A late Feb. 2012 article for the DIY Musician site How to Legally Use a Famous Icon (like the Hollywood sign) in Your Album Artwork or Music Video" mentions the following:
An example of how using famous signs/landmarks/buildings does makes sense is a page called “What does a trademark have to do with the public domain?” on the Public Domain Sherpa site. The article says that you could freely take a photo of New York Life building, but using it to sell insurance would mean you will soon here from the lawyers.
-Point of this thread: Unless you were to use the Hollywood Sign in a situation similar to the above example, I don’t understand the justification for it being trademarked. If anything, I think most people will ID with the movie industry or that part of L.A. itself and not any particular goods/services.
Various Hollywood facts:
-the name “Hollywood” was registered to be a town in Aug. 1886* by Harvey Wilcox and his 2nd wife, Daeida. So, they are the founders of the town in its modern form. H.J. Whitley was the main architect of the town and thus is sometimes called the Father of Hollywood.
This is similar to parenting: the Wilcoxes were the “birth parents” whereas H.J. and his wife, Margaret Virginia Whitley, were the parents that “raised” Hollywood.
-Whereas many places say that it was registered on 2/1/1887, that doesn’t seem to be true. In an e-mail exchange between 11/17/2016-1/3/2017 with Gaelyn Whitley Keith (author of The Father of Hollywood, which is about her great-grandfather), she told me the best place to look for the registration is through Los Angeles County Recorder’s Office. Often people will show this this 1887 map but Gaelyn said in that exchange that this map was made by a banker.
For those that choose to read her book (the 2010 edition), much of her info was taken from sources like family journals/diaries and business correspondences, so there is some bias…
I don’t understand why you’re including “various Hollywood facts” about the place called Hollywood when your thread is about the trademark status on the sign.
Haven’t you ever gone into any of those tourist trinket shops on Hollywood Boulevard? They’re selling all kinds of crap with the Hollywood sign on it–key chains, pens, shot glasses, whatever–at ridiculously high prices. It’s a big industry, and of course the Chamber of Commerce wants to get a cut of that. In order to do so, they need to maintain the trademark.
Reading the credits at the end of La La Land, I learned that the city of Paris seems to control the rights to show the Eiffel Tower in a movie. That rather surprised me, though I guess I can see the legal theory at work.
Ref the snip above, you seem to misunderstand something pretty fundamental. Something is either trademarked or it is not. Something cannot be trademarked in one situation but not in another.
So the sign *is *trademarked, period. The owner of that trademark *is *the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, period. How they came to be the trademark owner *is *immaterial, period.
Now there are specific protected circumstances under which a trademarked item can be used by others without license or payment of royalties. Absent those specific circumstances, the law requires you obtain a license to use somebody else’s trademark.
But … to the degree the trademark owner gets lax about enforcing against uses that should get a license but didn’t, the trademark owner runs the risk of destroying their trademark. As a result, they have a strong incentive to err on the side of over-enforcement rather than under-enforcement of their rights.
So given all this background: what are you really trying to say? Are you explaining, complaining, or agitating for a change?
They definitely can; most trademarks lay out specific ways in which they can be used. “Apple,” for example, is also a trademark of an auto dealership in Pennsylvania. They can’t sell or manufacture computers, but can still trademark the name as a car dealer.
You misunderstood what I meant. I agree completely that two entities in different scopes can both hold the same trademark within their scope. Scope being geographic, line of business, or both. Plus a couple other minor dogs & cats.
The OP seemed to be saying that trademark can be turned off and on depending on the usage of it. He might have simply been using poor terminology referring to fair use, where trademark protection is inapplicable. But I didn’t read it that way.
The Hollywood sign is inextricably linked to Hollywood, Los Angeles, and the movie industry. There isn’t much practical usage of the sign which doesn’t infringe on the trademark rights owned by the Hollywood CoC.
Yeah–upon rereading it, I suppose it’s actually more concerned with the semiotics of the image itself, rather than legal technicalities. Would that be correct, Kadmos1? But as others have pointed out, once you get a trademark, that doesn’t matter.
I’d be more curious as to how the Chamber of Commerce justified a trademark in the first place for something which it didn’t create, doesn’t own, sitting on land it doesn’t own either, and which it doesn’t even maintain.
Apparently the Federal government (specifically, the National Park Service) is OK with commercial interests exploiting the Statue of Liberty, as a certain sleazy insurance company currently does in its TV saturation ads.
However, some things are so well-known that they should not be TMed. For example, an agency TMing Mt. Rushmore (unless it was something like an insurance logo)? Stupid.
IIRC, we had a long thread with the OP on a different topic regarding IP a few months ago, when he first joined. In short: he simply doesn’t like many of the details of US IP law, and trying to explain the details here doesn’t make a difference.
Being well-known is not a legal barrier. However, the Chamber of Commerce also has the TM for the Walk of Fame sidewalk stars, and one trinket company took them to court, arguing that those stars were conceived by the City of Los Angeles, and that they are embedded into public property. Interestingly the suit was settled out of court–interestingly because the trinket company could not have had much legal muscle compared to the Chamber.
The Hollywood sign is on public property (Griffith Park), too, but more importantly, what product or service does the Hollywood sign really identify? Effectively it’s the logo itself which is being sold (emblazoned on cheap souvenirs, which can be anything). But the chamber itself doesn’t sell the logo, and doesn’t own the sign itself. Is it essentially commodifying the place itself (which is a district of Los Angeles), a public community? I’m curious how they justified this trademark in their application.
I cannot stand those commercials, in one the lady’s head won’t stop moving when she talks, another the poor guy being badgered by his wife and then the narrator talking who sounds like he still has coffee in his mouth when he speaks! Allstate went the good route with Dennis Haysbert’s voice at least. But I did wonder how they were able to use the statue of liberty in that or if it was computer generated, does that make a difference?