jagardner@watmath.UUCP (Jim Gardner) (10/30/85)
In article <2852@vax4.fluke.UUCP> moriarty@fluke.UUCP (The Napoleon of Crime) writes: > >The biggie first: Marvel's lawyers have sent a "cease and desist" >order to Kitchen Sink. Three guesses why. Yup, they feel the >"Megatropolis Quartet" and some other characters that appear in >MEGATON MAN are "copyright infringement and unfair competition". > > Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer As many people will remember, the same sort of thing came up a while ago in connection with Wolveroach in Cerebus. There was an initial torrent of outrage (as is only right), but a few letter columns later, Dave Sims mentioned that he had talked to Shooter and straightened things out. If I remember things correctly, the argument went like this: Marvel can lose trademark/copyright to their characters if they do not protest continuing public use of those characters. In law, the phrase is "without force, without secrecy, without permission". If you publicly walk over someone's property often enough, without getting their permission first, and they let you do this without protest, the courts may decide that you have historically been indifferent to your right of ownership and therefore cannot suddenly decide to enforce that right. This is the way that the Cello company lost the trademark on the word "cellophane", for example. The word came into general use for that sort of product and eventually the courts decided that the trademark was void. (Same thing recently happened to the trademark on the board game "Monopoly".) As a result, companies must make a show of protest when their trademarks seem to be used in a continued highly public way. For example, Xerox occasionally takes out ads saying that the proper term is "photocopying", not "xeroxing". I remember an ad from Coke in a somewhat obscure Canadian publishing trade magazine saying that the proper term was Coke "always capitalized, never plural". It is not that Coke really cares how the rank and file spell their name; it's just that they must make a public show of protectiveness. All this is not to say that I think highly of Marvel or that threat of legal action isn't a nasty thing...it's just that I understand Marvel is protecting its assets from legal challenges and is not (necessarily) being brutish about occasional parody. Dave Sim said much the same thing in Cerebus. Jim Gardner, University of Waterloo