Discourse Chronicle

Marvel and DC have been claiming and attempting to enforce this “trademark” for many years. According to this link (one of several) from the US Patent and Trademark Office’s “Trademark Application and Registration Retrieval system,” Marvel & DC claim a “First Use in Commerce Date” of October 1966. Most knowledgeable folks aggree that this claim […]

category: Comics, Politics, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

“Data transmission is within our field of use. That’s what [the 1991 trademark agreement] says and it is inescapable,” said Anthony Grabiner, according to The Associated Press. No “reasonable person,” he said, would assume that Apple Computer had created or owned the 3.5 million songs on its hugely successful iTunes music store. Apple Corps’ lawyer […]

category: Popular Culture, Technology    

Apple Corps’ four owners, Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison (wives of the late John Lennon and George Harrison) want Jobs to break the link between the Apple brand and music products of Apple Computer (nyse: AAPL – news – people ) and fork out millions of dollars in damages. The […]

category: Popular Culture, Technology    

Red Mage: All it required was a cocktail of dangerous, experimental surgery and a willingness to ignore the unnecessary suffering of perfectly innocent beings! [Hilarious and wrong on so many levels, not only because it conjures up Frankenstein’s monster and Victor Frankenstein (although those are on my mind right now). The two other things coming […]

category: Comics, Humor, Popular Culture    

The soul singer has voiced the Chef character in South Park since 1997, but left recently because of what he allegedly called the animated show’s religious “intolerance and bigotry”. Founders Matt Stone and Trey Parker said that Hayes, a Scientologist, was angry that South Park mocked the religion in an episode last November. Hayes did […]

category: Popular Culture, Technology, Television    

Salisbury also uses “Birth of a Nation,” a comic-book novel by Aaron McGruder, creator of the popular cartoon strip “Boondocks.” And she’s not the only professor outside the art department assigning comics. An English 105 class this semester was required to read “Watchmen” — a dystopian comic about superheroes who are outlawed by presidential order […]

category: Comics, Literacy, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

Wha be tha blake prevy lawe That bene wantoun too alle tha feres? SHAFT! Ya damne righte! Wha be tha carl tha riske is hals wolt Fro is allye leve? SHAFT! Konne ye? Wha be tha carl wha wolden flee Whan peril bene all aboughte? SHAFT! Verray! Alle clepe tha carl ane badde mooder-swyver SOFTE! […]

category: Humor, Popular Culture    

In a written statement handed to the court Monday, Rayner James said Brown copied from “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” but acknowledged he may have done so “unwittingly because of the research materials supplied by Blythe Brown.” “His evidence should be approached with deep suspicion,” the lawyer said. “He had almost no recollection […]

category: Popular Culture    

Random House lawyers argue that the ideas in dispute are so general that they are not protected by copyright. They also say many of the ideas in “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” do not feature in Brown’s novel, which follows fictional professor Robert Langdon as he investigates the murder of an elderly member […]

category: Popular Culture    

Page after page, the comic goes through examples of producers who’ve found themselves in difficult circumstances because they allowed themselves to get pushed around by big-media lawyers – even when their use of someone else’s content is justifiably fair use. It’s intended to give producers confidence when it comes to using someone’s content in a […]

category: Popular Culture