Friday fantasies

"Hmm. I wonder if I have
a cause of action against
DC Comics ..."

Let's not call it "old news" but rather "recent history". The "it" in question is the copyright and trade mark infringement action which DC Comics brought against Mark Towle (of Gotham Garage) for making and selling replica Batmobile modification kits.  A Los Angeles court found Towle liable and the action does not appear, at first blush, to feature any issue of deep legal interest or difficulty.  What struck the IPKat is the fact that the most successful infringers are the most invisible, those whose products are so well made, or so low-profile, as to be undetectable or at any rate hard to detect. Making and selling Batmobile bodyparts was always going to be less difficult than getting away without detection (a katpat to veteran reader Lee Curtis, he of the Automotives+IP LinkedIn group, for the link to this report in Wired).

Around the weblogs. On the 1709 Blog, Monika Bruss brings latest news of the tussle over the right to publish Hitler's Mein Kampf.  On the same blog, the post by Ben Challis on workplace music licensing and whether it constitutes "double taxation" is attracting some interesting comments.  Enrico Bonadio and Mauro Santo's Current Intelligence note on the Scarlet Extended v SABAM ruling on blanket filtering orders for ISPs, to be published in JIPLP, now appears on the jiplp weblog here. On Art & Artifice, Simone Blakeney discusses public funding of the arts.

INTA's Community trade
mark: note the "all at sea"
waves, which might appeal
to the European Parliament

ACTA and INTA: now the truth can be told. The European Parliament has posted this "easy-to-follow infograph on the legislative procedure for ACTA to help people who are confused about how a decision will be made on this controversial anti-counterfeiting agreement" on its website. Intellectual property enthusiasts will be startled to see INTA right at the heart of it. What, you may wonder, is INTA, the International Trademark Association, doing in the middle of the process by which the European Union will confer its blessing on the controversial agreement? Don't worry, says the IPKat, there is nothing to worry about -- this isn't the real INTA: it's just an unfortunate short-form reference for the European Parliament's International Trade Committee. Noting that the real INTA has the fifth Community trade mark ever issued, for a logo in which the letters INTA are the dominant feature, Merpel mischievously wonders whether the trade mark owners' organisation might consider its own mark to be tarnished or otherwise adversely affected ... (a katpat is shared by Magali Delhaye and Serena Tierney for providing this link).