Photoshopped Fillipa Hamilton, Olive Oyl, and a more "robust" and real Hamilton.
Actually, poor Olive would need to lose weight for the runway these days.

 

Great Video Coverage of this by Rachel Maddow
"She sort of looks like she was shrinky-dinked, doesn't she?
Look at the ratio of her torso to her head.
That is not a ratio that exists in nature, at least outside the insect world....
It looks like whoever was in charge...was inspired by a combination of Barbie and those
giant-headed Bratz dolls. Actually those dolls
look more normal and more human than the model."

It's obvious by now that Ralph Lauren *hates* being mocked. They hate being mocked so much that they ordered their attack lawyers to send letters trying to fool ISPs into pulling an "infringing" advertisement featuring a ridiculously skinny model (in fact, our posting of the image was fair use, not infringement; Ralph Lauren's takedown notices are bogus and they should know better).

It's also obvious that the photo of Filippa Hamilton used in the Ralph Lauren advertisement was digitally manipulated. But we still have three questions: 1) who, exactly, gave Ms. Hamilton the Olive Oyl physique? 2) If the photo was manipulated after it appeared in the advertisement, why didn't Ralph Lauren's law firm make mention of that in their silly DMCA takedown notice? and 3) Where's the original advertisement?

The tradition of accepting amicus briefs comes from a larger concept, the amicus curiae, or “friend of the court.” A friend of the court may be interested in a case for various reasons, although he or she is not directly involved. For example, a court might be preparing to try a case related to online file sharing, an issue of great concern to many people. An amicus brief might be filed to discuss the larger ramifications of potential case outcomes, since these ramifications might not be brought up by the prosecution or defense during the course of a trial.

( Read an Excerpt ).

( Read an Excerpt )

( Read an Excerpt )

HP the Musical was written and produced in early 2009 by a bunch of college kids/recent grads through a non-profit student-run theatre company. It was a free show that ran for three nights (five performances) and will never be done again... but luckily we taped it so everyone can get a chance to enjoy its magical silliness. The songs were written by Darren Criss (who plays Harry Potter) and AJ Holmes (who plays piano in the band). The script was written by Matt Lang (who also directed the show), Nick Lang (who assistant directed and made the dragon puppet) and Brian Holden (who was busy working at a real job while the rest of us were making a goofy play).
HP the Musical was a completely non-for-profit unofficial parody show made by Potter-fans for Potter-fans. All of us involved love the books immensely (and strongly encourage everyone to read them if you haven't) and it is with the utmost admiration that we celebrate and poke fun at them with this musical inspired by our very favorite stories.

saiphgrl

~~Willy at fourteen was a caring child, an absent-minded dreamer. That’s how it all began because he had been given the Book of Secrets with directions as to his initiation into Wizardry.

~~The great hall of Napoleon’s Castle revealed a dramatic scene. There were wizards everywhere. Willy gulped. There right across the hall just above their cone hats was a large white banner printed in giant letters, ‘IT IS FORBIDDEN TO CAST SPELLS WHILE YOU VISIT THIS CASTLE. THE PENALTY FOR THE THOUGHT...’
There were wizards of all races. Chinese, with massive Mandarin hats beautifully hand painted with peasant scenes. Black and brown wizards from the Ivory Coast and Delhi. Willy wondered. Until now he’d never realised the immensity of the Wizard brotherhood. He was frightened at the power it could muster.

~~Willy had been on Cloud 84 which was for Wizard Chess Players.
These were pullman-like trains made of see-through platinum, and inside the trains were chess rooms. Willie was handicapped 18. There were Wizard Chess Masters who were virtually unbeatable. Willie had made a daring move. He didn’t want to watch his opponent’s response and his mind wandered at the moment that Angel Sandy had tapped violently on the train window....

( More Quotes and Pictures Under the Cut... )

The allegations of plagiarism made today, Monday 15 June 2009, by the Estate of Adrian Jacobs are unfounded, unsubstantiated and untrue,"

"Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures," the estate statement said.

"It is alleged that all of these are concepts first created by Adrian Jacobs in Willy the Wizard, some 10 years before J.K. Rowling first published any of the Harry Potter novels and 13 years before Goblet of Fire was published."

According to the statement, Jacobs had sought the services of literary agent Christopher Little who later became Rowling's agent. Jacobs died "penniless" in a London hospice in 1997, it said.

He allegedly sent the manuscript to Christopher Little, the literary agent at Bloomsbury Publishing who went on to represent Miss Rowling, but it was rejected.
Instead his book was published by a smaller company under the title The Adventures Of Willy The Wizard No 1: Livid Land.

Mr Jacobs, who lost all his money in a stock market crash in 1991, died in 1997, so did not live to see the Harry Potter books' success.

But his estate - which includes his son and grandson - now claims Miss Rowling's fourth book, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, was plagiarised.

In both books, the boy wizard competes in a magic contest. The lawsuit also notes both have the boys trying to rescue human hostages held by half-human creatures from a bathroom. Shared references to a wizard train and a wizard prison are also part of the allegations.
Legal proceedings have been issued at the High Court against Bloomsbury, and the Jacobs estate also says it will file a lawsuit against Miss Rowling.

The estate is also seeking an injunction to prevent further sales of Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, and damages or a share in the book's profits.

My friend   bohemianspirit   showed me a developing story over on the Zenhabits blog.
 
It seems that the blogger, Leo Babauta, had used the phrase "Feel the fear but do it anyway" as the title of a post, and was then served with a Cease and Desist email from the attorneys of a writer who has that phrase trademarked as the title of a book. Unbelievable. He had never heard of her book, nor was he quoting her, but she wanted him to put a trademark symbol beside the words and a disclaimer that she was granting him "permission" under the title.
 
Zenhabits: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway or The Privatizaion of the English Language

bohemianspirit and I left comments over there. There are alot of comments, pro and con, but mostly in favor of the blogger.


UPDATE: Lots and Lots of bloggers are picking up this story. Techdirt even gave me credit for sending them the story - wow! I didn't expect that.

Techdirt: Using Trademark To 'Privatize The English Language' from the did-you-(R)-that? dept

Jeanne sent in news of yet another overly aggressive trademark claim, this time on a blogger who just so happened to use the phrase "feel the fear and do it anyway" in a blog post.

. . . trademark law is only supposed to apply to use in commerce, and it seems like a stretch to claim the blog post is use in commerce (though, since the blog has ads, the lawyers might disagree). However, the fact that the use of the phrase seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the book again raises questions about how this could possibly be considered confusing or dilutive of the mark. Either way, Barbauta makes a point we've been trying to make here for a long, long time...

Andrew writes: ...Susan Jeffers holds a federal trademark registration for “FEEL THE FEAR…AND DO IT ANYWAY.” She actually owns several registration for that precise trademark, for different goods and services.

The main trademark registration at question here is probably registration # 3338961 for these specified services: Education services, namely conducting seminars, workshops and training programs both in person and online, and the production of video and television programs in the field of psychology, spirituality, personal development and self improvement.

But the real question is: How did Leo use the trademark? He wrote a blog post that used the phrase “feel the fear and do it anyway” deep within the content.

Here’s the key: Leo didn’t use the phrase as a trademark. Susan Jeffers doesn’t own the exclusive right to “feel the fear…and do it anyway.” She just owns the right to use that phrase as a trademark on certain goods and services.

OK, I just found more stuff about AP that is mind-boggling.

I found this at  Bigsole Blogspot. It seems now that AP doesn't even want their own affiliates to embed their YouTube news videos, and sent out a cease and desist to a country music radio station here in Tennessee - WTNQ-FM who was posting their content on a website.
The man you see in this video is Christian Grantham a Nashville television producer. His own post about this topic is HERE. 

You cannot make this stuff up. Forget for a moment that WTNQ is itself an A.P. affiliate and that the A.P. shouldn’t be harassing its own members. Apparently, nobody told the A.P. executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the A.P. itself controls, and that someone at the A.P. decided that it is probably a good idea to turn on the video embedding function on so that its videos can spread virally across the Web, along with the ads in the videos.

lunas_ceiling

In a crackdown on Web piracy, the AP board of directors said they were launching a "newspaper industry initiative to protect news content from misappropriation online."

"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," AP chairman Dean Singleton said.

The AP statement said the news agency would work with Internet portals and other partners who legally license content "and would pursue legal and legislative actions against those who don't."

AP president Tom Curley said the news agency will develop "a rights management and tracking system" for text content and "new search pages that point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news."

The AP did not mention any particular websites in its copyright initiative but many US newspapers have openly criticised aggregators such as Google News, which links to their content without sharing advertising revenue.

It's not hard to see why AP is concerned now. According to its annual report (PDF), the combination of subscriber attrition and the lower fees they've had to adopt to keep that dwindling, cash-strapped client base on board "will result in a revenue decline not seen by the company since the Great Depression."

The Internet compounds the problem. The RIAA and MPAA can at least try—however ineffectively—to use copyright law to stanch unauthorized copying of their works. But what AP is selling isn't really the scintillating prose of its writers: it's fast access to the facts of breaking news. Now, though, a writer for any one of a million websites can read an AP story on the site of a subscribing news organization, write up their own paraphrase of the story, and have it posted—and drawing eyeballs from AP subscribers—within an hour of the original's going live.

From Duke University Libraries Blog

Falzone will talk about these cases and the importance of fair use for scholars and universities in a talk at Duke on MARCH 2, 2009 in the Schiciano Auditorium (Fitzpatrick CIEMAS engineering building) at 5 pm. He will emphasis that fair use is vital in higher education not only to prevent copyright from stifling scholarship but also to support free speech and academic freedom.

His lecture is entitled “From James Joyce To Harry Potter And John Lennon: The Impact Of Fair Use On Scholarship And Free Expression.” A reception will follow.

This event is open to the whole Duke community, but it is especially relevant for scholars and teachers who rely on fair use to create their own scholarship or to distribute scholarly works to students and colleagues, as well as to those interested in the role of free speech in the academy.

...Falzone’s lecture will be repeated at UNC Chapel Hill on March 3 at 5:30 pm in the Wilson Library. These events are jointly sponsored by UNC University Library, Duke University Libraries, UNC’s Center for Media Law and Policy, and Triangle Research Libraries Network.

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney

( Read more... )


So what are the lessons to be learned here? Many media companies want to assert their copyright privileges beyond legal limits - not for petty cash, but for petty power. They aim to establish the precedent that they are in control, regardless of their legal standing. I’d guess the last thing ABC-Disney would want is to sue me or OUP over the frame grabs, as a loss in court would firmly establish the limits of their claims (and an unlikely win would yield little in revenue anyway). What they really want is bully power, the ability to make outsiders assume that rights holders also hold all the power. Unfortunately because the book was already in press, we had to yield - if we were able to, both my editor and I wanted to swap out the cover Lost image to avoid having to pay for the frame grabs that we had the right to use, thereby implying that fair use did not apply.

Lawyers for Fairey acknowledged that the artist used the photograph. But they said he transformed the literal depiction into a "stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that creates powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message."

AP spokesman Paul Colford said the company would have no immediate comment until its lawyers reviewed the lawsuit. The AP had said in a statement last week that it was in discussions with Fairey's attorney and hoped for an amicable solution.

The AP has not taken legal action against Fairley. But the lawsuit noted that the AP had threatened twice to sue Fairey, possibly as early as Tuesday, and that it considered all works that incorporate the imagery of the "Obama Hope" poster to be infringements of its copyrights.

Take, for example, an influential 2006 decision vindicating Jeff Koons. A fashion photographer named Andrea Blanch sued Koons for using a picture of hers in one of his paintings without paying her. Koons had scanned her photograph, which she had taken for a Gucci ad, and cut and pasted it into a digital composition he then painted. The federal appeals court said that Koons didn't need to pay Blanch to do what he did, because of how thoroughly Koons had transformed the photograph.

How the AP can argue that use of this picture hasn't been transformed by Fairey to offer "new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings" is beyond comprehension. Perhaps they are feeling the pinch of newspapers abandoning their product -- they've been dropped by Dow Jones, Tribune, NY Daily News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Spokane Spokesman-Review, while newspapers in New York and Ohio have banded together to create competing networks to rid themselves of the AP blight.

Throw in the newspapers that are simply going out of business, and apparently the AP's new business model is to legally intimidate artists basing their artwork at least partly on AP images. Like going after small bloggers for blockquoting material from their news stories, It's morally bankrupt, legally questionable (at best), and a direct assault on the very notion of intellectual property fair use. The day the AP finally shutters its doors can't come soon enough.

( Read more... )

lunas_ceiling

( Read more... )

It might be nice if the Potter Puppet Pals did a reenactment of the case with Snape as SVA, Hermione as Jo, Fudge as RDR, McGonagall as Dale Cendali, Lucius Malfoy as Falzone/Hammer, and Dumbledore as Judge Patterson. "What's that ticking sound? Oh, it's a Cease & Desist letter. Just ignore it and it'll go away." *BOOM*

Expelled is Absolved :  ...so the film goes out on DVD on October 21 in censored form, illustrating the damage that even an unproved and unsupported infringement claim can do. At the same time, the result here -- great but imperfect -- is a fantastic lesson in how we might start to solve the fair use dilemma.

If a film with Hollywood producers has trouble using media clips, what hope does an average citizen have of using something without worrying about huge legal expenses that could result? . . . Legal protection is nothing but words on paper if the de facto law is that whoever has the most money decides what constitutes fair use.

clair_de_lalune

Court Frees Indian Film from Harry Potter Spell

By Vipul Tripathi

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - An Indian court has cleared a Bollywood film accused of plagiarising the "Harry Potter" brand, saying viewers would not confuse the international film and book series with "Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors."

Dismissing the plea against the Hindi-language film, Delhi High Court said Warner Bros., which owns the rights to Harry Potter movies, had made "belated attempt to trip up" the film.

"Viewed from any angle, the plaintiffs have failed to establish a prima facie case for the grant of an ad interim injunction," Justice Reva Khetrapal said in an order on Monday obtained by Reuters.

. . . "Justice Reva Khetrapal said the class of viewers was such that they would not get confused with the title of the film," Pratibha Singh, the defence counsel, told Reuters.

"A Hindi-speaking, rural child would not have heard of Harry Potter, while the English-speaking, urban viewer would be so well versed with Harry Potter that there would be no reason for them to be confused," Singh quoted the judge as saying.

( Read more... )

( Read An Excerpt Under the Cut... )

( Read An Excerpt Here . . .  )

Praetorianguard: HAI, JUDGE PATTERSON!

Derek Bambauer: Rowling 1, Lexicon 0

Foresthouse: Conclusions of Law
&
Foresthouse: Harry Potter ~ One More Thing

Dustbunny105: Go, JKR!

Liz B.: Top Eight Things To Know About the Lexicon Ruling

Quidawn: Aaah, The Sweet Taste of Justice Like Chocolate!

( Links to Articles and Quotes from Steve Under Here )