Mike Madison has an excellent post on free riding, over at Madisonian.

Check it out …

Today’s NYT has the story on a dust-up between Rebecca Charles, owner of the Pearl Oyster Bar, and erstwhile Pearl sous-chef Ed McFarland’s Ed’s Lobster Bar.

A bit of the story …

In recent years, a handful of chefs and restaurateurs have invoked intellectual property concepts, including trademarks, patents and trade dress — the distinctive look and feel of a business — to defend their restaurants, their techniques and even their recipes, but most have stopped short of a courtroom. The Pearl Oyster Bar suit may be the most aggressive use of those concepts by the owner of a small restaurant. Some legal experts believe the number of cases will grow as chefs begin to think more like chief executives.

Lord help us. Isn’t the opportunity cost of such litigation awfully high, for a restaurant business where the owner’s attention to things like new recipes is key?

Of course, Mike Madison and Frank Pasquale offer sharp commentary.

UPDATE: And Tim Lee quotes Tom Lee.

EFF has soundly drubbed Barney’s lawyers, achieving a favorable settlement.

I blogged about EFF’s suit against Barney’s harassing lawyers and their overreaching i.p. claims back in August. From my earlier post:

c|net news reports on a new suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to stop the Barney lawyers from sending more baseless, threatening letters to a parody website. From the story:

EFF and the Akin Gump law firm are representing Stuart Frankel, who maintains the “Source of All Evil” site with a rendering of a vaguely Satanic cartoon tyrannosaur. Frankel writes: “The Barney Creature is a voracious, bottomless pit. All who oppose it with ridicule must be destroyed.”

Matthew Carlin, an associate at the New York firm of Gibney Anthony and Flaherty, sent at least four threatening e-mail messages to Frankel starting in February 2002. Each demands the removal of the Barney pages and threatens immediate legal action unless the pages are deleted.

EFF has its own web page devoted to the suit. If you want to see a copy of the complaint, you can get it there.

And now c|net reports that EFF has won:

Lawyers for the plush children’s icon have agreed to pay $5,000 to settle a federal lawsuit filed against them in August by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was defending an anti-Barney Web site called the “Source of All Evil.”

The settlement, announced on Tuesday, caps a five-year campaign by the New York firm of Gibney, Anthony and Flaherty to rid the Internet of unflattering images of its plump saurian client.

Read the whole thing. And the documents, including the settlement, are at EFF’s webpage on the case.

UPDATE: The L.A. Times has also covered the settlement.

In late May, I wrote a post about Major League Baseball’s “right of publicity” claim against CDMsports.com, a fantasy baseball website. Yesterday, ruling on cross-motions for summary judgment, the U.S. magistrate judge in the case rejected Major League Baseball’s publicity right claim. You can download a pdf copy of the court’s 49-page opinion here, from the CDMsports.com site.

[ UPDATE: Here's the USA Today story on the ruling. ]

[ UPDATE 2: Here's Howard Bashman's roundup of links at How Appealing. ]

[ UPDATE 3: AP reports that MLB plans to appeal.  Hat tip to How Appealing. ]

I have lengthy quotations from the opinion below the fold.

(more…)

About a week ago, the New York Times ran a story about the ongoing right-of-publicity lawsuit between Major League Baseball and CBC Distribution & Marketing Inc.’s CDMsports.com. (You can read the complaint here, courtesy of Hearsay.com.) The story caught Frank Pasquale’s eye, and he posted about it at PrawfsBlawg; ditto for Kaimi Wenger at Concurring Opinions.

Both Frank and Kaimi expressed some dismay at Major League Baseball’s right of publicity claim against CDMsports, a fantasy baseball service website. Frank, riffing on MLB, called Baseball’s demand for royalties for the use of named palyers’ statistics “Misusing Law Brazenly,” as well as “bizarre” and “astonishing[].” Kaimi, for his part, links the fantasy baseball story to Kevin Kelly’s meditation on the universal library, to which I’ve linked previously. Like Frank, I reacted to the story with deep skepticism about the strength of MLB’s royalty claim. Not knowing that much about right of publicity law, however, I thought I would investigate a bit. It turns out that MLB’s claim appears to have some merit in the expansive doctrine that the right of publicity has become. So much the worse for the right of publicity.

Could this dispute be a reductio ad absurdum that prompts the courts to prune back the right of publicity? More after the jump. (more…)