Trademark and copyright battles

Trademark tales: Yeezy & Walmart

Yeezy, LLC is suing Walmart for its take on the hot commodity, Yeezy Foam Runner. Yeezy sued Walmart and third party sellers for its production of copycat foam runners. They sued on grounds of unfair competition. Allegedly Walmart is trading on Yeezy's successful brand and representation. Upon further discovery on Walmart.com you can view that the Yeezy counterfeit footwear included references to Kanye west line in a description below the product. Walmart collaborates with celebrities for the production of goods and services. Walmart also filed an opposition in which they claim they will be damaged by Yeezy's registration of a new logo.

Logo Battle: Yeezy and Walmart

To the right is Walmarts trademark and standard logo. Yeezy is trying to register what they call 3 dotted lines meeting in the center. While Walmart is described as, “a design of six rays symmetrically centered around a circle to resemble a spark." There is no infringing activity on the logo's end. The Walmart logo isn't distinctive. It doesn't take on a secondary meaning. The Arches for McDonald's or the faces of KFC and Wendy's.Yeezy's logo has lines meeting at a middle point, yes.These lines are dotted and not colored and there are 8 lines not 6. The yeezy logo isn't Vicarious to Walmart or its customers and its not contributory in any defaming way. While the logos side by side are similar Yeezy used transformative use, which is justified as fair use.

Google Fined for 500 million Euros

Frances competition authority said that it breached an agreement in which google agreed to negotiate fair deals in good faith. Google was allowed to utilize French publishers for their content, called news showcases. The competition agency in France took much issue with this as it didn't discuss remuneration for current uses of content covered by the press. France was the first country to adopt contentious new EU copyright laws aimed at giving news organizations more protections.

Article 13 EU copyright law

Rights-holder's can flag copyright violations with tech firms. they can then take action and pull any content they deem as copyrighted material. Services like google have to be particular about how they go about publishing news articles. Tech firms need to agree to licenses with publishers.

Using the 4 elements we talked about in class the ownership of the stories google is trying to break the news about is not owned by them. Its unauthorized usage of copyrighted material. The trademark dilution act of 1995 would apply here but we are in foreign countries, dealing with their laws and principles. France is the first country to adopt these laws and thats why Google finds themselves in a tough position. Duplicate, distribute, derive, and finally display or perform. Most news publications can be duplicated, distributed and derived to finally display, but France illudes to the fact that its works must be individually paid for publication and not reused without permission.