What’s the purpose of their saying, “The name will be registered in book form in the US Copyright office?” Is it not to deceive people into thinking something that isn’t true?
Comedy gold! Brilliant!
Seeing how state attorney generals have successfully gone after International Library of Poetry and other poetry vanity scams, I see no reason why the name a-star-scam couldn’t be next. It’s probably lack of complaints. Buyers seem more or less satisfied.
And FWIW, even some small-town planetariums do name-a-star for fundraising. But they clue the donors in to the fact that it’s just a game of sorts.
UnuMondo
They may be trying to get you to believe something as long as you don’t think too hard about it but if you have a prblem with this then you have a problem with the vast majority of advertising out there. What does “100% Real Orange Juice” mean to you. If you think it actually has to be 100% juice of the orange fruit in it and nothong else you’d be wrong. I am not even sure it has to have any actual juice of the orange fruit in it at all.
Certainly the ISR wants you to think you are getting something at least slightly cool instead of a worthless piece of paper and they spin their rhetoric to enable sales. In the end though they aren’t actually lying about anything and it is the buyer’s fault if they purchase something so useless.
According to the article in the second of drewbert’s links, at least one state’s attorney general has investigated International Star Registry and cleared them. ISR may have removed any lingering confusion in their fine print since they were cited by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs in 1998.
Note that the above quote comes from an article written close to three years ago. I don’t know what the current legal situation is.
It was also discussed here. Scroll down to where yales announces he/she will take bids to rename buildings for those willing to pay for it. Funny stuff.
If that were literally what they represented, I’m with Bricker. I don’t think even this weaselly statement is really non-deceptive (and I have the feeling, as others have mentioned, that these same bad actors have in the past made significantly more grandiose claims that more clearly passed the line separating free speech and fraud).
Specifically, I don’t know that Granny’s name is a “creative work” such as can be copyrighted – nor that the name, per se and in itself, is truly “registered in book form with the Copyright Office.” Rather I think it’s the arbitrary compilation of many names presented by the ISR that is “registered.” So, ISR has a (worthless) copyright registration in a worthless compilation, but I don’t think any individual namer in the compilation (or the respective names therein) has any registration in and of itself (and, if he went to the LOC, would not have any ability to search the card catalogs for “his” registration). Cf. if McDonald’s represented that they had “registered the color golden with the U.S. Trademark Office in design form” as opposed to making clear they’d registered a composite design of specifically-shaped arches including the color gold. N.B. too that mischaracterizing the scope or nature of federal intellectual property registrations or rights potentially opens one up to sanctions for patent/trademark/copyright misuse.
In sum, while I do believe caveat emptor and common sense generally ought to prevail, if the FTC or a State A.G. decided to go after ISR, I don’t think it would be more far-fetched as a matter of fraud/deceptive trade practice enforcement than many other busts or consent decrees. Of course, [slight hijack] figuring out what the FTC’s priorities and thought process are isn’t easy. Until recently, supine FTC officials would just shrug their shoulders ruefully about spam complaints and note that there was no law against it – when it seems to me that any first year law student could formulate a fairly good argument that electronic communications containing forged headers and unsubscribe information, and making false medical claims, might just constitute wire fraud, etc.[/slight hijack]