Considers S. 1396, to amend section 5 of the Trademark Act of 1946 to allow persons other than trademark registrants or applicants to be registered as registered users if they are not wholesalers, retailers, or others who resell the registrant's goods; pt. 2: Continuation of hearings on S. 1369, to revise trademark registration and protection requirements.
Considers S. 1396, to amend section 5 of the Trademark Act of 1946 to allow persons other than trademark registrants or applicants to be registered as registered users if they are not wholesalers, retailers, or others who resell the registrant's goods; pt. 2: Continuation of hearings on S. 1369, to revise trademark registration and protection requirements.
The Trademark Guide: A Friendly Handbook for Protecting and Profiting from Trademarks is an invaluable reference tool for both businesses and individuals looking to master the law and glean the best strategies for benefitting from trademarks. Clear-cut and completely up-to-date, this comprehensive guide covers what can and cannot be protected, duration and scope of protection, notice and registration, how to avoid and evaluate infringement, and how trademarks are used and abused in the marketplace.
Who controls how one’s identity is used by others? This legal question, centuries old, demands greater scrutiny in the Internet age. Jennifer Rothman uses the right of publicity—a little-known law, often wielded by celebrities—to answer that question, not just for the famous but for everyone. In challenging the conventional story of the right of publicity’s emergence, development, and justifications, Rothman shows how it transformed people into intellectual property, leading to a bizarre world in which you can lose ownership of your own identity. This shift and the right’s subsequent expansion undermine individual liberty and privacy, restrict free speech, and suppress artistic works. The Right of Publicity traces the right’s origins back to the emergence of the right of privacy in the late 1800s. The central impetus for the adoption of privacy laws was to protect people from “wrongful publicity.” This privacy-based protection was not limited to anonymous private citizens but applied to famous actors, athletes, and politicians. Beginning in the 1950s, the right transformed into a fully transferable intellectual property right, generating a host of legal disputes, from control of dead celebrities like Prince, to the use of student athletes’ images by the NCAA, to lawsuits by users of Facebook and victims of revenge porn. The right of publicity has lost its way. Rothman proposes returning the right to its origins and in the process reclaiming privacy for a public world.
