product placement and brand names

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Some time ago Cecil answered a question regarding “trade names that become generic,” to which my question is an addition of sorts. http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/meponym.html

One of the givens of the modern entertainment industry is ‘product placement,’ whereby a company will pay a producer to have its goods shown prominently in a movie or a TV show. What i would like to know is to what extent a company can prevent its trademarked product from being placed in a movie (or other cultural production such as a book, play, etc.) if it does not like the way in which the product is displayed or the context in which it is shown. It just seems to me that if corporations spend millions and annoy the crap out of everyone in order to have their brand names become part of the public sphere, they should be willing to suffer the potential downside of such exposure. Also, someone recently told me that universities like Harvard are brand names, just like Coke; to what extent is this true, and do the same rules apply?

Michael, Baltimore Md.

[Edited by bibliophage on 08-22-2001 at 10:56 AM]

2

It is true for academic institutions, where officially licensed merchandise is big business. The rules, at least in the US, are the same for any commercial copywrite. Look at a college t-shirt. Somewhere you’ll likely find a copywrite insignia.

3

Welcome to the SDMB, mhendo. Since this is a comment on a Staff Report, I’ll move it to the appropriate forum.

By the way, I fixed your hyperlink by removing the parentheses. You need to leave a blank space on either side of the URL for it to work in vBulletin.

bibliophage
moderator, GQ

4

Or not, as these are some of the most heavily counterfeited items of clothing in the US.
[nitpick]
It’s copyright, as in the right to control who makes a copy of your work. Sorry, but this one gets me as bad as “the right to bare arms”.
[/nitpick]