A bill that would drop express protection for "noncommercial use" of a trademark and would weaken the protections for those who use trademarks in news commentary will be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. The legislation has already passed the House....Trademarks, including business names, brands, and slogans, are unavoidable and proliferating in daily life. Writers of fiction and nonfiction inevitably incorporate trademarks into their work, sometimes to comment on the particular business using the trademark, but frequently the use is merely incidental to the nonfiction or fiction writer's story ("Tom went to a McDonald's, had a Coke, and waited for the Harley to arrive."). Just as fair use provisions of copyright law permit writers to make certain uses of copyrighted works in their own works, so do fair use and related provisions of trademark law permit writers to use trademarks in their works....The new law would weaken these protections, exposing writers to greater potential liability for their use of trademarks. This would needlessly chill expression.
Comment. Imagine writing up your research on the safety of Vioxx, the security of a new Microsoft browser, or the lawfulness of Google's Library Project, and finding that you have to use the ™ symbol or even pay royalties just to name the product.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/17/2006 09:20:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
