Subject: Habeas and spam

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2003 08:52:57 -0700

IANAL but I don't take the fact that habeas was founded by a lawyer to
indicate that their idea of copyright law is necessarily enforceable.
Lawyers are notoriously bad judges of their own cases. The guy running
EMarkettingAmerica thinks he can file a case on behalf of unspecified
plaintifs...

The copyright and trademark claims arround the Haiku are a stretch because
Habeas are trying to use one IP regime to achieve the object of another -
patent law. There is case law in the video games area that indicates you
can't use a copyright or trademark claim to make an access control system
closed.

But there is a pretty good argument that unauthorized use of the statement
'approved by Habeas' or similar is a mark. That is like a restaurant
claiming to have three Egon Ronay stars when it does not have any, it is a
pretty clear trademark case.

The Haiku thing might work and is pretty costless, but overall I doubt that
it is necessary.

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From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2003 00:41:07 +0200

Phillip writes:

> IANAL but I don't take the fact that habeas was founded
> by a lawyer to indicate that their idea of copyright law
> is necessarily enforceable.

Agreed.  Probably 95% of all corporations are founded by lawyers.  That
doesn't mean that they'll always win in court, or even that they have sound
business ideas.

> But there is a pretty good argument that unauthorized
> use of the statement 'approved by Habeas' or similar
> is a mark.

It would have to demonstrably lead to confusion in the eyes of consumers or
dilute the value of the mark.  Since this mark would not even be visible to
consumers, it's hard to see how that could be argued in this case.