IP LEGAL NEWS AND UPDATES
"CANDY" Crushed
Authors: Marcella Ballard and Victoria R. Danta
From taxi cabs, to subways, to airplanes, to your dinner table, it was virtually impossible to avoid "Candy Crush Saga" in 2013. With over a half billion downloads on Facebook and mobile devices, Candy Crush was the year's most downloaded gaming app.
However, Candy Crush and its owner King have also received publicity for another reason. Perhaps due to the overwhelming success of Candy Crush, in February 2013, King attempted to register the term "CANDY" as a standard character mark in the United States – a bold brand protection move that, paradoxically, may have harmed the brand by earning the company a negative reputation as a "trademark bully."
Click here to learn the outcome.
DMCA Takedown? Not Without a Registration
Author: Joshua J. Kaufman
A recent court ruling has provided yet another reason to register your copyrights sooner rather than later.
One of the most effective ways of protecting your copyrights is a takedown under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (17 U.S.C. § 512). The DMCA was an outgrowth of a compromise between web hosts and copyright owners. Pre-Internet, the publisher of content, be it a newspaper or magazine, was liable for copyright-infringing matter which appeared in its publications. With the advent of the early Internet bulletin boards, websites provided users the ability to upload material, also known as user-generated content (UGC). The result was a flood of photographs, music, and text being uploaded to the web.
Learn more about protecting your materials by registering copyrights pre-release.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
