Section 504(c) of the Copyright Act allows for statutory damages of between $750 and $30,000 per violation and up to $150,000 per violation if the infringement was willfull. If you figure each song is a separate violation, it doesn't take much to make up a huge number.
Man, did anyone actually read the article? They first started talking when she was 15. They talked for 2 years and were going to meet on her 17th birthday. That meeting happened almost 2 years ago - now she is 19. There was anopther two years in there all of you are forgetting about.
BTW - I would put money on the fact that the lawsuit was filed now because the statute of limitations was problably going to run on her ability to sue AOL.
By the way, for all the beer snobs out there (and I consider myself one of them) Anheuser-Busch is the worlds largest contract-brewer. Lots of mid-size brewersuse them to be able to produce and bottle large amounts of beer and then get that beer in the distribution chain. Sam Adams? for a long time more than 50% of all SA in the market was contract brewed by Anheuser-Busch (Miller Brewing now has the contract).
Yes, Anheuser-Busch produces bland beer. But form a beer making perspective, they are absolutely the best at being able to produce any kind of beer in the world and to do it well.
I recently bought a house in a new "Smart Community" in suburban Virginia. The community was wired with direct to home fiber and 100mb ethernet throughout the neighborhood. The provider is a company called Openband - http://www.openband.net - and over the same network (although not over the same fiber) they provide our cable and phone services. Its actually a pretty good little packeage that is paid for in our home owners fees. (the cost in the fees for basic phone, internet access, and the basic cable is about $150 bucks, which is not bad. The whole network is connected out through a T1 at the moment, but as more homes come online, that will up to a T3. So while they claim they have 100mb network, the connection is only a T1. The entire house is wired with cat5, so I ahve at least one if not two data/phone/cable connections in every room, which is pretty sweet. All in all, its a pretty nice set up.
The "All Rights Reserved" langauge is actually included because it it required (or strongly suggested) by the laws of countries other than the US, especailly in South America. You are right that in the US all you have to do is the standard copyright notice, but you include the additional langauge so that you can reuse the printed version the book (maybe with a different cover)in additional countries, where the laws are different.
Actually, a lot of investors had already calculated the risk into their investment. (kind of like investing in Union Carbide - you know that sometime, someplace there is going to be a leak that kills thousands of people.) MP3.com had already set aside $150 mill for this contingency so it really isn't going to make that big a damper into their finances.
Actually, according to copyright law, radio stations do not have to pay, and DO NOT pay, record labels a dime to broadcast music. What they pay is fee to the copyright holder of the music and lyrics (which may be the record label, but often is not). It is a strange quirk of the law but it came about because at one time radio stations were much more powerful then the record industry and were able to get the law passed that way.
Not a single terrorist has been caught by the FBI due to traditional wiretaps. According to the 1999 Wiretap Report from the Adminstrative office of the US Courts, availabe at http://http://www.epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/1 999-report/default.html , in 1999 the feds were granted a total of 601 wiretaps. A whopping 504 (83%) of those were for Narcotics, 61 (10%)were for racketeering, 1 was for bribery, 4 were for homicide and assault, 3 for kidnapping, 2 for theft, 2 for exortion, and 24 for other crimes. Geez, terrorism isn't on that list at all!
I used to do criminal defense/computer law for hackers a while back. One time, I was in a room with 8 FBI agents, going over a particular matter and trying to keep a client out of jail. During a break, a couple of the agents came up and asked me, off the record, what motivates these guys and what they could do about it. I told them, flat out - "Get them laid!" The agents, who are not known for their sense of humor, stared at me for a couple of seconds, and then burst out laughing.
Not only would it be hard, but it is impossible. It is a fundemental principle of logic that it is impossible to prove a negative. Therefore, no one could ever prove that a statement is false. The standard is that truth is a defense to a claim of defamation, meaning that if a defendant can prove something is true, he or she has a defense against the claim. THe plaintiff doesn't have to prove its false.
The first place to look, and the most authoritative, is Richard Nimmer's work Nimmer on Copyright considered the bible on copyright issues (and cited by courts as almost as authoritative as the statute itself). He has a section describing the issues concerning the copyrighting of characters and has an exhaustive list of court cases on the subject. (The first cases were from the 1920's)
A recent case to go read is Silverman v. CBS Inc. 870 F.2d 40 (2d Cir. 1989) involving the Amos and Andy characters.
It is important to note however, that courts have discussed that the character must be sufficently deliniated enough to stand on their own before they will be considered copyrighted. The line of cases talks a lot about what kind of characters can be copyrighted and most of them are fairly explicit that general characters cannot be but carefully delinated and describe characters can be (Tarzan, Mickey Mouse, Amos and Andy). It is also important to note too, that the cases do not really extend this protection much beyond the characters as they are deliniated. So in your example above, a starship captain from Iowa is not enough to invoke the protections, but if you wrote a story explicity about Captain Kirk, then that would fall under these cases.
The copyrightability of characters is a vexing one for the courts because there is no true provision for it in the statute. But case law has moved down the path towards a form of copyright protection for characters outside of the original works in which they appeared. So long as the characters are sufficently deliniated enough to be recognizable outside of the work, then the courts more than likely will give them protection outside of pure copying of the text. But the copyright in that character probably only exists so long as the copyright in the original does. Elements to a character added later are still protected so long as those works are still copyrighted. SO the character Tarzan, whose first few stories are in the public domain is probably himself in the public domain to the etent set forth in those stories. Items that came later will not be in the PD and cannot be used. (Obviously, trademark issues would still prevent the widescale use of the character but that is still an open issue)
Is Lestat sufficenly deliniated? probably. COuld Anne Rice claim a copyright in Lestat outside of the books? maybe. So she is not necessarily wrong.
Clearly, you don't have much knowledge of copyright law. YOU CANNOT COPYRIGHT IDEAS! You could try patenting them, but that won't fly unless you invented them. "West Side Story" has the same ideas as "Romeo an Juliet." If shakespeare tried to sue, (assuming he's been born a few years later:) he would lose.
Close but no cigar. You are absolutely correct that you cannot copyright ideas, but the concept of where the "idea" ends and where the protectable expression begins is a long and complicated one that has its roots back as far as 1876. When courts look at two works to see if one is an infringemnt of another, they break down the issue into varying levels of "abstraction". The abstraction begins at a level such as "A crew of a spaceship are hurled into another galaxy and try to find their way back home". The court then adds layer upon layer to this until they find the point at which two diverge. Depending on this divergance point a court will decided if there has been an infringement or not. The closer to the level of the ultimate abstraction, the closer the finding of no infringement.
For an excellent example of this, look up a case called
Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp.
from 1931. It is an important case in this area of law.
BTW, the west side story example is a bad one. Courts have referred to this before as an example of a derivate work. Shakespeare, were he to sue, would not only win, but would would big time.
Just a thought: what if someone were to write a prelude trilogy to Star Trek? (Or to anything that hasn't a detailed history between real-now and fantasy-then.) The first part would build on real history, and successive parts would converge into the Star Trek timeline of 24th century (or whenever). When would the trilogy change from Original into Derivative, if ever? As the first part only hints in the direction of Star Trek, it could be considered as Original work. The sequels would, naturally, have more concrete aspects of the Trekversum, but it could be argued, that Star Trek builds on them...</I> <p> Nice try but the important issue is not when in the fictional time line the works appear, but when were they created. The Prelude, in your example, is still derivative of the original work because it was created after the original and is based upon it (in the sense that you have to use elements of the original to dictate where your history goes) <p> Rob Jones
I could write a great story about a Federation starship crew that gets flung into another galaxy, and so long as I'm not stealing material from existing Star Trek Voyager episodes I'm fine.
Actually that is probably not true. While I do not have cases that I can cite to off the top of my head, from most of the case law I have read and a good understanding of how coprights works (as a copyright attorney)as well as an educated view of how a judge would probably look and rule on these types of cases, I would argue that you could write a story about a ship that flung off into another galaxy and even get away with calling a "Federation starship" but if you used any of the elements from the show (ie, place names, races, technology, etc.) in more than a single time, passing manner, a judge will probably view the work as a derivative and will jump all over you for it. Its a matter of degree, but I think the line would be a lot closer than farther away.
As a lawyer who also dabbles with writing code, I can tell you that law and software code are very similar. They both use a language known only by those familiar with the particular law/code. They both regulate how people/computer operate. They both have specific subsets where people specialize. So in reality, all coders are actually lawyers, just lawyers for a different kind of law.
They don't pay royalties to the song's publishers but to the performing rights societies like ASCAP and BMI which primarily represents artists, not publishers. MTV doesn't pay record companies, because unless they produced the video, they have nothing to do with the video itself. I think MTV pays the artists though, but I not postive on that. (NOTE MTV is being investigated by the DOJ for antitrust violations in the music video industry excatly because it is the 800 gorilla and does what it wants.)
As for the webcasters, I think that they were supposed to pay a royalty to the record companies but that negotiations on the rates broke down. It was apparantly very acrimoniuos. I don't remember what the final result was though.
Actually, the original poster is correct and you are wrong. Radio companies do pay royalties to ASCAP and BMI, but those royalties are for the public performance of the music and lyrics. ASCAP and BMI represent the artists and musicains, but not the record companies themselves. The music and lyrics are not typcially owned by record companies, who own the rights to the phonograph itself. These rights extend to authorship used in engineering the record itself,and the selection and composition of the songs on the record. That is all they "own". And the Copyright act is very clear that there is no public performance right for phonographs, and it was a matter of heated debate in 1976 when the Copyright act was being enacted. The record companies wanted that right and the radio stations didn't want to have to pay them royalties. The radio stations won. As a result, radio stations DO NOT pay royalties to the record companies for the broadcast of their records. It is important to remember that the record companies are NOT the rights owners when it comes to music, they are the producers and distributors. Rob Jones
Actually this sounds a lot like what happened with the Digital Audio Tape format. When that format came out on the market, the RIAA and record companies went ballistic, claiming that it would unleash a flood piracy that destroy them. So they fought long and hard against the medium, both on a technical level and at a political level. In 1992, they succeeded in passing the Audio Home Recording Act, a part of the Copyright law which prevented anyone from selling a digital audio recording device without 1) incorporating a copy control mechanism and 2) without paying royalties into a fund for the copyright holders. This process took so long and tied up the the sales of DAT to the point that no one used it except for in computers (which they did not have to pay royalties on). This is also the same law that the RIAA went after Diamand for the RIO MP3 player.
So, it sounds like copyright mafia is at it again.
From a lawyers perspective, I thought that paragraph 14 quoted above was great language for the lawyers in the DeCSS case. I think it speaks right to the heart of the 'actual' issue involved in the case as opposed to what the MPAA and the studios try to couch it as.
There are a couple of issues that need to be pointed out however before we can see this a true victory. This case was decided in the 9th circut, which has jurisdiction over most of the west coast. In the DeCSS case in california, the studios sued under a trade secret theory, not a copyright one. The Connectix case, and the analysis presented in the quote above, are related to copyright and fair use. The judges basically ruled that intermediate copying for the purpose of reverse engineering was a fair use and that Sony cannot use copyright to prevent Connectix from creating a competeing product so long as Connectix did not use any of SOny's code. Like I said earlier though, the california DeCSS case involves trade secrets, which is a completely different set of rules and analysis. The court in that case could very well say, "it doesn't apply cause they are suing under a different law"
The New York case is a little different. There, the studios did claim copyright infringement and the DMCA and the judge based a lot of his analysis upon copyright law. So this might be a better case to be used in that court. The only problem is that New York is in the 2nd Circuit and doesn't have to follow the Connectix case's logic or reasoning. He could just say, "hey that's nice, but I do not care what the 9th circuit says."
If I were the defendnat's attorneys however, I would be hammering away with this case and see where it lead me. It will be interesting to see what happens
In an ideal word, yes, that is how responsible companies would always manage their decision making process. But we all know that the real world is a lot messier than that. Lawyers and the Legal departments have a lot more flexibility than you might imagine. Here in my legal department, we make decisions like that all the time, although almost always the other way (management tells us to trademark something and we decide not to because the mark isn't worth it). But often, the reason you hire lawyers is to make decisions that management doesn't have the expertise to be able to handle. Should it have gone back through management? Probably. But I can also see how it would been just a mistake. Having been in similar situations in the past, my take on what probably happened is this: Verio decides to trademark whois.net. They call their lawyers, and say "Trademark Whois.net" That is probably all they say. Their lawyers assign the the task to an overworked associate who diligently prepares the paperwork. At some point, they probably remember that the USPTO is hesitant to trademark pure.com names because they don't always meet the criteria for a mark. So the kid asks the partner what to do and the partner says, file another one for just the word. Wham, bam here we are. It may be a mistake, but I am not sure that we need to pillory Verio because of it. Just string up the lawyers! (to parphrase Shakespeare). Or maybe just some of them.:-) Rob Jones
I whole-heartedly agree with you. Most lawyers who do trademarks are not going to have the foggiest idea what "whois" is or its history. They know trademarks and so when sometihng like this comes across their desk, theyh are just going to treat it as if they would any other situation and try to trademark the domain name as well as the underlying mark itself. Really nothing more than that. Definitely nothing sinister. Oh, BTW I am an attorney and I do know what DHCP is (although I couldn't work with it, at least I understand what it does and what it means). Most attorney's who would know this are doing trademark work. Rob Jones robjones@robjob.com robjob@robjones.com
Slashdot Mirror
Section 504(c) of the Copyright Act allows for statutory damages of between $750 and $30,000 per violation and up to $150,000 per violation if the infringement was willfull. If you figure each song is a separate violation, it doesn't take much to make up a huge number.
Man, did anyone actually read the article? They first started talking when she was 15. They talked for 2 years and were going to meet on her 17th birthday. That meeting happened almost 2 years ago - now she is 19. There was anopther two years in there all of you are forgetting about.
BTW - I would put money on the fact that the lawsuit was filed now because the statute of limitations was problably going to run on her ability to sue AOL.
By the way, for all the beer snobs out there (and I consider myself one of them) Anheuser-Busch is the worlds largest contract-brewer. Lots of mid-size brewersuse them to be able to produce and bottle large amounts of beer and then get that beer in the distribution chain. Sam Adams? for a long time more than 50% of all SA in the market was contract brewed by Anheuser-Busch (Miller Brewing now has the contract).
Yes, Anheuser-Busch produces bland beer. But form a beer making perspective, they are absolutely the best at being able to produce any kind of beer in the world and to do it well.
I recently bought a house in a new "Smart Community" in suburban Virginia. The community was wired with direct to home fiber and 100mb ethernet throughout the neighborhood. The provider is a company called Openband - http://www.openband.net - and over the same network (although not over the same fiber) they provide our cable and phone services. Its actually a pretty good little packeage that is paid for in our home owners fees. (the cost in the fees for basic phone, internet access, and the basic cable is about $150 bucks, which is not bad. The whole network is connected out through a T1 at the moment, but as more homes come online, that will up to a T3. So while they claim they have 100mb network, the connection is only a T1. The entire house is wired with cat5, so I ahve at least one if not two data/phone/cable connections in every room, which is pretty sweet. All in all, its a pretty nice set up.
robjob
The "All Rights Reserved" langauge is actually included because it it required (or strongly suggested) by the laws of countries other than the US, especailly in South America. You are right that in the US all you have to do is the standard copyright notice, but you include the additional langauge so that you can reuse the printed version the book (maybe with a different cover)in additional countries, where the laws are different.
Actually, a lot of investors had already calculated the risk into their investment. (kind of like investing in Union Carbide - you know that sometime, someplace there is going to be a leak that kills thousands of people.) MP3.com had already set aside $150 mill for this contingency so it really isn't going to make that big a damper into their finances.
Rob Jones
I think the copyright to Happy Birthday is held by an organization called the American Linguist Society or something like that. But I could be wrong.
Rob Jones
Actually, according to copyright law, radio stations do not have to pay, and DO NOT pay, record labels a dime to broadcast music. What they pay is fee to the copyright holder of the music and lyrics (which may be the record label, but often is not). It is a strange quirk of the law but it came about because at one time radio stations were much more powerful then the record industry and were able to get the law passed that way.
Rob "Dammit I am too a lawyer" Jones
Not a single terrorist has been caught by the FBI due to traditional wiretaps. According to the 1999 Wiretap Report from the Adminstrative office of the US Courts, availabe at http://http://www.epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/1 999-report/default.html , in 1999 the feds were granted a total of 601 wiretaps. A whopping 504 (83%) of those were for Narcotics, 61 (10%)were for racketeering, 1 was for bribery, 4 were for homicide and assault, 3 for kidnapping, 2 for theft, 2 for exortion, and 24 for other crimes. Geez, terrorism isn't on that list at all!
I used to do criminal defense/computer law for hackers a while back. One time, I was in a room with 8 FBI agents, going over a particular matter and trying to keep a client out of jail. During a break, a couple of the agents came up and asked me, off the record, what motivates these guys and what they could do about it. I told them, flat out - "Get them laid!" The agents, who are not known for their sense of humor, stared at me for a couple of seconds, and then burst out laughing.
Not only would it be hard, but it is impossible. It is a fundemental principle of logic that it is impossible to prove a negative. Therefore, no one could ever prove that a statement is false. The standard is that truth is a defense to a claim of defamation, meaning that if a defendant can prove something is true, he or she has a defense against the claim. THe plaintiff doesn't have to prove its false.
A recent case to go read is Silverman v. CBS Inc. 870 F.2d 40 (2d Cir. 1989) involving the Amos and Andy characters.
It is important to note however, that courts have discussed that the character must be sufficently deliniated enough to stand on their own before they will be considered copyrighted. The line of cases talks a lot about what kind of characters can be copyrighted and most of them are fairly explicit that general characters cannot be but carefully delinated and describe characters can be (Tarzan, Mickey Mouse, Amos and Andy). It is also important to note too, that the cases do not really extend this protection much beyond the characters as they are deliniated. So in your example above, a starship captain from Iowa is not enough to invoke the protections, but if you wrote a story explicity about Captain Kirk, then that would fall under these cases.
Rob Jones
The copyrightability of characters is a vexing one for the courts because there is no true provision for it in the statute. But case law has moved down the path towards a form of copyright protection for characters outside of the original works in which they appeared. So long as the characters are sufficently deliniated enough to be recognizable outside of the work, then the courts more than likely will give them protection outside of pure copying of the text. But the copyright in that character probably only exists so long as the copyright in the original does. Elements to a character added later are still protected so long as those works are still copyrighted. SO the character Tarzan, whose first few stories are in the public domain is probably himself in the public domain to the etent set forth in those stories. Items that came later will not be in the PD and cannot be used. (Obviously, trademark issues would still prevent the widescale use of the character but that is still an open issue)
Is Lestat sufficenly deliniated? probably. COuld Anne Rice claim a copyright in Lestat outside of the books? maybe. So she is not necessarily wrong.
Rob Jones
Close but no cigar. You are absolutely correct that you cannot copyright ideas, but the concept of where the "idea" ends and where the protectable expression begins is a long and complicated one that has its roots back as far as 1876. When courts look at two works to see if one is an infringemnt of another, they break down the issue into varying levels of "abstraction". The abstraction begins at a level such as "A crew of a spaceship are hurled into another galaxy and try to find their way back home". The court then adds layer upon layer to this until they find the point at which two diverge. Depending on this divergance point a court will decided if there has been an infringement or not. The closer to the level of the ultimate abstraction, the closer the finding of no infringement.
For an excellent example of this, look up a case called
- Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp.
from 1931. It is an important case in this area of law.BTW, the west side story example is a bad one. Courts have referred to this before as an example of a derivate work. Shakespeare, were he to sue, would not only win, but would would big time.
Rob Jones
Just a thought: what if someone were to write a prelude trilogy to Star Trek? (Or to anything that hasn't a detailed history between real-now and fantasy-then.) The first part would build on real history, and successive parts would converge into the Star Trek timeline of 24th century (or whenever). When would the trilogy change from Original into Derivative, if ever? As the first part only hints in the direction of Star Trek, it
could be considered as Original work. The sequels would, naturally, have more concrete aspects of the Trekversum, but it could be argued, that Star Trek builds on them...</I>
<p>
Nice try but the important issue is not when in the fictional time line the works appear, but when were they created. The Prelude, in your example, is still derivative of the original work because it was created after the original and is based upon it (in the sense that you have to use elements of the original to dictate where your history goes)
<p>
Rob Jones
Actually that is probably not true. While I do not have cases that I can cite to off the top of my head, from most of the case law I have read and a good understanding of how coprights works (as a copyright attorney)as well as an educated view of how a judge would probably look and rule on these types of cases, I would argue that you could write a story about a ship that flung off into another galaxy and even get away with calling a "Federation starship" but if you used any of the elements from the show (ie, place names, races, technology, etc.) in more than a single time, passing manner, a judge will probably view the work as a derivative and will jump all over you for it. Its a matter of degree, but I think the line would be a lot closer than farther away.
Rob Jones
As a lawyer who also dabbles with writing code, I can tell you that law and software code are very similar. They both use a language known only by those familiar with the particular law/code. They both regulate how people/computer operate. They both have specific subsets where people specialize. So in reality, all coders are actually lawyers, just lawyers for a different kind of law.
Rob Jones - A better attorney than programmer
They don't pay royalties to the song's publishers but to the performing rights societies like ASCAP and BMI which primarily represents artists, not publishers. MTV doesn't pay record companies, because unless they produced the video, they have nothing to do with the video itself. I think MTV pays the artists though, but I not postive on that. (NOTE MTV is being investigated by the DOJ for antitrust violations in the music video industry excatly because it is the 800 gorilla and does what it wants.)
As for the webcasters, I think that they were supposed to pay a royalty to the record companies but that negotiations on the rates broke down. It was apparantly very acrimoniuos. I don't remember what the final result was though.
Rob Jones
Actually, the original poster is correct and you are wrong. Radio companies do pay royalties to ASCAP and BMI, but those royalties are for the public performance of the music and lyrics. ASCAP and BMI represent the artists and musicains, but not the record companies themselves. The music and lyrics are not typcially owned by record companies, who own the rights to the phonograph itself. These rights extend to authorship used in engineering the record itself,and the selection and composition of the songs on the record. That is all they "own". And the Copyright act is very clear that there is no public performance right for phonographs, and it was a matter of heated debate in 1976 when the Copyright act was being enacted. The record companies wanted that right and the radio stations didn't want to have to pay them royalties. The radio stations won. As a result, radio stations DO NOT pay royalties to the record companies for the broadcast of their records. It is important to remember that the record companies are NOT the rights owners when it comes to music, they are the producers and distributors. Rob Jones
Actually this sounds a lot like what happened with the Digital Audio Tape format. When that format came out on the market, the RIAA and record companies went ballistic, claiming that it would unleash a flood piracy that destroy them. So they fought long and hard against the medium, both on a technical level and at a political level. In 1992, they succeeded in passing the Audio Home Recording Act, a part of the Copyright law which prevented anyone from selling a digital audio recording device without 1) incorporating a copy control mechanism and 2) without paying royalties into a fund for the copyright holders. This process took so long and tied up the the sales of DAT to the point that no one used it except for in computers (which they did not have to pay royalties on). This is also the same law that the RIAA went after Diamand for the RIO MP3 player.
So, it sounds like copyright mafia is at it again.
robjob
From a lawyers perspective, I thought that paragraph 14 quoted above was great language for the lawyers in the DeCSS case. I think it speaks right to the heart of the 'actual' issue involved in the case as opposed to what the MPAA and the studios try to couch it as.
There are a couple of issues that need to be pointed out however before we can see this a true victory. This case was decided in the 9th circut, which has jurisdiction over most of the west coast. In the DeCSS case in california, the studios sued under a trade secret theory, not a copyright one. The Connectix case, and the analysis presented in the quote above, are related to copyright and fair use. The judges basically ruled that intermediate copying for the purpose of reverse engineering was a fair use and that Sony cannot use copyright to prevent Connectix from creating a competeing product so long as Connectix did not use any of SOny's code. Like I said earlier though, the california DeCSS case involves trade secrets, which is a completely different set of rules and analysis. The court in that case could very well say, "it doesn't apply cause they are suing under a different law"
The New York case is a little different. There, the studios did claim copyright infringement and the DMCA and the judge based a lot of his analysis upon copyright law. So this might be a better case to be used in that court. The only problem is that New York is in the 2nd Circuit and doesn't have to follow the Connectix case's logic or reasoning. He could just say, "hey that's nice, but I do not care what the 9th circuit says."
If I were the defendnat's attorneys however, I would be hammering away with this case and see where it lead me. It will be interesting to see what happens
Rob Jones
In an ideal word, yes, that is how responsible companies would always manage their decision making process. But we all know that the real world is a lot messier than that. Lawyers and the Legal departments have a lot more flexibility than you might imagine. Here in my legal department, we make decisions like that all the time, although almost always the other way (management tells us to trademark something and we decide not to because the mark isn't worth it). But often, the reason you hire lawyers is to make decisions that management doesn't have the expertise to be able to handle. Should it have gone back through management? Probably. But I can also see how it would been just a mistake. Having been in similar situations in the past, my take on what probably happened is this: Verio decides to trademark whois.net. They call their lawyers, and say "Trademark Whois.net" That is probably all they say. Their lawyers assign the the task to an overworked associate who diligently prepares the paperwork. At some point, they probably remember that the USPTO is hesitant to trademark pure .com names because they don't always meet the criteria for a mark. So the kid asks the partner what to do and the partner says, file another one for just the word. Wham, bam here we are. It may be a mistake, but I am not sure that we need to pillory Verio because of it. Just string up the lawyers! (to parphrase Shakespeare). Or maybe just some of them. :-) Rob Jones
I meant most lawyers who do understand this are NOT doing trademark work. Sorry about the confusion.
I whole-heartedly agree with you. Most lawyers who do trademarks are not going to have the foggiest idea what "whois" is or its history. They know trademarks and so when sometihng like this comes across their desk, theyh are just going to treat it as if they would any other situation and try to trademark the domain name as well as the underlying mark itself. Really nothing more than that. Definitely nothing sinister. Oh, BTW I am an attorney and I do know what DHCP is (although I couldn't work with it, at least I understand what it does and what it means). Most attorney's who would know this are doing trademark work. Rob Jones robjones@robjob.com robjob@robjones.com