UPDATED! Defamation and The Donald: How To CYA When Standing Up To A World-Class Bully

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There’s a difference between a dispassionate telling of the facts, and a heated accusation of wrongdoing. The more your remarks hew towards the latter, the more likely you veer into defamation territory, which robs you of the high road and puts you in danger of getting sued yourself. The last thing you want, as a victim of copyright infringement or breach of contract, is to defend yourself against a defamation claim. And the more prominent they are, the less likely they are to feel bad for suing you. After all, they have a bottom line to maintain, don’t they? 

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Paramount Releases Star Trek Fan Film Guidelines, Shows Other Studios How To Interact With Fans

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Surely you’ve heard by now the story of the troubled fan film, Star Trek: Axanar. The film, which had earned over a million dollars from backers on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, was sued by Paramount for violating “innumerable copyrighted elements of Star Trek, including its settings, characters, species, and themes." While Star Trek fan films have been around forever (I was a Trekkie as a kid and remember seeing them a lot at meetings and conventions), Paramount was concerned about Axanar’s size and scale - high quality visual effects, name actors, feature-length runtime, etc. I guess they were concerned that a film of sufficient quality could impact not only the release of Star Trek Beyond, but its future slate of Trek films and spinoffs. 

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Bagel v. Bagel, or Why You Can't Really Trademark Food

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Bagel v. Bagel, or Why You Can't Really Trademark Food

In order to be granted trademark registration by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the mark you’re seeking to protect must be distinctive. The more generic or common your mark is, the less likely it is to be granted protection. The USPTO reviews proposed marks on a sliding scale of descriptiveness in order to determine whether they should approve registration.

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Robin Wright Threatens to Topple House of Cards By Playing Hardball In Negotiations

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Robin Wright Threatens to Topple House of Cards By Playing Hardball In Negotiations

Normally I don’t recommend threatening the other party. If you don’t have the leverage to follow through on the threat it could backfire. But in this case, Wright (who is also a producer and director on the show) had two things going for her that made the tactic pay off. First, she knew she had the upper hand. She was too popular to simply replace with another actor and the bad blood resulting in her leaving the show and publicly bashing her former employer could’ve seriously impacted the show’s cache with its viewer base, maybe even killing it.

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On Bill Watterson’s Refusal To License Calvin and Hobbes

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When Calvin and Hobbes went out of print twenty years ago, I think most people assumed it would return at some point. I know I certainly did. Calvin and Hobbes was a formative part of my youth - the sly brilliant writing and stark black and white illustrations providing color to my sense of childhood wonder and adventure. Watterson had the innate ability to put on the page something that spoke directly to the brash creative misfit lurking deep inside of me (or maybe not so deep if my mother is to be believed), like he was illustrating the comic for an audience of one. With something so clearly loved by its creator and so personal, I just couldn’t envision a world where there would be no more new ones. And if Calvin and Hobbes had been created by anyone other than Bill Watterson, we probably wouldn’t have heard the last of it. 

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