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| Porn Users Forum » Legal trademark question |
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| 04-25-09 06:04am - 5720 days | Original Post - #1 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User  Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Legal trademark question If a phrase is trademarked, does that mean I, or the average citizen, can not use it in an ordinary or commercial sense without the permission of the trademark owner? I was reading a news story, and I have a hard time understanding the implications of the story. It appears that Oprah Winfrey and Mutual of Omaha are suing each other over who has the right to use the term "AHA Moment". Let's say that I wanted to sell T-shirts with the slogan, "AHA Moment". Would that be illegal, unless I had legal permission from the trademark owner? (I'm not really planning on selling T-shirts, with or without that slogan. I'm just using selling T-shirts as an example.) Another point: Mutual of Omaha says the term has been used widely for 100 years. So what sense does it make to now allow Mutual of Omaha to take out a new trademark on the phrase, if the public has been using it for 100 years already? Wouldn't that be like taking something the public has been using, and now saying that only the trademark owner can legally use it from now on? For the lawyers to make money on this issue seems like an incredible waste of time and money (except the lawyers won't consider it wasted money, since they are the ones that will profit from this nonsense.) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.eonl...egal-moment-20090424 Oprah, Fellow "Aha" User Having a Legal Moment Source: E! Online Fri Apr 24, 2009, 2:11 pm EDT Are they telling us that Oprah Winfrey isn't the only one allowed to have an "aha moment"?! That's what Nebraska insurance company Mutual of Omaha is saying in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court against the queen of daytime's Harpo Productions, which claims it owns the term "AHA Moment." Mutual, the self-proclaimed official sponsor of the aha moment, sued to protect its right to use the phrase in advertising after receiving a request from Winfrey's camp to "cease and desist" its ongoing "What's your aha moment?" campaign. According to Mutual's marketing materials, the term refers to "those amazing, uplifting, inspirational moments that changed [people's] lives." When Mutual tried to lay claim to the term in February, nobody tried to stop them then, the company said. "The term 'aha moment' has been used widely in the public vernacular for a century," Mutual said in a statement Friday, per the Omaha World-Herald. "Mutual of Omaha's research to obtain its federal trademark uncovered no competing federally registered trademarks, and the trademark application received no opposition." Harpo spokeswoman Lisa Halliday said that the two sides are hoping to reach an amicable solution. | |
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| 04-25-09 12:05pm - 5720 days | #2 | |
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exotics4me (0)
Active User  Posts: 664 Registered: Jan 12, '07 Location: USA |
I can answer the question about the t-shirts, if something is owned by copyright, you would most likely be threatened and/or sued for using the slogan to make profit. My experience with copyrights happened over the last year. I had been a well-known sports blogger, mostly college football, and my handle I used had a slogan and team nickname in it. I posted under the handle for years on a not for profit blog through a major sports website. Never had any problems from it. After the major site had some internal problems they changed many of the rules/functions of the site. I left it and opened my own blog site at my url, which contained the slogan and team nickname in it. Within a month I had received an email asking me if I knew the slogan was trademarked and that since my blog was ad-supported, it was a for profit blog. The email wanted to know an estimation on how much money I would make off the ads and they would be expecting a part of that money since their catchy slogan was part of my url. Within another month, the school that I had used their nickname, threatened a lawsuit because I used what they saw as "vulgar" (shit) language in one of the posts and they did not want their school's image associated with my blog. I ended up quitting blogging and just letting it all go, including 3 urls that have only been used for about 2 months of 2 year deals. My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich. - Chuck Palahniuk | |
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| 04-25-09 03:47pm - 5720 days | #3 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
I've heard that the best defense is a good offense. Maybe you should have kept the site open, and instead of sending the profits to the school, you could have invested them in AK-47 assault rifles. From Wikipedia: "The AK-47 was one of the first true assault rifles and, due to its durability, low production cost and ease of use, the weapon and its numerous variants remain the most widely used assault rifles in the world�so much so that more AK-type rifles have been produced than all other assault rifles combined." I was impressed with PinkPanther's response to the poll question of how he would feel if he found out his favorite model was transgender: PinkPanther wrote, "I'd follow the great American tradition - I'd go buy an assault rifle and go on a murderous rampage! And before anybody gets all upset, let me assure you - I'm kidding - totally kidding!" (I suspect PinkPanther didn't want to hassle with the FBI or Homeland Security.) You had to close your web site/blog because of legal trademark issues: It would have been expensive and time-consuming for you to fight it. But I think it was unfair. At least Oprah Winfrey and Mutual of Omaha have plenty of money to pay their lawyers. The same holds true for Microsoft and Disney and Apple and all the big corporations: Legal fees are part of doing business. That's the system, and the little guy gets a kick in the head. | |
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| 04-27-09 11:21am - 5718 days | #4 | |
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Wittyguy (0)
Active User  Posts: 1,138 Registered: Feb 04, '08 Location: Left Coast, USA |
Trademarks are a royal pain in the ass that primarly generate no resolution to anything other than legal bills. A trademark is a distinctive sign, phrase or other indicator that someone uses in association with a product. The product can be a business or a person. The whole deal with mutual of Omaha and Oprah is over hyped. Oprah would never be able to claim money from people using the phrase in everyday useage since it's been around so long. What she wants to do is grab the phrase so that other companies would have to pay her money to use it in their advertising for their products. In Exotics case, he found out what happens when you try and run a business built around an identity someone/thing else already has a claim to. For example, let's use Florida State as an example. FSU goes by the nickname the Seminoles and they've probably trademarked that nickname. They can't charge people for using the word Seminoles or for describing the actions of their sports teams. They can go after people though trying to make money off of the Seminoles name when that name is used in close association with their school. That's probably what Exotics ran into. Overall, trademarks (and intellectual property in all) is a very murky and gray world. It's not uncommon to see companies get overzealous defending their "turf" because legally they have to assert their trademark claims over others or else risk losing the trademark and associated income. As a result a lot of little people get squashed because they don't have the time and money to defend what they're doing against the legal goon squad. Usually, it's the lawyers who seem to convince companies that trademarks for useless phrases and the like carry a lot more weight than they do. If you really want to get pissed off at intellectual property types you should be aware that you don't own your own body. Under US law, companies can patent protect genes. In other words, the human genome has been around for a few hundred thousand years. Yet, a company can sequence a gene, patent it, and sit on it charging others a fee for the right to research that gene. So, if you have some obscure disease that someone working on a doctorate might want to investigate, they might not be able to because Mega-Corp owns that gene and doesn't want anyone playing with it without forking out the cash first. That's something to be cheesed about. | |
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