trademark infringement

Some people continue to insist that intellectual property and censorship are two totally separate issues, but that's ridiculous.

Yet another example is in the ongoing case concerning software company Jenzabar, which we've covered before.

Not surprisingly, I've been reading up a lot on E-PARASITE/SOPA, and Larry Downes' recent analysis at CNET is, hands down, the most thorough and complete article I've seen highlighting the massive problems of the bill.

Here's just a taste:

Stripped of their obfuscations, SOPA and Protect IP suggest increasing desperation by media companies.

In the last few weeks, Homeland Security's ICE division has once again been seizing servers. TorrentFreak noticed a group of five domains seized recently, and SD pointed us to details of five more domains seized a little over a week earlier.

With more than a million members in the United States and more than 6 million spread over 150 countries worldwide, the Church of God is one of the largest Christian movements.

We've covered tons of lawsuits where companies were sued over claimed trademark infringement for buying ads based on trademarked keywords.

While there are still some such lawsuits under way, for the most part, the courts have made it clear that just buying ads on a trademarked keyword is not a trademark violation.

However, in the ever changing world of so-called "intellectual property" laws, things change all the time.

Perfect 10 are no strangers to lawsuits. From 2005 to the present day they have sued several huge companies for either allegedly using their images without permission or somehow being connected to infringements.

Notable among them are Google, Microsoft and Amazon (for providing search engine results) and Mastercard, Visa and CCBill for providing payment services for allegedly infringing sites.

Private settlement with Amazon aside, most of this legal action was a complete failure.

We've seen so many cases of trademark bullying, and it's so rare to see people fight back, that it's interesting to see it happening -- and even more surprising to see it done as a class action suit. Eric Goldman points us to the news that this class action lawsuit has been filed against luxury goods maker, Coach, for apparently issuing takedowns to eBay for perfectly legitimate second-hand sales, while also threatening those who put up those items.

Eric Goldman alerts us to a somewhat bizarre cease & desist letter sent to a law firm, Cobalt Law, which specializes in IP law.

Paul Levy has been staying on top of a rather important aspect of the ongoing Rosetta Stone/Google lawsuit over whether or not Google is liable for trademark infringement over keywords ads that might point to counterfeit copies of Rosetta Stone software.

So far, Rosetta Stone has lost badly and it seems likely that will continue.