Article 1

‘Pwned.com’ Weighs In On ‘Pwnage’ Trademark Attempt

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/03/06/pwnedcom-weighs-in-pwnage-trademark-attempt/

Apparently the company FutureMark is attempting to trademark the term "pwnage". They say that they are claiming it only to keep cybersquatters from claiming it. Who's to say that they're not the cybersquatters that they say they're protecting us from? It all sounds kind of fishy to me. This potential threat has caused the employees of pwned.com to look into options for protecting themselves just in case something like this happens to them. Can slang that is used so commonly really be trademarked? It doesn't seem right to take what is now practically a dictionary term potentially attach a price to it or restrict the ways that it can be used (like the Happy Birthday song we talked about in class).

Article 2

TradeMark Express Discovers McCain Winning '08 Presidential Trademark Race

http://www.centredaily.com/business/story/463081.html

Apparently a number of political candidates are trademarking their political slogans / callsigns. McCain has trademarked "McCain" and "McCain Space". Obama was able to get his logo trademarked. The article doesn't say if Hillary got anything successfully trademarked, but it does say that she is using the trademark "Solutions for America" - a rather generic term claimed by the University of Richmond. Some rejected submissions were "No Drama with Obama," "Hillary Clinton is Politically Incorrect" and "Bearack Obama."

It's obvious from the articles we read in class that these candidates have good reason to claim up these terms or words that mean a lot to them. While it may be a term that they use, if they didn't have it trademarked, it'd be possible for someone else to take it. I doubt a court would uphold such a claim, but it could happen. For example, a company was able to trademark 08AMA for clothing and other goods. They claim that it is not associated to anything, but I think we can all see where it came from.

Article 3

Virtual worlds ripe for real-world lawsuits

http://www.financialpost.com/reports/legal/story.html?id=368299

Ed: I picked this article because it seems like something you would be especially interested in. Basically, we all know about second life and the potential IP that it creates. Basically this article explains that some law firms are moving onto second life - and for good reason. Intellectual property is obviously huge, but the ever growing online universe really complicates things to the extreme. Does a company that trademarks something offline be able to sue another company or individual that breaks the mark in a virtual world? What about the other way around, where a company in a virtual world creates a trademark / patent for the virtual item, and someone creates a real world version? To complicate things even more, what jurisdiction does this fit into? Does it go to the international, the country/state the offender is located in, or what?

Excerpt from the article: "Eros, a company that created virtual beds that it sold to online users so they could have virtual sex, faced this problem when an unknown person created unauthorized replicas of the beds that it sold for a lower price. Eros identified the infringer, however, by obtaining court-ordered subpoenas directing Linden Lab and Internet service providers to release information about the anonymous defendant, who has since been identified."

Now wait a minute. I thought that the Linden Labs outlawed this. I thought they had a way to block patents because of their "open source morality" that we talked about in class. How did this happen if that's the case?