Good attorneys, however, know how and when to turn off the bloodlust.  The best attorneys manage to avoid it altogether.  The moment you start to get emotional about going after that one defendant, the moment it becomes personal for you, there is a real danger that you’re going to accidentally misdirect that energy.  If you lose the big picture in a haze of red, bad things can start to happen.  Recent events in the heated debate over copyright enforcement serve as proof.

Larry Flynt Publications (LFP) just parted ways with Evan Stone, an attorney that was hired to pursue the hundreds of BitTorrent users who are illegally trading copies of one of the company’s recent video titles, This Ain’t Avatar XXX.  When Stone wanted to press harder than his client, not surprisingly he got the boot.  It turns out that when LFP was unwilling to bite the hand of Time Warner Cable, an ISP dragging its heels on turning over customer information tied to IP addresses used to share the movie, Stone became unhappy with LFP’s intestinal fortitude.

According to LFP President Michael Klein . . . the shifting focus from the alleged pirates to putting pressure on the cable companies was not a strategy that appealed to the iconic adult company, which has a television division and continuing global ambitions that require it to be a partner rather than an antagonist with companies like Time Warner.  . . .  Klein said that as much as LFP is determined to maintain a professional relationship with cable operators, it was ultimately their frustration with Stone’s aggressive PR tactics that led them to the decision to end the contract with him.

“He wanted us to put pressure on the cable operators, but it’s not our goal to go after them,” Klein told AVN.  “We want to look at ways to go after pirates, and we thought this strategy might work out, but the reason why we terminated with Stone was because of what we considered to be his unprofessional tactics.”  (source)

Even though the company was happy to quietly let him go, Stone took the more douchey path of announcing his break with LFP to the press.

Plenty of attorneys argue — and they’re not necessarily wrong — that being successful requires adopting the client’s problems as if they were the attorney’s own.  However, very few businesses become successful by playing hardball with everyone the way an attorney would.  (Similarly, any company that is always as cautious as their attorney advises will likely fail to excel.)  The problem comes when your level of tenacity goes beyond the client’s, and fighting the problem becomes for your benefit rather than theirs.  This is almost always a recipe for disaster, especially considering it can require superhuman empathic skills to know where the line is sometimes.  Unfortunately, there’s no law school course that will give you the paracortex of a Betazoid, so you’ll have to rely on your own douchetastic meter to figure out when you’ve gone too far.  There’s no surefire way to navigate this conundrum, but staying away from brash and overly aggressive tactics will help, and that’s a good practice in any endeavor.

Keep fighting the good fight, Lamebook, so you can continue to remind us how funny ignorance can be.

This article was originally posted on The Legal Satyricon

Limewire joins the list of infamous internet services deemed to be overwhelmingly used for copyright infringement (source).  Napster, Mp3.com, and Grokster rumored to be throwing a welcome bash for the new fish.

This article was originally posted on The Legal Satyricon

This article was originally posted on The Tactical IP Blog

• Shut down the luge track to prevent any more deaths… check.
• Conduct an internal investigation… check.
• Let an “independent” authority do its own investigation… check.
• Make immediate modifications to the luge track to stop future accidents… check.
• Make a press release, expressing regret, but denying all responsibility… check.

All perfectly acceptable anticipated responses. So why is this an IP story, you ask? Well, when the above-described actions failed to push this embarrassing catastrophe under the rug, the IOC turned to their attorneys, asking what else could be done to hush the whole thing up. Video clips of Kumaritashvili losing control of his sled and crashing into a steel pole were popping up all over the internets, repeatedly showing the world what happened. The answer from their legal team: Those people are violating our copyright in that clip! We can use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to have that material removed from the web — so no one else will see it!

Now, giving the IOC the benefit of the doubt, I’m sure their intentions in suppressing the accident footage were honorable. Don’t misunderstand me. I recognize that what happened was horrible, and Kumaritashvili’s family and teammates are likely still reeling from the impact of it all. If they have to see that clip everywhere they turn on the web, that’s not ideal — especially if any of the commentary employing the clip was in poor taste, which I’m sure some of it was.

Even where all of this is true, U.S. copyright law was not implemented to choke off the flow of facts and news reporting. In fact, § 107 of the Copyright Act specifically limits a copyright owner’s rights in these kinds of situations. The IOC cannot use DMCA takedown notices to silence the speech it does not like. In fact, sending those notices may end up costing the IOC, unless they can successfully make the case that they considered whether use of the clips could be fair use before making their demands. Just ask the artist currently known as Prince. This will be tough argument for the IOC, considering this isn’t the first time they’ve tried to misuse their copyrights.

Unfortunately, groups like the IOC don’t recognize that the appropriate response to inappropriate speech is not to look for the most expedient suppression mechanism — it’s more speech. The marketplace of ideas is perfectly capable of recognizing which commentary is a legitimate dissemination of news about the tragedy and which ones are morbidly childish. Sending out demand letters that essentially state “you have to pay if you want to show our Faces of Death video” is equally deplorable, no matter what the IOC’s intentions actually were.

The article was originally published on The Tactical IP Blog

As an example, when someone goes shopping for clothing, they are able to quickly pick out which garments are desirable, and which ones are not, simply by looking at the tag or emblem stitched on the left breast.  If you see a silhouette of a man riding on a horse and swinging a polo mallet, you immediately know something about the characteristics of that shirt, whether it’s from your own experience or from what you may have heard from other satisfied purchasers.  You know a little something about the quality and whether it falls into your intended price range – all without having to spend the time, effort, and expense of buying one of each brand of shirt and conducting your own comparative analysis.  You know, before even opening it, that when you take a sip from that can that has “Coca-Cola” printed on it, it will taste a certain way, and you likely made your purchase (or selected the one with “Pepsi” printed on it instead) based on that knowledge.

This special kind of nonverbal communication of information only works, however, if we let a single shirt maker to use the polo playing man silhouette.  If three different companies used the same symbol, no one would know which one is the good one and which one’s seams come undone after one washing.  This phenomenon is aptly named, in the parlance of trademark law, consumer confusion – where two or more companies use marks that are so similar that consumers have trouble associating a single producer with a particular product.  As a method of preserving the economic advantage embodied in this product/producer association, our federal government, and each state, has created a legal cause of action, which allows a producer to sue others who try to use her trademark in a way that creates consumer confusion.  It makes sense to put the job of enforcement into the hands of the parties whose interests are most closely aligned with the government’s, keeping the size of government down and minimizing taxpayer costs.  Toyota will be as motivated as the government, if not more, in preventing someone from selling lemons with a rounded “T” symbol on them.

The only potential problem with this enforcement schema is that some producers, usually because they are not informed, misunderstand the purpose of trademarks and try suing anyone who uses their mark, even when there is little or no danger for consumer confusion.  Usually, those mark owners believe that they “own” a particular word that they’ve used as a trademark, such that they can prevent the whole world from using that word without their permission.  This perception of trademark ownership, while completely incorrect, is unfortunately held by many.  As a result, many a demand letter is sent to an unhappy customer who wrote about their unpleasant experience with a particular company, for example, on their Facebook or Twitter page.  Preventing criticism couldn’t be further from the intended goal of trademark law, and many companies find out the hard way that trying to use your trademark rights to silence an unfavorable review only draws attention to a bad customer experience – one which is likely an anomaly.

As an entrepreneur, registering and enforcing your trademarks can be an incredibly powerful way of building your brand and, as a result, your business.  Just be careful to keep in mind the real reason why the government has given you the power to sue and try to use an attorney who is experienced in these matters, who can help you see the unintended consequences of filing an infringement suit.

This article was originally published on The Tactical IP Blog.