May 27th 2010
The most (or perhaps least) popular words in the creative business: “Could you make the logo bigger?” For anyone who has had a client suggest that you “try putting the copy in comic sans, or helvetica oblique, ” I submit to you this anthem.
March 10th 2010
Remember my 2010 prediction that brand holders should beware of clowns? I called it the Coulrophobia Epidemic of 2010. Logorama did it with trademarks, and won an Oscar. Girl Talk did it with music, gaining top rankings from Rolling Stone, Blender and Time magazine. And now Eric Faden uses the most copyrighted video anywhere, Disney® [...]
March 8th 2010
Last night, a 16-minute animated film, entirely populated by trademarks as both characters and props, won an upset Academy Award. Its producer, Nicolas Schmerkin, explains: It’s about the way we live and the way we react to these logos. The brain can register 14 logos in less than one second. Making the logos characters with [...]
March 2nd 2010
INTA, the International Trademark Association, is a group of nearly six thousand trademark professionals in 190 countries. They protect the world’s brands. They’re being Twitter-squatted. There’s no pretty way to say it. In 2007, someone apparently seized their name as a Twitter handle and posted one five letter word, “srrrr”. This looks like a case [...]
February 22nd 2010
This week the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Boston Police Department for using “wiretapping” laws to prevent citizens from taking video footage of police arrests. Some would naively think such laws were passed to protect the people from the authorities, not vice versa. (details in Law.com) Following Training? Boston police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll rejected [...]
January 31st 2010
I don’t need to tell you, its a tough time to be a young lawyer. This dark send-up of lawyer advertising suggests that the economy may bring our best and brightest to promote themselves using desperate measures. This sketch is from Almost Live a local comedy show based in Seattle. As you can imagine, Aurora [...]
November 2nd 2009
Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has produced his own “Downfall” parody video, making fun of the fact that Constantin Films has issued DMCA notices to remove all of the “Downfall” parody videos from YouTube. This little-known film has become an Internet sensation and, as I note below, Constantin Film’s [...]
October 30th 2009
In a season where teen vampires are all the rage, can a drama following a real-life band of teen burglars looting celebrities be far behind? (For Halloween, I’ll be dressed as them!) The Net was their accomplice. The teens tracked the movements of stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and broke into their [...]
August 12th 2008
My local transit agency, the MBTA, gained a restraining order to keep a group of MIT students from presenting their discovery of just how easy it is to forge credits on the subway’s fare cards. But since the MBTA filed the students’ paper as part of their complaint, the full text of what they sought [...]
August 4th 2008
If you manufactured automobiles, you’d also likely need to make keys so that your customers could start their engines. Ubisoft, publishers of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2, recently missed the equivalent of that second step when they released their game for sale as a downloadable file on the Internet. Unfortunately, the security program surrounding [...]
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