51–60 of 85 posts
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I’ve never heard of a regulation governing attorney’s fees. Which regulations might you be referring to?
For example, Florida Bar Rule 4-1.5(a) prohibits "clearly excessive" attorney's fees, while 4-1.5(f)(4)(B) sets several criteria for contingency fees (typically the sort of fees a plaintiff's firm would charge) that, if not met, renders a fee presumptively "clearly excessive".
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There's not much point to the thought exercise. You wouldn't get the trademark in the first place.
> There's not much point to the thought exercise. You wouldn't get the trademark in the first place. My brother in Jesus Christ paperwork, even now there are already 236 active and formally-registered trademarks which have been granted involving "Jesus Christ", 18 if you limit it to "wordmarks." [0] Also, as per the concurrent(?) edited-in last paragraph, the basic idea remains even if the scope is, er, less-grandios…
There are a number of longer phrases which include the phrase "Jesus Christ" that are trademarked (either as logos or as phrases), but that is a very different thing.
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There's not much point to the thought exercise. You wouldn't get the trademark in the first place.
> There's not much point to the thought exercise. You wouldn't get the trademark in the first place. My brother in Jesus Christ paperwork, even now there are already 236 active and formally-registered trademarks which have been granted involving "Jesus Christ", 18 if you limit it to "wordmarks." [0] Also, as per the concurrent(?) edited-in last paragraph, the basic idea remains even if the scope is, er, less-grandios…
So, you could start a new church and trademark "Terr's Church of Jesus Christ", as the trademark covers the organization, but you cannot trademark the name "Jesus Christ" itself.
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Copyright only applies to specific expressions. Mickey is still a trademark of the Disney corporation. You're right though. This is an open and shut case that Morgan and Morgan will lose. There's only several decades of case law on this...
>Mickey is still a trademark of the Disney corporation. Mickey, yeah. But steamboat willie is covered by a copyright that has now since expired.
I suppose trademark law will be the catch-all protection Disney will be using from now.
Am I wrong in thinking this makes more sense than decades/centuries long copyrights? Let the copyright on a work expire so I can share my copy of Toy Story with my friends, but retain a trademark on the characters so that I can't go around making new Toy Story movies (or theme parks or pajamas).
The issue is that some of the specific expressions of the elements may be extremely distinctive, and trademarked by a person (or company) for commercial use. In those situations, you can still use the element, but not the specific expression of that element that is trademarked because that specific expression is being used by another person for ongoing commercial activities. However, unlike copyright, trademarks die if they are not kept in relatively continuous commercial use, generally 3 years after last use.
For example: the Winnie the Pooh horror movie. The specific version of Winnie the Pooh in the animated films is trademarked by Disney. The version that is a serial killer wearing a costume is not. Disney didn't bother to try and stop the film. So, if you wanted to make versions of the Toy Story character that don't look like the animated versions, you'd be in the clear once the copyright expires.
But the Morgan and Morgan ad is different. They're attempting to use trademarked characters for their own commercial purposes. (And there's no clear parody of Steamboat Willie; in the original cartoon he causes a bunch of accidents that harm other characters including the character that would become Minnie, so what is the parody here?) Unless they've made a sizable donation to the judge's bank account, they have no chance of winning their motion as there is over a century of case law against. OTOH, given the current administration and the openness of his appointees to disregarding centuries of existing law, it's very possible that Morgan and Morgan expects to win this case.
As an aside, Morgan and Morgan is generally regarded as the worst of the large personal injury law firms. In cases in which other PI firms sued the same defendants, the M&M plaintiffs got the smallest settlements, because M&M settles as early in the case as possible (usually before discovery) as their business model is based on quick, cheap settlements and they'll put heavy pressure on clients to accept the low-ball offers to avoid having to spend the time or labor costs of going through discovery. There are many complaints of M&M pressuring their own clients, fraudulent billing, withheld settlements, dropped cases, and bait-and-switch fees. They're the most sanctioned law firm in the country...by a lot...
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Copyright only applies to specific expressions. Mickey is still a trademark of the Disney corporation. You're right though. This is an open and shut case that Morgan and Morgan will lose. There's only several decades of case law on this...
We're talking about parody though, there's case law suggesting it would be fine: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law...
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Am I wrong in thinking this makes more sense than decades/centuries long copyrights? Let the copyright on a work expire so I can share my copy of Toy Story with my friends, but retain a trademark on the characters so that I can't go around making new Toy Story movies (or theme parks or pajamas).
But why shouldn't you be able to make a new Toy Story movie 100 years, give or take, after the original?
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> Morgan & Morgan's business model places a heavy emphasis on convincing the defendant to settle before litigation. To be fair, "ambulance chaser" lawyer or not, over 90% of civil cases in general in the US settle before a trial commences.
That's true, though I wonder at times how much of that is because of the way plaintiff's firms set the market up. And, again, I don't really mean to criticize them--I tend to err on the side of access to justice--as much as to explain to anyone non-US who tf M&M are and why this is interesting.
For claims significantly less than the defendant's assets, if the defendant is likely to be found liable, they may need to pay the plaintiff's losses as well as lawyer and court costs; settling before court most likely reduces the cost and provides certainty. For the plaintiff, settling before court may reduce the award, but provides it faster and with certainty.
For claims larger than the defendant's assets, typical cases involve an insurance company and in some cases a trial award that's above policy limits may be payable the insurance company if a settlement offer below the limits was offered by the plaintiff and not accepted by the insurance company (keyword: excess judgement), but if the plaintiff is on their own they may not care one way or the other --- a settlement they can't pay might be the same as a judgement they can't pay, perhaps delay and hope is preferred, perhaps they may be able to negotiate a settlement that they can pay. For the plaintiff, if there's only $X from the defendant, using it on legal costs is a loss, so settlement is preferable, especially if there's a chance of the defendant making the assets unavailable.
The incentives for settlement aren't so much about what plaintiffs' lawyers or defendants' lawyers are up to, but about how courts operate. Certainly lawyers have some influence on operation of courts, but it's a big combination of things, and IMHO, it falls more under government policy than anything else. If courts were staffed such that you could reliably expect to take an injury case from complaint to judgement in 6 weeks, maybe more people would do it. Of course, that might require more omniscience than is possible.
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Copyright only applies to specific expressions. Mickey is still a trademark of the Disney corporation. You're right though. This is an open and shut case that Morgan and Morgan will lose. There's only several decades of case law on this...
We're talking about parody though, there's case law suggesting it would be fine: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law...
To successfully make a parody case in regards to trademark the parody itself must make it obvious that the defendant is not in anyway connected to the owner of the trademarked thing. The Morgan and Morgan ad doesn't do that; without the disclaimer at the beginning it wouldn't be obvious that the ad wasn't a animation created by Disney. (In the original Steamboat Willie, Mickey causes a number of accidents that harm other characters. Causing a car accident would not stand out from the list of things he does.) Importantly, a disclaimer doesn't really mean much for trademark law since this body of law is about how the trademark is used.
Why does MOB get away with parodying the LV bag (in the case you cite)? Well, for starters they didn't just rip off the look of an LV bag; they stylized their renderings of the LV bags to over-emphasize aspects of the LV bags that weren't actually present in the LV bags (but were clearly evocative of the bags). They also were juxtaposing the stylized LV bag against their own product.
The case you cited also specifically refers to other LV cases in which the defendants lost (and LV won). In one case, Hyundai briefly displayed a basketball with a logo very similar to LV's trademarked monogram. Hyundai lost, even though the ad was about the ostentatiousness of luxury goods (i.e., social commentary), because nothing about the parody itself indicated that the trademark owner wasn't involved (and indeed, part of why Hyundai lost was because there was evidence that people believed that LV was making limited-edition basketballs and wanted to buy them).
More on point, the defendant in the Debbie Does Dallas case was sued by the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, and lost, even though DDD is clearly a parody. The problem is that the parody was not sufficiently specific to the trademarked content (in this case, the uniform), and also it wasn't clear from the content of the film itself that the DCC wasn't connected to the film.
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> There's not much point to the thought exercise. You wouldn't get the trademark in the first place. My brother in Jesus Christ paperwork, even now there are already 236 active and formally-registered trademarks which have been granted involving "Jesus Christ", 18 if you limit it to "wordmarks." [0] Also, as per the concurrent(?) edited-in last paragraph, the basic idea remains even if the scope is, er, less-grandios…
USPTO search reveals...0 trademarks of "Jesus Christ" because its not trademarkable. There are a number of longer phrases which include the phrase "Jesus Christ" that are trademarked (either as logos or as phrases), but that is a very different thing.