Trademork.com is an excellent source of silly trademarks, as shown by this recent example: A Finnish computer game company is applying for a trademark for the term "pwnage," a recently coined word signifying that someone has been had. The company cannot lay any claims that it created the word, and the word is now commonly used in the gaming and online communities.

I want to trademark "trademark"...

The L.A. Times turns a spotlight on the Church of Scientology's abuse of IP claims in order to try and silence its critics.

No corner of the Web, it appears, is safe for Scientology. Blogger and lawyer Scott Pilutik recently posted a story noting that Scientology was yanking down EBay auctions for used e-meters, the device the church uses for spiritual counseling. EBay allows brand owners -- Louis Vuitton or Rolex, say -- to remove items they believe infringe on their trademark or patent rights. Basically, fakes. But, Pilutik said, the used e-meters being taken down were genuine. Reselling them was no different than putting a for-sale sign on your old Chevy.

"What's actually going on here," he wrote, is that the church is "knowingly alleging intellectual property violations that clearly don't exist."

...

The current wave of anti-Scientology activity began in January, when a video of Tom Cruise extolling the religion's tech-based approach to enlightenment was leaked onto YouTube, where users holding it up to ridicule copied and recopied it; several sites posted it without hesitation.

It wasn't long before Nick Denton, who as publisher of the blog syndicate Gawker Media had put the video online first, received a legal threat from a law firm representing Scientology, alleging copyright infringement. But Denton refused to take the video down.

"It was an awesome news story," Denton wrote in an e-mail. "If we didn't race to post it up, some other site would have. That, rather than litigation by Scientology, was the fear going through my mind."

The church's whack-a-mole campaign with the Cruise video became a rallying cry for Anonymous, which saw efforts to remove the videos from YouTube as an unwanted incursion into the domain of digital culture, where information and media, copyrighted or no, are often exchanged freely.

...

Ironically, it is the church's aversion to negative publicity -- and the legal strategy it has long used to prevent it, that has aroused more online ire than any other issue.

The website ChillingEffects .com has posted dozens of cease-and-desist letters sent by Scientology's lawyers to various website and Internet service providers requesting that copyrighted material be removed.

But in the diffuse and often Byzantine world of the Web, some precision legal strikes are more likely to backfire than hit their target. Scientology's use of copyright law appears to be an increasingly losing battle on the Web, said Andrew Bridges, a San Francisco-based intellectual property attorney. "The big question is: Is the copyright serving the purpose of promoting science and the useful arts, or is the purpose essentially the stifling of criticism?"

Read the whole article.

The Federal Court of Appeal in charge of interpreting Patent Law has been an absolute disgrace. I would have thought that it should be obvious that only tangible technology could be eligible for a patent under the law. But the court has at times implied that even modes of thought and communication can somehow be patented if it leads to concrete results in the physical world. Maybe they are slowly staring to get the message of just how wrong they have been all along.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit redefined the margins of patent eligibility in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group Inc. in 1998. The effect was to boost patent protection for business methods, such as financial models, contract provisions, insurance policy features, computer-related inventions and Internet startups.

There were unintended effects, too. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was deluged with new patent applications and had few examiners with the expertise to handle them. Four Supreme Court justices have bemoaned the precedent, calling it vague and contrary. And several financial-services companies, frequent targets of the business-method-patent holder, have run up millions and in some cases billions of dollars in royalties and damages.

After a decade of disagreement over the precedent's bearing on American innovation, the Federal Circuit decided Feb. 15 to revisit State Street through the lens of another case, In re Bilski, which lifts State Street's holding on business methods and attempts to carry it further.

In a rare move, the court scheduled an en banc hearing without prompting by the parties in the case. The hearing is set for May 8.

Read the whole thing here.

A federal appeals court upheld a lower court's 2006 ruling that a corporate consultant, who thought up American Express's "My Life, My Card" slogan, has no trademark rights in it. His claim is akin to an ad agency's marketing concept. Ad agencies get paid for their marketing and advertising work. So can this guy.

Here is the story.

Jeffrey H. Birnbaum at the Washington Post begins, "Trial lawyers sue each other all the time. Now they are suing each other over what to call themselves." The story goes on link here; the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) decided that it was poor PR to keep the distrusted term, trial lawyer, in the title and rechristened themselves as the American Association for Justice (AAJ). Another group of lawyers formed a competing group, the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA). AAJ then went to court, arguing the new group's name confused people and violated its trademark on the ATLA acronym. How can you trademark an acronym?

Then a third group, the American College of Trial Lawyers, sued, arguing that the name would confuse people with it. If you are confused as to who has the best case, hire a trial lawyer. It is nice to see them taking each other's money. And making current IP law look ridiculous.

Starbucks is suing Conga Coffee and Tea, a tiny two-store operation in Michigan, for trademark infringement link here. Both use green circles around a small center picture, so there is a vague resemblance. But this is a case of an elephant trying to stamp on a mouse. Incidentally, Conga has been in business with the same trademark since 1996, and went unnoticed until now.

We rarely get the chance to make the case for protecting any form of intellectual property. Here is one from Mike Masnick at Techdirt. The Korean cell phone maker, LG, is peddling a phone called Black Cherry very close to RIM's BlackBerry link here. If people are as mindless about shopping for named goods as I, they could easily confuse them. That is the bottom-line case for trademarking--it's protection for the buyer.

T-Mobile claims to own the color magenta, ostensibly having put it under trademark. The law on this is complicated beyond belief, which allows an otherwise ridiculous determination to continue to be enforced. Read all about it here and here.

Who is going to sue at great expense to get it overturned?

Behold the latest proof -

Patent lawyers started breathing again Wednesday, as the specter of new patent rules was chased away -- at least for a little while -- by a Virginia court.

U.S. District Judge James Cacheris granted pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline's motion for a preliminary injunction blocking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from implementing rules set to go into effect today.

The new rules would reduce the number of claims, which help define a patent, and the number of continuations, which are used to amend patent claims and contest those that are rejected. Claims would be limited to 25, and continuations to just three. The current rules imposed no limits.

"I won't be alone in being among the patent attorneys who are very pleased with the injunction that was granted today," said Neil Smith, a veteran IP lawyer at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in San Francisco. "Anyone who cares about the strength of patents and about innovation itself saw those rules as causing some real problems -- it's a good day for the patent system."

The patent office says the rule changes are meant to speed up the patent process and eliminate the enormous backlog of applications. But opponents say the changes could weaken patents by not allowing sufficient continuances to cover ever-evolving innovations. They also say the new rules would have unfairly been retroactive on pending applications.

Notice how patent attorneys engage in Orewllian Newspeak talking about the "strength of patents" and "innovation". Always have to read between the lines with them - much like politicians.

Read the whole article here.

In a frighteningly bizarre Orwellian case, a guy who criticized the fact that an organization was trying to trademark the word 'freecycle' got sued for trademark infringement because he used the word in his criticism. The organization even got a lower court to issue a preliminary injunction preventing the guy from 'disparaging' the trademark.

Fortunately, the 9th Circuit Appeals Court freecycled the case back to reality - ruling that not only was there no trademark infringement here, but also declaring that federal law doesn't recognize an action for trademark 'disparagement'.

PDF link to the case here.