Media Tech Law – Page 16 – MIRSKY & COMPANY, PLLC

Who owns advertising data?

Posted August 23, 2009 by Andrew Mirsky 0

First, what data? This comes up in various contexts. First example: an agency contracts with an ad campaign client for marketing, issue advocacy, corporate branding, what have you. It used to be that creative was a “work for hire” (or assumed to be) owned by the advertising client. With some sort of understanding that the client wouldn’t end-run the agency.

In other words, expectations were governed by historical industry practice. Copyright and contract law didn’t play much a part.

But what about campaign performance? What about reports and research and metrics and all the “data” compiled by the agency to make its case? Forrester and Gartner Group and Corporate Executive Board and their ilk have been selling research reports for years on these sorts of things, but agencies typically didn’t bother with industry best practices-type studies or reports. Work was done for clients, and work product was owned by the clients (or again, was assumed to be).

Fair Use and the Collapse of Web Advertising

Posted August 17, 2009 by Andrew Mirsky 0

If the thinking behind a liberal approach to web content sharing is driving traffic back to your original content source, what happens when the benefits of doing exactly that – i.e. bumping up traffic for potential advertisers – fails to generate the hoped-for commercial return?

Like all advertising, web advertising has always been somewhat more art than science (yet), for better or worse, with accompanying difficulties in translating eyeballs into advertising revenue metrics. Comes now the collapse of the web advertising market. What then becomes of the willingness to go along with liberal content “scraping”, excerpting and other copying under “fair use” arguments?

Brian Stelter probed this very question in the NY Times recently. Stelter interviews, among others, Henry Blodget of Alley Insider and Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, whose publications are among the most aggressive and overt in the practice of integrating others’ content into their writings. Ms. Huffington states, honestly, that “we excerpt to add value”, which is probably a fair statement, except that Stelter also notes that these sites “highlight [] what they deem to be the most meaningful parts of newspaper articles and TV segments.”

Can you trademark a domain name?

Posted August 5, 2009 by Andrew Mirsky 0

Can you trademark a domain name? Amazon.com is a registered US trademark of the company by the same name, including not just the word “Amazon”; but also the dot com. There are numerous examples of this, although they have in common the brand value of the name inclusive of the dot com appendage.

How many businesses can say this, really? More commonly, a web domain reflects the name of the business or the brand or the celebrity (or whatever), and the “.com” is simply a location finder on the internet. So, for example, “ExxonMobil.com” is not registered as a trademark. Nor is Apple.com, even though the brands without the .com are.

The issue is a question of what name you’re trying to protect. Cybersquatting laws (and some famous cases) prevent certain well-wishers from staking claim to web domains of trademarked terms such as “McDonalds.com” and “Walmart.com”.