Chicago Field Museum Decides To Embrace Cross-Promotion Instead Of Trademark Protectionism With Brewery
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When it comes to trademark issues, we tend to keep our pages filled with stories about disputes, bullying, and over-protectionism. While we try to highlight good-actors on matters of trademark, those stories are too few and far between for our tastes. With that in mind, why not start off the new year with one such example?Toppling Goliath is a brewery in Iowa with a number of regular and seasonal beers. One of those is PseudoSue, an ale with a label that features a roaring Tyrannosaurus rex. Anyone from the Chicago area is likely already thinking of our beloved Field Museum and the enormous T. rex fossil skeleton of Sue, who the museum tends to dress up like some kind of prehistoric barbie doll whenever one of our local sports teams has themselves a particularly good season. The museum has a trademark registration for Sue that covers all kinds of mechandise and initially reacted as readers of this site will have come to expect.“Initially the Field Museum was very hard line about” wanting to protect their trademark of the name Sue used with the image of a T. Rex, said Martha Engel, an intellectual property attorney who represents Toppling Goliath. But, instead, the stance of those at the museum -- ahem -- evolved into one more cooperative with the brewery. Rather than going the protectionist route, both parties talked through a more amicable solution: a full-blown partnership to benefit both sides.But, ultimately, the brewery owners and the marketing executives at the museum got together and decided to create a cross-promotion scheme rather than launch a legal fight.“It became obvious that we could work well together,” Clark Lewey, a co-owner of the brewery, said. As part of the deal, Toppling Goliath will print new labels for PseudoSue and another beer called King Sue that promote the Field Museum and Sue, the T. Rex. This example set by a brewery and a museum ought to serve as the antidote to the poison that is the most common excuse for trademark bullies: trademarks must be protected jealously or they will be lost. As this story shows, that isn't remotely true. Nor, by the way, is such protectionism the most optimal route for the trademark holder. By partnering with the brewery, the museum gets the promotion through the beer label and name. It also gets a nice PR story, along with an exclusive untapping of a beer within the Chicago market.And all without the billable hours charged by the museum's attorneys.
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posted at: 12:02am on 05-Jan-2017
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Facebook Censors Art Historian's Photo Of Neptune's Statue-Penis
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It's probably time for Facebook to give up trying to be the morality police, because it isn't working. While nobody expects the social media giant to be perfect at policing its site for images and posts deemed "offensive", it's shown itself time and time again to be utterly incapable of getting this right at even the most basic level. After all, when the censors are removing iconic historical photos, tirades against prejudice, forms of pure parody, and images of a nude bronze statue in the name of some kind of corporate puritanism, it should be clear that something is amiss.Yet the armies of the absurd march on, it seems. Facebook managed to kick off the new year by demanding that an Italian art historian remove an image of a penis from her Facebook page. Not just any penis, mind you. It was a picture of a godly penis. Specifically, this godly penis.
That, should you not be an Italian art historian yourself, is a picture of a statue of the god Neptune. In the statue, which adorns the public streets of Bologna, Neptune is depicted with his heavenly member hanging out, because gods have no time for clothes, of course. Yet this carved piece of art somehow triggered a Facebook notice to the photographer, Elisa Barbari.According to the Telegraph, Barbari got the following notification from Facebook. “The use of the image was not approved because it violates Facebook’s guide lines on advertising. It presents an image with content that is explicitly sexual and which shows to an excessive degree the body, concentrating unnecessarily on body parts. The use of images or video of nude bodies or plunging necklines is not allowed, even if the use is for artistic or educational reasons.” Even were I to be on board with a Facebook policy banning nudity and, sigh, "plunging necklines" even in the interest of education or art -- which I most certainly am not on board with -- the claim that the image is explicitly sexual and focused on "body parts" is laughably insane. There's nothing sexual about the depiction of Neptune at all, unless we are to believe that all nudity is sexual, which simply isn't true. Also, the depiction focuses not on one body part, but on the entire statue. Nothing about this makes sense.And that's likely because Facebook is relying on some kind of algorithm to automatically generate these notices. Confusingly, the site's own community standards page makes an exception for art, despite the notice Barbari received claiming otherwise.Strangely, an exception is made for art. “We also allow photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures.” Except when it doesn't, that is. Look, again, nobody is expecting Facebook to be perfect at this. But the site has a responsibility, if it is going to play censor at all, to at least be good enough at it not to censor statues of art in the name of prohibiting too much skin.
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