| Author | Message | ||
| Ros Badcoe (Rosemary)
Intermediate Member Username: endolith Post Number: 301 Registered: 03-2008 |
I was sharing my Mr Peanut poem with my real-life writing group this morning, and it was pointed out to me that companies are very protective of their trade marks and might not be amused with our off-stage lives of their characters. I wonder how far such protection reaches? I reckon anyone trying to sell us stuff is fair game! | ||
| Rania Watts
Valued Member Username: cementcoveredcherries Post Number: 300 Registered: 04-2008 |
Are you serious? Wow, I hope not. Cheers, Rania Watts "You will hardly know who I am or what I mean" ~ Walt Whitman http://cementcoveredcherry.wordpress.com | ||
| Gary Blankenship
Moderator Username: garydawg Post Number: 23866 Registered: 07-2001 |
Do not worry, only Disney sues everyone... Smiles. Gary Celebrate Walt with Gary: http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/tw10/tw4conte.htm | ||
| Rania Watts
Intermediate Member Username: cementcoveredcherries Post Number: 304 Registered: 04-2008 |
Hi Gary, That is just too funny! Cheers, Rania Watts "You will hardly know who I am or what I mean" ~ Walt Whitman http://cementcoveredcherry.wordpress.com | ||
| Michael Reed Samford
Intermediate Member Username: mikesamford Post Number: 385 Registered: 03-2008 |
 Oh! Crap, can't even write poetry anymore without someone trying to take it from you. Hope to help. | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30004 Registered: 11-1998 |
I wouldn't worry about it, Ros. If companies went chasing after every author who mentioned their trademarks in some piece of fiction, the courts would be overloaded with frivolous lawsuits. Think about it. Would you spend thousands of dollars and many years suing someone for a poem they most likely didn't receive any compensation for (beyond perhaps a free copy or two of the publication in which it appeared)? It's not worth the expense, not to mention the aggravation of lawyers, court dates, etc. Beyond that, poets have been playing with trademarked characters for years. This is not a new thing. DeFrees used Blue Nun, Lucille Clifton wrote a great poem about Aunt Jemima, and another in the voice of Cream of Wheat, with Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of others. Your real life writing group is just a bit too sensitive. And frankly, a little unrealistic in their fears. And maybe not reading enough poetry, if they are unaware of how trademarked characters are used and sometimes even abused in it. *LOL* I'd point them to DeFrees and Clifton as examples. Love, M | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30005 Registered: 11-1998 |
Aunt Jemima by Lucille Clifton white folks say I remind them of home I who have been homeless all my life except for their kitchen cabinets I who have made the best of everything pancakes batter for chicken my life the shelf on which I sit between the flour and cornmeal is thick with dreams oh how I long for my own syrup rich as blood my true nephews my nieces my family my kitchen My home From a BOA Editions, Ltd. Review: "One of Clifton's aesthetic strengths is her ability to write inventive dramatic monologues, that as they, image and idea, find their serious governing intents. "Voices" also includes several dramatic monologues spoken by animals. Additionally, the food products Aunt Jemima syrup and Cream of Wheat get their say. Here is Cream of Wheat's take on who he truly might be, as he imagines himself, Jemima and Uncle Ben (from Uncle Ben's Rice) sharing a late night stroll through the supermarket aisles:" Cream of Wheat by Lucille Clifton sometimes at night we stroll the market aisles ben and jemima and me they walk in front humming this and that i lag behind trying to remove my chef's cap wondering what ever pictured me then left me personless rastus i read in an old paper that i was called rastus but no mother ever gave that to her son toward dawn we head back to our shelves our boxes.........ben and jemima and me we pose and smile.........i simmer to myself what is my name . | ||
| Ros Badcoe (Rosemary)
Intermediate Member Username: endolith Post Number: 309 Registered: 03-2008 |
I've also just heard that you can say anything about anything as long as it's satire  , so I would imagine we're safe! I think we have far fewer 'characters' attached to products over here (at least, only a few spring to mind), but every now and then we do hear about companies suing someone using a similar name. But I guess that's really rather a different issue. | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30006 Registered: 11-1998 |
Dearest Ros -- money is the driving force. If there is no money to be made from suing you, i.e., you received little or no compensation for using their trademark, companies would laugh about suing you. It costs big bucks to sue someone. They'd spend infinitely more than they could ever even hope to recoup (which in a poem's case, is for all intents and purposes, zero). Would you spend thousands of dollars (or pounds) to make zero? Companies sue other companies who use a similar name because there are hundreds of thousands, more often millions of dollars involved. That's actually worth pursuing. But poets and poems? We're not even a blip on their radars. In fact, we're providing free advertising. Love, M | ||
| Kathy Paupore
Moderator Username: kathy Post Number: 8741 Registered: 12-2003 |
Also, Billy Collins wrote one about Smokey the Bear. For the companies whose trademark character you use it is just more advertising, I don't think they would sue over that kind of exposure. *Kathy You're invited to: Wild Flowers Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.--Robert Frost | ||
| Packrat
Member Username: harolyn_j_gourley Post Number: 77 Registered: 02-2008 |
Besides, Ros, any decent judge would laugh it out of court...probably chased by a flock of Satires, decked out in obnoxious rhyming couplets!! (Heeheehee!) --Packrat. | ||
| Ros Badcoe (Rosemary)
Intermediate Member Username: endolith Post Number: 318 Registered: 03-2008 |
Poets and poems not important? I'm going to have to think about that one... | ||
| Jane Røken
Advanced Member Username: magpie Post Number: 1398 Registered: 03-2007 |
By no means commercially important. I think we ought to rejoice at that. Just imagine the kind of traps and nets we might be entangled in if we and our writings were considered "important". | ||
| sue kay
Intermediate Member Username: suekay Post Number: 743 Registered: 11-2005 |
Someone called me? LOL. I think the idea of copyright infringment is something along these lines.  But knowing how sue-happy everyone is these days, its always a bit nervous making if we really start to think about it. regards Sue | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30007 Registered: 11-1998 |
Dearest Ros -- much as we'd like to think poets and poetry are important, count the number of poetry volumes in your local bookstore and then compare that to the number of total volumes in the entire place. My guess is the percentage is awfully low. Check what books people are reading in doctor's offices and on buses and trains. Again, my guess is you'll see a poetry book only rarely. Support for all the arts has always been less than optimal, lower these days than ever. It's sad, but about the only people poets and poems are important to are poets themselves. What I hear from most people when they see me with a poetry book in my hand is, "What's that you're reading? Oh, poetry. I never could understand that stuff." Oh, and sue. Do we, like, have to call you sue-happy now? *LOL* Love, M | ||
| Gary Blankenship
Moderator Username: garydawg Post Number: 23893 Registered: 07-2001 |
Of course, these suits can get silly http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/05/starbucks_asks_rat_city_rollergirls_to_c Starbucks has their head up their cup. Their gal don't have a black eye, so how can there be any comparison. Smiles. Gary Celebrate Walt with Gary: http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/tw10/tw4conte.htm | ||
| W.F. Roby
Valued Member Username: wfroby Post Number: 278 Registered: 03-2008 |
I was half-awake and half-asleep. I heard a knock, or a sound like a knock. So I opened some kind of "door". There were my poems all lined up. But they looked reeeeallll good. Cleaned up well. Ties and all. First guy slapped me on the back, showed me his first few lines, and said something aboue Me being Served. I woke up since then, but I'm wondering. Slander? Libel? What would your own poems accuse you of? | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30028 Registered: 11-1998 |
My own poems would accuse me of being a big, fat liar, liar, pants on fire. I've never told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in any of them. Ever. Love, M | ||
| Judy Thompson
Advanced Member Username: judyt54 Post Number: 1186 Registered: 11-2007 |
There is truth, and there is reality. Sometimes one has nothing to do with the other. That's my story and Im sticking to it. | ||
| brenda morisse
Advanced Member Username: moritric Post Number: 1848 Registered: 04-2007 |
My pants are on fire but it's not because I'm a liar. | ||
| Fred Longworth
Senior Member Username: sandiegopoet Post Number: 3977 Registered: 05-2006 |
Although it is unlikely that Planters (owned by Kraft Foods) will sue over the Mr. Peanut poem, I think we should anticipate that, if a poem becomes well known, and if it uses a trademarked icon in any manner that could be construed as sullying the reputation of, or diluting the value of, the product that the icon stands for, AND (and this is a big AND) if the company which makes the product is in "defensive mode," litigation may follow. Arguably, the Lucille Clifton poems, above, are both written by a prominent African-American woman, who deals with symbols intimately connected to the corporate utilization of the White majority's myths/stereotypes about Black people in order to sell product and make money. I would bet that Legal would advise NOT to sue, because it would press a racial hot-button. And besides, I doubt if a corporate attorney could successfully argue that Cream of Wheat or Aunt Jemima products would suffer any loss of sales because of the poems. Consider what would happen if a poet wrote a lengthy poem using the Energizer Bunny in a manner that actually did imply that Energizer batteries were overpriced, over-rated, didn't last as long as the Copper Top, and often leaked inside equipment, damaging the circuitry. Imagine the Bunny apologizing to America for billions of dollars of injured equipment. Let's further imagine that, "poetic license" aside, the allegations in the poem were manifestly untrue. And suppose that the poem "caught on" both on and off the internet, so that by both timing and geography, plus market research interviews, it became clear that the poem actually did reduce Energizer sales. I would expect the Energizer company to hit back legally. So . . . whether a suit would ever occur is highly dependent on surrounding or collateral factors. Fred Unofficial Forum Pariah recent victim of alien abduction | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30030 Registered: 11-1998 |
Oh, man, Freddie. That's an awful lot of if's that would have to fall into place. I highly doubt that your scenario is ever going to happen. But just for discussion's sake, name one example in the whole history of poetry when a major corporation (or even a minor one) has sued a poet (not novelist, journalist, editorialist or any other type of writer) for unauthorized use of a trademark in a poem. Just one. If this has ever happened, I'd really like to know about it. Hell, you can hardly get poets to buy and read other poets' poetry books. The majority of the general public doesn't read poetry. I don't think it's a racial hot-button that keeps Clifton out of court. It's probably that there's no money to be made (and lots of money to be thrown away) in pursuing legal action. The corporation's CFO would have to be a little on the nutty side, I think, to approve and authorize spending so much to gain so little. Even though Clifton sells a fair amount of books, she's still not writing Harry Potter. In order to convince a lawyer to take it to court, you'd have to assure him/her there's money in it. Unfortunately, from what I can see of the poetry business, there isn't. Very, very few people can even make a living writing poetry (are there any?). Take a look at print runs on poetry books and chapbooks. You're lucky if they print a few hundred, much less thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies to distribute and sell. Particularly if your name's not Clifton. I think the concerns are a little overblown and unrealistic. Love, M | ||
| Christopher T George
Senior Member Username: chrisgeorge Post Number: 6505 Registered: 12-2004 |
Hi all The way things are going, a corporation could take legal action if they think their brand name is infringed upon or held in disrepute. Consider the following excerpt from the introduction to the book Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture by David Bollier, described as "An impassioned, darkly amusing look at how corporations misuse copyright and trademark law to stifle creativity and free speech": The Modern Obsession with Owning Culture The fantasies I have imagined here may seem faintly ridiculous. But in truth, contemporary copyright and trademark law are replete with tales of the bizarre and hilarious. That's what I discovered as I ventured into the forbidding precincts of intellectual property law. If Robert Ripley were still chasing down the lurid stories that once graced the Sunday comics section - a rutabaga that looks like Abraham Lincoln, a sultan with 500 wives - Ripley would find many ripe oddities for his franchise in copyright and trademark law. "Believe It or Not!" For example, if you dare to evoke some aspect of a celebrity - by creating a portable toilet called "Here's Johnny!" or making an advertisement featuring a female robot that turns letter tiles on a game show - you may be violating that celebrity's "publicity rights." If you're an artist who makes mobiles, the estate for Alexander Calder, the famous maker of monumental mobiles, may prevent you from selling your works in museum gift shops. If you want to take a photograph of your friends while sitting in a Starbucks, the manager may intervene to stop your Kodak moment (oops, a trademark that doesn't belong to me) lest you replicate the shop's tastefully designed "trade dress" interior. If you want to paint your own renditions of Mickey and Goofy on your day care center walls, lawyers for the Disney Company may send you an intimidating "cease-and-desist" letter. While the stories of this book may shock and entertain, there is a serious purpose afoot. These tales speak to a radical reconfiguration of political and cultural power in the digital age. They are significant because they are harbingers of our future. As more aspects of American life migrate to the Internet and digital media, the obscure, clunky machinery of copyright and trademark law is gaining vast new powers to re-engineer the flows of information, art and culture in our society. What was once considered part of the cultural commons, available for all to use, is increasingly being privatized and locked up. The scope of this plunder is remarkable. It includes all manner of text, images, music, fictional characters, celebrity personas, accounts of public events, and even common words. The ownership of culture now extends to letters of the alphabet, distinctive sounds and colors, and even scents. Increasingly, the lawyers tell us: "You may gaze upon and buy the products of American culture. But don't be so naive as to think that you can actually use them for your own purposes. We own them." Congress and the courts have actively facilitated this rather dramatic privatization of culture and political rights with little public scrutiny or citizen participation. The resulting empowerment of several major industries - film, music and publishing in particular - is matched by a corresponding disenfranchisement of ordinary citizens, artists and posterity. Try to use an existing works in a new creation - even in a fleeting, partial way, even for personal and non-commercial purposes - and you enter a shadowy cultural underground, a zone of the illegal imagination. New creativity is stymied. Free expression is stifled. A boisterous open culture is turned into a regimented marketplace. . . . More at http://www.brandnamebullies.com/intro.html Editor, Desert Moon Review http://www.desertmoonreview.com Co-Editor, Loch Raven Review http://www.lochravenreview.net http://chrisgeorge.netpublish.net/ | ||
| Fred Longworth
Senior Member Username: sandiegopoet Post Number: 3985 Registered: 05-2006 |
Chris and ~M~, I am going to speak from economics here. As the United States departs from being significantly an industrial nation to being significantly a source of intellectual property, in order to maintain some comparative advantage other than military might, we will need to take a broadly more assertive stance regarding intellectual property rights. The alternative would be for the public to accept a somewhat lower standard of living. I therefore anticipate (and largely support) laws and conventions that undergird and defend intellectual property. * * * * * That said, there will be numerous ridiculous instances of zealous corporate legal departments "going after" overblown threats. And I support a healthy and hearty anti-ridiculousness. * * * * * Here's an example of a company that will likely zap you if you use their trademarks, logos or icons without express permission -- http://www.americafirst-ins.com/omapps/ContentServer?cid=1057678079441&pagename=ramInternet%2FPage%2FramStandard&c=Page There are a plethora of other examples. It only takes a little searching. http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/terms_of_use.csp * * * * * As far as poetry, as you know the #1 venue for poetry in America today is as lyrics of popular music. It may not be erudite, superbly crafted poetry, but to say it is not poetry is to invalidate about 95% of the entire history of poetry, from tribal campfires on down. Here is an example of an online music community where you submit (and promote) your songs, and where you must agree that anything in the song you have rights to -- http://www.soundclick.com/docs/legal.cfm?site=music * * * * * Please read this in its entirety, with special attention to the comments on trademarks -- http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/sept97/cew2.htm * * * * * The references to why use of trademarks and icons in popular media is frowned upon, and may even result in legal action, are huge. The only reason page poetry such as we write is not targeted is because, as cited above, no money is to be had, and its influence on the culture is minimal. But, as I said, as we become an increasingly "intellectual property" economy, the intensity of protection of such property can be expected to increase. * * * * * I urge you not to be so complaisant. I know that the general view around here is that you can say pretty much anything you want in poetry with impunity. And truly, you can say a very great deal -- and, as you know, I personally DO say a great many controversial things. But if you use trademarks, the reason that no corporation zaps you is generally not because they don't have a legal right to do so, but because you aren't important enough to matter. * * * * * I was thrown out of the University of California because of something I wrote. As the editor of the San Diego Mensan for five years, I frequently was censored by the directors of the local chapter. As a frequent writer for nearly twenty years of trade journal articles in the electronics service field, I was often censored by editors for including trade names or icons in my articles. There were -- put bluntly -- afraid that major companies like North American Philips, Sony, Panasonic and others would take legal action against them. As I write this, Pioneer zealously guards the service literature on vintage Pioneer receivers made in the 1970's, even though they have not sold this literature in either print or .pdf form for many years. This has created a "Pioneer service literature underground." Fred Unofficial Forum Pariah recent victim of alien abduction | ||
| Gary Blankenship
Moderator Username: garydawg Post Number: 23914 Registered: 07-2001 |
None of which stops us... There is one way, Clifton might be sued - If the cover represented a common logo - say Blue with Sleeping Beauty's castle on the front with Tinkerbelle and the title "Escape from Disneyland." And the book was stacked in the window of University Book Stores in SoCal, Seattle and Bismark (kidding for the last). IE, in a way that might reflect negatively on the Disney name and in the public's eye enough to draw attention to it. Starbuck did not sue Rat City because of money, but because of location and some misquided idea connection with roller derby was negative. I'm betting they back off. Smiles. Gary Celebrate Walt with Gary: http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/tw10/tw4conte.htm | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30031 Registered: 11-1998 |
You said it all right here, Freddie: "But if you use trademarks, the reason that no corporation zaps you is generally not because they don't have a legal right to do so, but because you aren't important enough to matter." Bingo. And there are the financial considerations. If the poet made no money (or even a pittance, relatively speaking) from using the trademark as a character in his poem, what is the point of legal pursuit? If the poet is a poor, working stiff with no money, why sue? You can't get blood (money) from a rock. I understand the concerns, and I am not being complaisant. I am simply being realistic. When my late husband investigated suing the company who discriminated against him because of his disabilities, our lawyer advised us that although he was definitely and legally wronged, what we faced was a long and drawn-out legal battle which we would eventually lose. He said if we wanted to spend thousands (probably hundreds of thousands) of dollars and many months (most likely years) in court proceedings only to lose in the end, or even win and receive much less in compensation than we spent, we could if we wanted, but he would not recommend it. And this was a serious case of disability discrimination, not some non-critical trademark infringement. I'm pretty certain any lawyer worth his salt would say the same to a corporation in pursuit of a poor poet who benefitted in no material way from using the words "Aunt Jemima" in a poem. Bottom line: it's just not worth it. The courts are too clogged already with real litigation over serious matters. And most corporations have vastly more serious legal issues to occupy their time and money. I think most judges have enough grey matter in their heads to look at a frivilous court case such as this, roll their eyeballs, and say, "You've got to be kidding, right?" My therapist told me that you have to separate rational fears from irrational ones. And as our lawyer told my husband, there is a vast canyon of difference between what you are legally entitled to and what makes financial sense to pursue. That's all I'm trying to say. Love, M |
