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Thursday, June 19, 2003
TRADEMARK FRINGEMENT.
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When I was in law school, one of the rules I learned is that you can never copyright, trademark, or otherwise protect a font. You can protect your individual logo, but if I want to copy the font you used to create your logo to make a different logo, I can and you can't stop me. This was really drilled into our heads-- no matter what you can't protect a font.
But at the same time, some trademarks consist only of individual letters. If you can't protect a whole font, how can you protect just one letter? Or, if you can protect one letter, why can't you protect 26 letters?
So, I wondered, what if you made a font, and every letter in the font individually infringed on someone's trademark? For example, the M is the big yellow golden arches from McDonalds; the K is the big red K from K-Mart; the C is the stylized C with a long squiggly underline from Coca-Cola; and so on.
Apparently artist Heidi Cody created this art installation, along these same lines, though probably not while thinking about this interesting intersection of conflicting legal rules. Of course, an art installation would probably be fair use, even if it did incorporate someone else's trademarks. But suppose you turned that into a font, and used it to make your own corporate logo or what have you? I just don't know the answer, and I don't think anybody does.
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2003/06/trademark-fringement.html
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