Take-Two Says Tattoo Artist Can't Get Statutory Damages Because He Only Registered Copyright In 2015

from the hmmm dept

Back when I first wrote about the copyright lawsuit between a tattoo artist and Take-Two Software, makers of the highly successful NBA2K basketball series, over the faithful depiction of LeBron James' image including his ink, I had been hopeful that perhaps this case could be a step towards resolving whether fair use applies when presenting images of people with tattoos in creative works. And that might still happen, but the defense Take-Two has decided to start things off with won't do the trick. Rather than asserting the work's status as fair use, the video game maker has led with a challenge to whether the tattoo artist can claim statutory damages based on when he had registered the copyright for the tattoos in question. It's a play on a technicality, one which seems to strangely play on what counts as an independent work.

Solid Oak Sketches had sued for damages nearing $1.2 million, claiming eight works had been infringed upon in the game NBA 2K16, including tattoo designs for LeBron James and two other players. According to Take-Two's most recent filing with the court, Solid Oak Sketches registered the copyright for those tattoos in 2015. The game company's argument is that it has been depicting those players and their tattoos since 2013, therefore there is precedent that statutory damages are not in play.

These claims for damages, however, are precluded by 17 U.S.C. §412. As is clear form the face of the Amended Complaint and its attachments, Take-Two has depicted Mr. James, Mr. Martin, and Mr. Bledsoe -- and their tattoos -- in its NBA videogames since at least 2013. This is years prior to the registration of the tattoos with the U.S. Copyright Office in June and July 2015... Here, where the same work has allegedly been infringed by the same defendant in the same manner since 2013 -- long before registration -- binding Second Circuit precedent dictates that statutory damages and attorneys' fees are unavailable.

In other words, because the complaint is over infringement that is essentially the same as has been occurring two years prior to the registration, precedent indicates that statutory damages and attorneys' fees should not apply. It's an interesting argument, though I wonder if it isn't without its pitfalls. Does Take-Two mean to suggest that in some way each years' NBA 2K game is not a separate work and publication. I am sure that is not what they are trying to argue, but arguing that the depiction of individual players within the game are essentially the same depiction for the purposes of combating this action leads us down that path.

Regardless, it does certainly seem to demonstrate that whatever harm Solid Oak Sketches wants to claim in their suit seems silly. Were it so injurious, it brings the question as to why it didn't act to protect itself in all the years previous in which similar alleged infringement is supposed to have occurred. Did it suddenly only become a problem in 2016?

The filing also makes it clear that Take-Two plans to also attack the underlying nature of the infringement claim in the future, which likely means it will assert a fair use argument. I hope it does. That would be the more important precedent to set here.

Filed Under: basketball, copyright, lebron james, registration, tattoos
Companies: solid oak sketches, take two software

DailyDirt: Jocks Versus Nerds

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The rise of fantasy sports and realistic video games for every major sport has expanded the audience and engagement incredibly. Even if you can't throw a spiral, you can still manage a fantasy football team. Sabermetrics changed baseball, and deep learning algorithms are about to change how a lot of other sports are played. Computers aren't just going to beat people at chess and Go. They might become better talent scouts and strategists for every major sport.

• IBM's cognitive computing platform Watson is becoming a talent scout for the Toronto Raptors, analyzing unstructured data to find undervalued free agents and trade targets. If this kind of artificial intelligence for NBA moneyball works, it'll probably expand to other professional league sports as well. And someone out there is probably going to make a killing with fantasy sports, too. [url]
• Embedded sensors in tennis rackets, golf clubs, helmets, etc... are going to provide a flood of sports data that will change the way these games are coached and played. These sensors will allow players to improve their skills and point out their flaws -- and possibly help avoid injuries. And in football helmets, we may even be able to better quantify brain damage from head impacts. [url]
• How will football strategies evolve over the next 50 years? Every play is caught on digital video and shared now, and playbooks are tablets. Simulations can help plan the best plays, and the difference between a video game and the real game could get a bit blurry for spectators. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: ai, algorithms, analytics, artificial intelligence, basketball, cognitive computing, data, football, moneyball, sabermetrics, simulations, sports, toronto raptors, watson
Companies: ibm, nba, nfl

Steve Ballmer Shrugs Off $60 Million TV Offer For Clippers Games, Considers Streaming Instead

from the tick-tock dept

It was really only a matter of time. As cord-cutting continues as a trend and the cable TV market as we know it today struggles to stay relevant by grasping at major pro and college sports broadcast deals, the injection of a tech-industry giant into the sports ownership arena meant that the chance of streaming for sports could only increase. Truthfully, When Steve Ballmer bought the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion, he wasn't the first tech celebrity to own an NBA team. Mark Cuban, after all, has owned the Dallas Mavericks for some time now. But Ballmer has been quite progressive in a traditionally conservative league in pushing the Clippers forward into modernity. Given the state of the team's business practices when he made his purchase, there was always going to be a lot of heavy lifting to do. Still, it seems that Ballmer isn't going to let that keep him from considering some very big ideas.

And one of those ideas appears to be transitioning the broadcast of games away from the television model to a streaming model. The New York Post reports that Ballmer has turned down a $60 million per year contract offer from Fox and is mulling over plans for an over-the-top streaming network instead.

If he follows through on the plan, Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, would be the first owner of a major US sports team to deliver games direct-to-consumer via a Web-based service and not through traditional cable or satellite companies, sources said.

Clippers games are now aired to roughly 5 million Los Angeles-area homes through Fox Sports’ Prime Ticket regional sports network in a deal that runs through the 2015-16 season. Prime Ticket currently pays the team a rights fee of $25 million a year — and offered a 140 percent increase, to $60 million, but the billionaire Ballmer turned it aside.

There are hurdles to be jumped over to make this work, of course. Production of the games is a job currently done by the networks, meaning Ballmer's service would need to come up with its own crews, commentators, and production values. That said, it feels silly to suggest that he isn't capable of that jump. More difficult would be creating a subscription model for the broadcasts, which is what the link above seems to think is the plan.

While he may have the technological smarts to pull it off, Ballmer may find it hard to earn more than $60 million in revenue a year from a single sport streaming RSN, experts said. The Clippers would have to sign up around 10 percent of LA’s 5 million households and get a pretty high price for the service, those people said.

“If it costs $12 per month, multiply that by 12 months in 500,000 homes, it would add up to $72 million — but then you’d have to produce the games and market the product,” said one.

And that’s if Ballmer can give fans a reason to subscribe during the five-month off-season. If he can’t, revenue would only come to $42 million.

And? The Clippers' deal with Fox currently stands at $25 million per year. Even under the notion that a $12/month subscription is the model, surely some percentage of fans would sign up. But, actually, I don't particularly understand why a subscription should be necessary to start with. Instead, free the product and let it grow in a streaming service that would be watchable on any internet-connected device. This means smart TVs, devices hooked up to regular TVs that can stream content, phones, computers, tablets, etc. If the accessibility of the games means that more viewers and fans can get the stream for more games than they could under the broadcast product, the advertising premium should see a correlative jump as well.

That extra revenue ought to make up for the lack of a subscription, I think. Meanwhile, you become the team with the most accessible product on the market, allowing the fanbase to grow. They might end up being America's basketball team, leading to even more revenue. Either way, streaming might be a win for Ballmer's Clippers.

And another nail in the cable coffin.

Filed Under: basketball, la clippers, ott, steve ballmer, streaming, tv
Companies: la clippers, nba

German Basketball Team Loses In Close Match With A Microsoft Windows Update

from the boom-shakalakah! dept

Windows: the still-dominant operating system is the 800 lbs. gorilla, so one fully expects to see tons of insult-darts shot at the thing to try and tranquilize it. And, in the age of technology fan-boy-ism, some techie folks are big on drawing lines in the sand and loudly proclaiming the superiority of one piece of software over another. But, still, when your German basketball team faces relegation into a lower class of league because a windows laptop crashed and then ran an update just before game time, you can kind of understand if they're pissed off about it.

The March 13 match between the Chemnitz Niners and the Paderborn Baskets was set to begin normally, when Paderborn (the host) connected its laptop to the scoreboard in the 90 minutes leading up to the game. In an interview with the German newspaper, Die Zeit (Google Translate), Patrick Seidel, the general manager of Paderborn Baskets said that at 6:00pm, an hour and a half before the scheduled start time, the laptop was connected "as usual."

"But as both teams warmed up, the computer crashed," he said. "When we booted it again at 7:20pm, it started automatically downloading updates. But we did not initiate anything."

After all the updates were installed, Paderborn was ready to start the game at 7:55pm.

Oops. Paderborn ended up winning the game, but Chemnitz filed a protest, arguing that the delay in starting the game constituted a violation and that Paderborn ought be penalized. The league agreed, taking a point in the standings away from Paderborn, which lowered its rankings such that it now faced relegation. Relegation, for you Americans who aren't Premier League Soccer fans, is a shift in which leagues a team plays in based on the year's performance. For Paderborn, this will mean not even being able to play at the championship level next year, instead being forced to play in the lower "ProB" league.

Seidel is pissed, of course.

"You can’t blame Chemnitz," Siedel added. "But as an athlete and a man, let me of course tell you something else. We beat Chemnitz twice in sportsmanlike, tight games. Therefore, this entire issue has nothing to do with sports."

Nope, just a Windows update costing you a potential championship next year. N00bs.

Filed Under: basketball, chemnitz niners, paderborn baskets, updates, windows

DailyDirt: Having A Ball

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Maybe you've been following a sport called football (not soccer!) recently. You wouldn't be alone. The World Cup has an audience size of nearly a billion people, roughly nine times the audience that watches the Super Bowl (or the whatever-you're-allowed-to-call-it "big game"). But for those of you not really interested in watching these soccer football matches, here are some links on the technology behind various game balls.

• Soccer ball designs have changed quite a bit since the 1920s. The Telstar Durlast ball from the 1970 World Cup is the buckyball shape that was designed to be more visible on black & white TVs. The newest ball designs have far fewer panels and seams, and they need to be tested to make sure the aerodynamics aren't too different from previous balls. [url]
• The first basketball was actually a soccer ball. Before the 1940s, the technology to make an inflatable ball without laces didn't exist, so it wasn't until after basketballs could be molded for a smooth surface (without laces), that dribbling became a major part of the sport. [url]
• A completely smooth golf ball would travel only about half as far as golf ball with dimples. The dimples create a turbulent boundary layer of air around the ball, and the effect can produce additional lift, depending on how the ball is hit. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: aerodynamics, basketball, design, football, golf, soccer, sports, super bowl, world cup

Newscasters Reenact Final Four Moments Rather Than Wait For Game Highlight Rights To Clear

from the much-more-enjoyable-than-defending-fair-use-in-court dept

Pervasive and extensive copyright law is damage. Route around it. This team of newcasters did (even though it really didn't need to), resulting in something much more entertaining than the content being withheld.

WCJB TV20 in Gainesville, Fla., couldn't legally show highlights of the University of Florida Gators' win over the University of Dayton on March 29. Instead of waiting for footage rights to recap the game, sports anchor Zach Aldridge recruited his coworkers to recreate the game's biggest moments in an office conference room.

Here are the highlights, as recreated using only classically-trained newscasters, a small hoop and a ball. Even the game-ending tears of a Florida Gators player are reenacted for posterity.

In his introduction, Aldridge claims the station would be unable to play the highlights until the following day unless it "broke a whole bunch of laws." Clearly, the use of highlight clips would be covered under fair use (hello, criticism, commentary and NEWS REPORTING).

But you know what? Screw the restrictive IP climate that surrounds every major sporting event. Why play by those rules? Route around it while highlighting the restrictive stupidity that prevents you from showing viewers what they came to watch. Have that clip go viral (388,000 views and counting), rather than the NCAA-approved clips handed out to local broadcasters like gifts from a begrudging God.

I guess this is what maximalists mean when they say strict IP enforcement encourages creativity and innovation.

(Oh, and don't even think about drinking your beverages in anything but an NCAA-approved sponsor's cups.)

Filed Under: basketball, copyright, fair use, march madness, reenactment, sports

No, Freak Gross Injuries Shouldn't Mean Media Outlets Can't Show Them

from the ouchy dept

Perhaps it's time we codified this, but it appears that for every horrible occurrence there will be an unequal, disproportionately large reaction to it. I humbly suggest we refer to this as Geigner's Law, because why the hell should Mike and Godwin be the only people with their name's attached to things? Regardless, it seems to me that this odd rule has been more greatly followed in the age of the internet. Terrorism got you down? Well, then obviously everyone should censor all things even remotely terrorist. A bunch of people lost their marbles and went on shooting rampages? Surely this means protected speech like videogames should face the consequences.

And, now that anyone remotely interested in college basketball had to spend Sunday evening figuring out how to get their previously eaten Easter dinner out of their carpeting thanks to Kevin Ware's disgustingly awful injury on live television, it's apparently time to call out any news outlet that showed the injury in the aftermath.

Don’t give me the Deadspin “Warning: Very Gross” alert either, as though that somehow absolves you from any sin; hell, the video embedded in that Deadspin post is stuck on a preview frame that pretty clearly shows Ware’s shin bone sticking through his leg. Even if you don’t want to watch the video, you don’t really have a choice.

Sites like The Big Lead may have one-upped even the freeze frame preview; by initially including a fully animated GIF on their immediate blog post about the injury before pulling that GIF in favor of just the reaction shot of the Louisville bench, TBL managed to not only generate thousands (and possibly tens of thousands) of hits, but then were able to play the high and mighty, “we’re not going to show that anymore” card a couple hours later – presumably after searches for “Kevin Ware Injury” had died down. It’s hypocrisy of the highest magnitude.

Look, let me be super clear here: the Ware injury footage is brutal. The guy's shin bone snapped in half and the angle of the shots show it with cookie-tossing clarity. In my opinion, you shouldn't watch it, unless you've ingested some kind of poison and you're looking to throw it up. I wouldn't even think of embedding the video here. It's that bad.

And that it's that bad is also my opinion. The simple fact of the matter is that sports is news, this injury is news, and the footage of it is news. We can argue all we want about whether that footage has value for the news consumer, and I'd argue it does as a matter of public inquiry, but that it's news cannot be doubted. There really is no argument to the contrary, as the article's author themselves note.

I don’t care that it’s “newsworthy” – write the story, and let the gawking onlookers go find the video for themselves.

Follow the two logical problems in these statements. First, don't show the footage, because everyone can already find it everywhere else. Surely calling on the media to censor themselves would never result in calls for similar censorship elsewhere, eventually disappearing this and perhaps even more newsworthy footage altogether. What could possibly go wrong? Secondly, if uncomfortable but newsworthy footage can be buried for something like sports under the notion that nobody should be getting "clicks" or money as a result of someone else's pain, does that also hold true for news items about war, gun-violence, murder, drugs, etc.?

The fact is that the original premise was right, just pointed at the wrong target. Yes, in the age of the internet, people have choices in how they consume the news. What that means is not that the media should self-censor upsetting footage. It means that anyone, like me, who wants the news without that footage can indeed get it elsewhere.

Filed Under: basketball, censorship, coverage, injuries, journalism, kevin ware, news

There's No IP In Team: How Protectionism Is Holding Back Sports Metrics (And Everything Else)

from the collaboration-is-key dept

If there is a single place where the sports and the geek worlds collide, it is undoubtedly in statistics. It's long been said that baseball is a thinking man's game, in part because of the chess game that is built into its very skeleton, but also because of the role that math and numbers play in terms of making decisions on each team based on individual situations. By this time, only those that work really hard at staying away from baseball will fail to recognize names like Bill James or Billy Beane. The people now most responsible for constructing teams and their strategies are people with advanced degrees in fields like economics and statistics. What's interesting is how quickly advanced metrics, or sabermetrics, have exploded in use and depth in the past ten years after being almost universally derided by the major league clubs. Advanced stats are everywhere in baseball now, from the early focus on OPS (On-Base Plus Slugging) to WAR (Wins Above Replacement) to WRC+ (Weighted Runs Created) and so on. What's amazing is how far behind other sports appear to be in developing their own advanced statistical systems. Take basketball, for instance. It would be very easy to conclude that there has been nothing resembling the development of baseball statistics in professional basketball, otherwise we'd have heard about it and the knowledge of it would have spread as wide as it has in baseball, right?

Well, no, actually, and the reason why is a lesson in how collaboration, open development, and building off of the ideas of others provides the most advanced outcome. Such is Jason Schwartz's conclusion in his lead up to the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, where at least some discussion of basketball metrics is occurring. That conference, now an ESPN sponsored event, grew out of what was once a simple Yahoo message board started in 2001 by basketball stats geeks. Early on, as was the case with baseball metrics, the forum was open for discussion, peer review, and the exchange of ideas. Unlike baseball, however, the NBA knew all about Moneyball by 2003 and teams were extremely interested in the potential of advanced metrics.

The NBA establishment quickly took notice. [Dean] Oliver, who published the seminal Basketball on Paper in 2003, seven months after Moneyball hit stores, was hired full time by the Seattle Supersonics in 2004. Another frequenter of the board, John Hollinger, was hired the following year by ESPN - and recently became a vice president of basketball operations for the Memphis Grizzlies. Hollinger's ESPN gig was filled by Pelton, who, after making his name at Basketball Prospectus, did a consulting stint with the Indiana Pacers' front office. Roland Beech, who created the popular website 82 games, was hired by the Dallas Mavericks in 2009 as director of basketball analytics. (His boss, Mark Cuban, is regularly one of the biggest names at the Sloan conference.)

So you're probably thinking, "Great! The teams took notice in the early stages, unlike what happened in baseball, meaning that the knowledge was embraced!", right? Well, that's true, but the result was the severe retardation of growth in basketball statistics. Why? Well, if you know anything about how patents and intellectual property often function today, you've probably already guessed.

As soon as each statistician joined an NBA squad, sharing in public became off-limits-and so, gradually, the think tank closed shop. What were the teams paying for, after all, if their new stat gurus were just posting their ideas online for the other 29 franchises to read? This has had a paradoxical result: Because NBA teams embraced advanced stats so quickly, progress on basketball analytics has actually slowed down. The top minds are now all working in silos, not only unable to collaborate but actually competing against each other.

This is, again, the exact opposite of what occurred in baseball. For baseball statistics, because teams were not impressed by the idea of advanced metrics, favoring instead old-timey scouts on the ground, the best minds were free to collaborate with one another, forming what are now some of the most prestigious sports stats think tanks in history, like Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs.

Major League Baseball teams were hidebound enough to ignore Bill James and sabermetrics for a full quarter century-as a result, he and others hashed out ideas out in open, public forums. By the time MLB executives finally embraced advanced baseball statistics, the movement was fully formed.

If you want to draw the obvious analogy, baseball statistics were developed on an open source model, while basketball has mostly been proprietary. As Schwartz notes, it isn't necessarily a lack of knowledge that is the resulting problem, but rather the issue is that this knowledge is all segmented throughout individual teams and nobody has the collective manpower to use it to its full potential.

Many, including Oliver, believe the killer app is hiding in there somewhere. The challenge is that there's so much information, it's easy to get lost. "It's like saying you're going to Wal-Mart or Ikea to get something," offers Tommy Sheppard, the Washington Wizards vice president of basketball administration. "You better know what you want, or you're going to walk out with a ton of s***." That each franchise is working alone - and against each other - compounds the problem. Goldsberry describes it as 30 "micro-CIAs," all racing against each other to "procure actionable intelligence out of these haystacks of vast data."

Sound familiar? Now, here's where it gets really fun for the purposes of our analogy. The quality of team construction in baseball is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was 20 years ago, in massively large part because of the explosion of advanced statistics and the resulting understanding of the game. Think about that for a moment. Even as these teams compete with one another, because of this open source statistical model for knowledge of the game, every team is better off for it. The game has universally advanced. Basketball, however, under the proprietary model, has not. While there have been rule changes that have influenced how the game is played, player evaluation is still essentially the same game it was 20 years, or even 40 years ago -- and thus you still end up with teams that look good on paper based on the old stats, but fail to perform well as a team. Why? Well, perhaps because the best minds aren't collaborating to advance the game through knowledge, and thus they're measuring the wrong things (and optimizing for the wrong things as well).

Thinking of each league as a microcosm of society and industry, the implications for intellectual property in general, and patents in particular, are somewhat breathtaking.

Filed Under: baseball, basketball, intellectual property, metrics, open, proprietary, sabr, sports metrics

DailyDirt: Digging Into Sports Statistics

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Baseball fans have been fascinated with player statistics for a really, really long time. Sabermetrics changed a few things about baseball in recent years, so it's about time other sports started looking into more rigorous data analysis, too. Fantasy team managers and actual professional coaches are both looking for diamond-in-the-rough players, and more player statistics are being collected and analyzed to find them. Here are just a few interesting developments in the field of performance analysis.

• Looking at the stats for 452 NBA players, there are far more than the five traditional positions in basketball -- try 13 different kinds of players. The 'Paint Protector' position gets more fouls than shots and collects rebounds like crazy. The 'Scoring Rebounder' might be a more highly-paid player, though. [url]
• The NBA wants to provide more engaging statistics to its fans, so it's turned to enterprise software solutions -- SAP HANA. Will re-purposed business analytics software be able to appeal to millions of fans? [url]
• The PageRank algorithm can be applied to soccer players, based on how many passes a player receives from his teammates, to help analyze how players fit into a team and quantify the overall strength of a team. Obviously, this algorithm has several limitations, but soccer isn't as statistic-friendly as other sports, so data analysis strategies for soccer are not as well developed. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: analytics, basketball, data, pagerank, sabermetrics, soccer, sports
Companies: nba, sap

Ridiculous: Court Says Mock Basketball Which Appears In Hyundia Commercial For 1 Second 'Dilutes' LV Trademark

from the are-they-insane? dept

A little over two years ago, we wrote about what we considered to be an absolutely insane lawsuit from Louis Vuitton, arguing that a mock basketball, which appeared in a Hyundai commercial for one second violated LV's trademark. You can see the commercial below:
If you missed it (entirely possible), at the 3 second mark, this image flashes briefly:


The point of the commercial is to get people to imagine what life would be like if "luxury" items were everyday items, and thus the mock basketball with symbols designed to suggest a luxury bag, like a Louis Vuitton bag. As we (and many, many trademark experts) suggested when the lawsuit was filed, the claims here are simply crazy. There is simply no harm whatsoever done to Louis Vuitton by this ad. Most people wouldn't even notice the markings and if they did, what possible "harm" would it do? The answer is none. There is no consumer confusion whatsoever. There are no LV basketballs that won't be sold because of this (in fact, the judge in this case notes that, after seeing this commercial, some people wanted one -- which would suggest a market opportunity, rather than litigation).

Of course, Louis Vuitton's complaint didn't rest on the bedrock of trademark law -- the likelihood of confusion -- but a more modern bastardization of trademark law called "dilution." The concept of dilution in trademark law is an affront to the purpose of trademark law, which is supposed to be about protecting consumers from confusion. That is, it's supposed to be about preventing someone from buying Bob's Cola, thinking that it's really Coca-Cola. But there's no such risk here. Dilution, however, flips the very concept of trademark law on its head and pretends (falsely) that trademark law is about protecting a company's trademarks from anyone doing anything at all with it that the company doesn't like.

Unfortunately, the courts don't always get things right -- which is why we get such ridiculous lawsuits in the first place -- and here, amazingly, the district court has sided with Louis Vuitton in its dilution argument, granting summary judgment on Hyundia's liability for dilution, while it rejected Hyundai's movement for summary judgment rejecting all of Louis Vuitton's claims. This is, in many ways, horrifying.

Eric Goldman's summary, linked above, highlights the many problems with the ruling -- while cautioning that the details suggest this type of ruling is limited. Still, as he notes:

And then we have an opinion like this--where the court finds trademark dilution without finding infringement (not resolved yet) and in a situation where EVERYONE can immediately tell there was zero harm to the brand owner. Rulings like this make trademark academics shudder in fear that trademark dilution will swallow up all of trademark law and confer rights-in-gross to trademark owners. While I don't share those fears for reasons I'll explain in a bit, unquestionably this is a bad ruling.

Goldman goes on to highlight some of the more specific problems with the ruling, but the key point is simply that there is no harm here. None. Absolutely none. Perhaps less than none, given the reports of interest in LV basketballs. When the law doesn't care about that, then the law is, unquestionably, broken. A ruling like this automatically lessens respect for trademark law, because it makes no sense at all. It makes a mockery of the judicial system by suggesting that lawsuits like this have any merit whatsoever.

Filed Under: basketball, commercial, dilution, eric goldman
Companies: hyundai, louis vuitton