With the assistance of Georgetown's Institute for Public Representation, I sued ICE to get it to answer some questions about why its representative claimed that "X sucks" merchandise would infringe X's trademark rights, at least where X is a sports team. ICE has made three productions so far, and it's basically a lot of blurry pictures and heavily redacted guides produced by sports teams/apparel companies. Assuming that the sample I have is at all representative, it seems to me that ICE does seize a lot of plain counterfeits, but it can also seize more questionably. Is this design on a shirt likely to cause confusion about source?
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| Blunt Blowin' Bull with bloodshot eyes and marijuana |
Certainly, many of the photos showed counterfeits, including counterfeit tags claiming to be genuine NFL etc. merchandise. With the caveat that the organization of the production makes start/endpoints for different seizures difficult to determine, there was one seizure centering on Seattle Seahawks merchandise that didn't follow this pattern. There didn't seem to be counterfeit tags--ICE didn't produce photos of tags for this seizure, and their practice is apparently to photograph tags when they might be counterfeits. Some of this merchandise bore Seahawks logos alone; others involved Seahawks-related images, or a logo plus other positive/fannish commentary. Many of those shirt didn't look particularly official to me; they might make good examples for discussion of trademark as a pure merchandising right, which ICE is helping to protect.
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| Superman/Seahawks |
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| Seahawks with list |
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| Match-up with both teams' logos |
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| Go Hawks Re-Pete |
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| I have no idea what's going on here; suggestions very welcome |
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| Why not us? |
Based on a quick Google Images search, it looks like there's a whole genre of sexy-Marilyn-Monroe-wearing-your-team's-jersey (or whatever... in the b/w image you got, she's also wearing 49ers underpants).
ReplyDeletehttps://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=marilyn%20monroe%2049ers&tbs=imgo:1