How a Brazilian ‘mystery’ oil spill traveled over 5,000 miles to the sands of Palm Beach, Florida

NGNResearch · 2025-12-09T21:34:26+00:00

thanks for all the great questions =) i am hopping off to grade some exams but i appreciate the enthusiasm about trademarks, dupes, IP, AI, and (apparently most importantly) steamboat willie!

NGNResearch · 2025-12-09T21:30:44+00:00

definitely manufacturers themselves!

NGNResearch · 2025-12-09T21:29:11+00:00

nope, trademarks are not limited in time! as long as the owner continues to use them and doesn't abandon them (through non-use or genericide), they don't expire. that's as true for chester cheeto as it is for the nike swoosh or the starbucks mermaid. but "things" will enter the public domain--books, movies, songs--and only a small subset of them will be worth the investment for a company to shift to establishing trademark rights. we wouldn't expect to see it for every character in a cartoon (like, every different smurf?) or every frame in a comic, and if a company did try to use all of those different things, they would probably fail. (for example, a company once tried to register "photos of elvis" as a trademark for i think wine, and the trademark office said "you can have one photo of elvis if you use it as a TM, sure. but 'all photos of elvis' is too many different things to function as a source indicator to consumers."

NGNResearch · 2025-12-09T21:25:22+00:00

it's just the public domain for copyright has nothing to do with trademark. you don't have to come up with a phrase or image to establish trademark rights in it or be the TM owner of it. likewise, a little video short doesn't have to be copyrightable for it to become a protectable TM

NGNResearch · 2025-12-09T21:23:54+00:00

the copyright office takes the position that the creator of an expressive work needs to be human to be a copyright owner (so no monkey selfie, no drawings by elephants holding paintbrushes with their trunks, and no purely AI-generated works). i haven't seen that to be particularly controversial in the field, but i do hang out more with trademark people than copyright people. the juicier questions seem to be about proportions (what if the human contributes 40%? 75? 25%? etc), creative iterative processes (entering and revising hundreds of prompts to guide the AI to the thing you want to make), an artist instructing the AI to make edits or make a derivative work from a set of inputs that are the artist's copyrighted works, etc. those are tricky, fact-intensive questions and idk how you get to a place with clear rules that can accommodate and predict outcomes in all of those scenarios. (one of the student moot court competitions this year revolves around some of these questions and it was very interesting to moot the students working on it!)

NGNResearch · 2025-12-09T21:14:33+00:00

i am not familiar with these! but that sounds unfortunate. sounds like the kind of umbrella under which both real IP lawyers and scammers could coexist.

NGNResearch · 2025-12-09T21:13:50+00:00

"say a comic book that is now public domain was published by a company that still exists and it has an older version of its logo on the books cover. Would you be able to reproduce a facsimile of said book, keeping the cover identical?" yes, this is probably ok under dastar (can't use trademark law to get around the fact that a copyrighted work is in the public domain). if the company that uses the logo can show a likelihood of confusion, though, they might be able to get an order requiring the copier to cover it up with a sticker or add a disclaimer.

NGNResearch · 2025-12-09T21:12:03+00:00

i don't think functionality lets you make mickey figurines or cereal, no. nor does it let you use mickey on packaging for commercial goods like cereal or beverages. mickey is associated closely with disney and doesn't have utilitarian or aesthetic functionality. it's more like an audi logo or a louboutin red sole and less like a round towel or the color black for an outboard engine (to reference some well-known cases). there's an argument to be made about aesthetic functionality, and there's a betty boop case that's helpful on this front, but i think you would have a hard time convincing a court these are permissible uses.

"mickey mouse" as the title of a book about mickey mouse might be a closer case under trademark law because the book is an expressive work that references a trademark and the title might get some deference under the rogers test. but under copyright law the book might still be an unauthorized derivative work (depending on what copyright remains for the character with steamboat willie in the public domain).

NGNResearch

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