The long running battle between Tiffany’s and eBay took a new turn recently. A ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld eBay’s victory against Tiffany’s claim of trademark infringement, but sent back for reconsideration Tiffany’s claim of false advertising by eBay. The case relates to eBay’s use of the Tiffany name in its ads, which Tiffany claims are used mostly in ads for counterfeit  products. The ruling, assuming the U.S. Supreme Court does not disturb it, will make it harder for companies wanting to use trademark as a way to limit the sale of pirated goods with 3rd parties using the trademarked name in advertising.

An AP excerpt goes into further detail:

The three-judge panel said in its written ruling that it had difficulty with the lower court’s reliance in its ruling on eBay’s assertions that it did not know which listings offered counterfeit Tiffany goods. The 2nd Circuit noted that eBay advertised the goods sold through its site as Tiffany merchandise.  “The law requires us to hold eBay accountable for the words that it chose insofar as they misled or confused consumers,” the appellate panel wrote.  The company would not necessarily need to stop advertising goods such as Tiffany products if it knows some of them are counterfeit, the appeals court said.  “A disclaimer might suffice,” it said. “But the law prohibits an advertisement that implies that all of the goods offered on a defendant’s Web site are genuine when, in fact, as here, a sizable proportion of them are not.”

Court documents unsealed recently in the titanic Google-Viacom lawsuit over Youtube have uncovered a treasure trove of alleged dirt: Youtube founders writing emails detailing copyright abuses from within and Viacom’s original plans of buying Youtube:

But an e-mail exchange among YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim showed there were in-house copyright abuses. “Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site,” Chen wrote in the July 19, 2005, e-mail. “We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.” In a statement after the documents were unsealed, YouTube said Chen’s e-mail was referring to some aviation videos that had been making the rounds on the Web. “The exchange has nothing to do with supposed piracy of media content,” YouTube said.

You can read all the dirt here

According to PC Mag Online:

Microsoft and Amazon on Monday signed a cross-license agreement under which both companies will have access to each other’s patent portfolio. The deal covers a “broad range” of products, including Amazon’s Kindle and Amazon’s use of Linux-based servers. Exact terms of the deal were not released, but it was revealed that Amazon will pay Microsoft for the access.

The article goes on to state that the goal of agreements like these is to help prevent costly patent litigation down the road.

The full article can be read here.

In a recent interview with gaming website IGN, John Koller, a Sony Hardware Marketing Director, detailed new plans to help combat piracy on Sony’s portable system, the PSP (Playstation Portable).

IGN reported that the plan calls for:

Those who purchase SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3 are now required to register the title through PlayStation Network before given access to online gameplay. UMD copies of the game will come with a voucher code that must be redeemed online, while digital copies will automatically register in the background. Those who buy a used copy of the UMD can purchase a PSN entitlement voucher for $20 to play online.

It’s also a move designed to both counter piracy and ensure a revenue stream from games even if they are sold in the secondary market.

The full interview can be read here

You Don’t Know Jack was a popular game and trivia quiz show during the 1990s. You Don’t Know Quack is part of a new ad campaign for the Aflac Insurance company. Jellyvision, the makers of You Don’t Know Jack, are not very happy with this new ad campaign and are suing Aflac claiming trademark infringement. Kotaku has some details on the lawsuit:

The suit, filed on January 21 in United States District Court for the Norther District of Illinois, alleges that Aflac’s You Don’t Know Quack marketing campaign and corresponding webgame infringe on Jellyvision’s long-held trademark for You Don’t Know Jack.

Jellvision Inc.’s suit claims that the logo for Aflac’s web-game and the style of the game itself — a series of questions — are similar enough to You Don’t Know Jack’s to compel legal action.

The company is seeking monetary damages and a court order to stop Aflac from obtaining a trademark for You Don’t Know Quack.

Now that we have discussed how a company can protect their content during development we should look at the next logical part of protecting one’s products: content protection during production.

The first step is ensuring that you know your manufacturers and can trust their own internal security measures. Most product leaks occur because someone at a replication facility made a copy of the product and spread it via the internet. Do not be afraid to investigate and ask questions before outsourcing. One solution to the risks of outsourcing is to keep as much production possible done internally. For every link in the chain you add (in terms of outside production) you increase the risk of your products being pirated and you not being able to track down the potential source and limit damage.

This leads us to the second step: tracking your products during production. If you have to outsource your production (and even if you handle your production internally) you should be able to track who is doing what during the production phase and when they are doing it. While people can gain access to a console or a locked drawer, the logging of products can help reduce the risk by simply making it harder for people and increasing the likelihood that they will be caught. New products are being developed that allow for a digital watermark that is unseen to the human eye and for low costs too, which makes tracking people even easier. In short making sure you know and trust your manufacturers and keeping track of your products during production are two key steps to preventing piracy of your company’s products.

Today we examine one of the various ways that content producers can protect themselves during the content production stage from piracy.

One key component is that only a limited number of employees should have access to the products in development. This should not aim to limit collaborative design work; instead it should ensure that only the people needed on the project are involved in the development chain. Too often leaks occur because someone outside the necessary development chain spreads the products to unauthorized users. This occurred during the development of Doom 3 when a non ID Software employee at a graphics card company pirated a pre-release version of the game. The game which had been worked under a fairly large veil of secrecy now became available for both consumers and competitors to try out. The key lesson is to ensure that your internal team is kept to a minimum needed for development and innovation, but also remains manageable. A manageable team helps make content easier to keep track of and protect from being stolen or leaked. Accidental leaks have led to the pirating of many products. A recent example was the downloadable content for the game Dragon Age Origins entitled “Return to Ostagar” was accidentally left on a file server accessible to the public. This led to the product being pirated while the retail version was still being tested (because of a last second software bug that was discovered) and the loss of a large amount of potential revenue. Harsh lessons such as the two examples above demonstrate the need for smaller more manageable teams in content production, balanced with the design and innovation needs

One of the biggest problems being faced by all parts of the entertainment industry is the leaking of their products before release date.  It seems more of a miracle these days when a product can actually be released on street date and not suffer from an earlier “pirate release.” The question is how can developers secure their products from a pirated release before an actual street date release? We will look at some of the various strategies available to content producers over the next couple of entries and we will look at protections available during content production, manufacturing, and finally shipping of the product. What steps can be taken during these various stages to protect the intellectual property of content developers? We will look at this very question in our next three entries.

A new documentary entitled Copyright Criminals is premiering at film festivals and on PBS that asks what is the difference between a sample and infringement, if any.

Is sampling and scratching theft or merely traditional cultural appropriation? That’s the central question of the new documentary Copyright Criminals, premiering Tuesday at the Toronto Film Festival as well as on PBS’ Independent Lens series.

When Public Enemy’s legendary 1988 release It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and De La Soul’s epochal 1989 effort 3 Feet High and Rising exploded the possibilities of sample-based sound collage, no one had a clue that hip-hop would become a multibillion-dollar global industry and spark lasting, devastating copyfights.

Were those copyfights legitimate, or simply ruthless attempts to cash in on a zeitgeist that knows no limit? Benjamin Franzen’s Copyright Criminals explores the subject through in-depth interviews with hip-hop’s finest talents, from De La Soul and Public Enemy to DJ Spooky, Jeff Chang, El-P, Mix Master Mike and many more.

The documentary makers even tracked down Clyde Stubblefield — James Brown’s original funky drummer, whose beats have been extensively borrowed to form the backbone of many hip-hop songs. Stubblefield says he has yet to see a dime from all the sampling, as he explains in the Copyright Criminals trailer.

Read More at http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/01/copyright-criminals/#ixzz0d7ceSYQN

Copyright Criminals – Trailer from IndiePix on Vimeo.

KenSingTon Vii- The one, the only, the Vii… which incidentally has its own infomercial too!

Apparently the device isn’t horrible, but then again it’s not really striving to be much. Devices like these cause numerous problems for Nintendo in their attempt to penetrate the PRC’s growing middle class with legitimate Nintendo products.