leichter@lrw.com (Jerry Leichter) (12/04/90)
Subodh Bapat writes: >Talking about the Bell logo, [it's rumored that] AT&T lost its right >to use the Bell logo, as the copyright expired and they forgot to >renew it? ... [T]hey had to pay a lot of money to get it back from >some smart entrepreneur who ... sneaked in and got the copyright. This rumor is nonsense just on the basis of the legal issues involved; you don't even need to check any details of the facts: 1. It's very unlikely that a logo could be copyrighted. It could be trademarked, and you could get a design patent on it (though design patents are way too recent an innovation to be relevant to the Bell logo). 2. Trademarks never expire. Generally, you lose a trademark only if you let it become generic - i.e., if it is in common usage refering to a class of things, not just the thing YOU sell, you will eventually lose the ability to claim that it refers only to your product. 3. Once a trademark is generic, no one can use it AS a trademark, at least for the same kind of thing it previously described. ("Kleenex" might become a generic for facial tissues. You couldn't reclaim it to describe YOUR brand of facial tissues - if it's not generic, Scott still owns it! - but you MIGHT be able to use it to describe your brand of carburator cleaner.) I suppose a trademark could become "free for the picking" if the company owning it went out of business or just decided to stop using it. The latter is unlikely, and in the former case a valuable trademark will be sold to satisfy the company's debts. 4. Copyright protection lasts for 50 years beyond the life of an individual author, or the last surviving author of multiple authors; or for the earlier of 75 years from the date of publication or 100 years from the date of crea- tion in the case of a variety of works where there is no identified author. Copyrights cannot be renewed. 5. You are generally required to include a copyright notice with each copy of a copyrighted work. Anyone ever see a "Copyright" next to the Bell logo? 6. Copyright prevents others from making COPIES. If the Bell logo were pro- tected only by copyright, I could cut my copy out of a phone book I owned and paste it to the "green pages" I sell. Hardly useful protection! 7. Patents do expire, and can be renewed (once); but once a patent expires, it's gone forever - there's no way for the inventor, much less a third party, to re-create the patent. Actually, I'm not sure how this works for design patents, but then again there's little precedent so far for anyone enforcing a design patent in any useful way. A design patent on the shape of a tele- phone handset might make a lot of sense; a design patent on a logo, hardly. Jerry
Andrew.Hastings@pogo.camelot.cs.cmu.edu (12/07/90)
In article <15252@accuvax.nwu.edu> leichter@lrw.com (Jerry Leichter) writes: >least for the same kind of thing it previously described. ("Kleenex" >might become a generic for facial tissues. You couldn't reclaim it to >describe YOUR brand of facial tissues - if it's not generic, Scott >still owns it! - but you MIGHT be able to use it to describe your >brand of carburator cleaner.) Kleenex is NOT a trademark of Scott (maker of "Scotties" brand facial tissues. It is a trademark of Kimberly-Clark Corporation of Neenah, WI. Andy Hastings abh@cs.cmu.edu 412/268-8734