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Anti-Piracy Copyright Lawyer Decides to Abuse Trademarks to Shut Down Pirates

posted by martyb on Thursday April 09 2020, @11:31PM   
from the ip-is-ip-is-ip dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Anti-Piracy Copyright Lawyer Decides To Abuse Trademarks To Shut Down Pirates:

Kerry Culpepper, Hawaiian IP attorney, [decided] to register a bunch of trademarks for piracy related terms and [is] then going around and shutting down accounts for "pirate" services on social media sites.

[...] The idea I suppose is to try to claim that 42 Ventures is suddenly and recently using these marks in commerce, the only way it would have a valid trademark. That, however, is bullshit. The terms and actual content creators were already long using those marks, as were the holders of the social media accounts 42 Ventures is busy taking down. In other words, Culpepper appears to be perfectly willing to abuse trademark law in his efforts to enforce copyright law. That isn't exactly a consistent respect for intellectual property now, is it?

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Original Submission

• Re:Pirate bay ate my hamster (Score: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday April 10 2020, @07:27AM

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Friday April 10 2020, @07:27AM (#980769) Homepage

  How was he able to register a trade mark for something that was already in use by someone else anyway? The leverage he now has is no better than estoppel, and his trademarks should be deemed illegal - heck, the pirate sites should probably be compensated. And the trademark office should be shut down for being utterly useless.

  --
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  Parent

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