LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION™

Hey, guess what I just found out by tracing our incoming traffic. What do you suppose is the number-one result if you do a Google search for “likelihood of confusion”? Hint: It’s funny, brilliant, iconoclastic and makes no money whatsoever! UPDATE (The Continuing Obsession): Perhaps you were looking for an explanation of the trademark law term “likelihood of confusion” and ended up at some blog. Then you had to read it! How terrible — sounds... Read more

IPKat reports that it lost on copyright, didn’t lose on trademark, for use of thumbnails out in California. California is a tough place to litigate these cases. Read more

Slate explains how Likelihood of Confusion did it: If anything, the data revealed a small positive uptick in test scores for kids who got to watch more television when they were young. For kids living in households in which English was a second language, or with a mother who had less than a high-school education, the study found that TV had a more sizable positive impact on test scores in reading and general knowledge. Evidently,... Read more

I (in my role as head of a small law firm) do get a lot of letters and emails of inquiry. It’s interesting to see what comes my way. I get a few very impressive resumes, people I would love to hire. I get a lot of grade-B and worse applicants — people who don’t put their law GPA’s on the resume, for example. Sometimes these are very interesting to look at, but not enough... Read more

Hugh Hewitt, he of the media Jacobins, confronts the crumbling edifice of the mainstream media at its Versailles — the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism — in the The Weekly Standard: The “blue” nature of the student body is further confirmed by my polling of the class I attended, done with the permission of Shapiro. Six of the 16 were English majors, two studied history, and the balance spread across the humanities. No one... Read more

The new Blawg Review is up at Colin Samuels’ Infamy or Praise. Colin explains the origin of his blog’s name — Dante’s Inferno, which is also the source of the title of one of the most influential books in my life (Inferno probably should have influenced me a little more, actually), Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. The latter reference is to that circle of Hades “Reserved for the souls of the just people who never knew... Read more

IPKat writes about that bane of patent examiners — or is it really just a study break for the nerdiest G-men? — perpetual motion machines. The philosophical feline makes an immodest, and very laissez-faire, proposal: The IPKat likes patents for perpetual motion machines (though, embarassingly, he couldn’t find a link to this one). They shouldn’t need to be expensive to examine once you rumble the concept, so the patent office should get good income from... Read more

The online New York Law Journal reports that the federal court in the Southern District of New York has ruled that a painter who produced a commissioned painting utilizing certain features of a commercial photograph used in a Gucci ad, “in a novel way to impart new information and new aesthetics so that their use was transformative” and protectible as fair use. Bill Patry has the decision. and a link to Koons’s works, which Patry... Read more

A 2001 Third Circuit opinion from Judge Alito supports even unpopular speech, even in schools: We . . . have found no categorical rule that divests “harassing” speech, as defined by federal anti-discrimination statutes, of First Amendment protection. . . . The public school policy governing speech was ruled overbroad: [Advocates of the policy] could argue that speech creating a “hostile environment” may be banned because it “intrudes upon . . . the rights of... Read more