It’s official: the RIAA is throwing in the towel on its litigation campaign against filesharers. Wall Street Journal; CNET News. (One footnote: although the “campaign” is over, apparently individual battles will continue against heavy downloaders or uploaders.) This will not come as a surprise to my Internet law students; we spent the last couple of weeks of class discussing the content industry’s options, and the class was nearly unanimous that the lawsuits were unlikely to be effective. The only dissenters from that view opined that maybe the campaign was succeeding as a sort of public service announcement—use only legitimate sites and don’t upload! But as we noted in class, changing individual behavior from the top down is very difficult to pull off. It’s inefficient, in the sense that you aren’t likely to get much bang for your buck.

And indeed, that seems to be what’s behind the decision to end the lawsuits. The RIAA is a trade organization, funded by the member companies. And the member companies are apparently unhappy with the amount that they’ve been ponying up lately in the form of dues. A related report out today indicates that the record labels will be cutting back on their contributions this year.

So now there are two questions to ponder, one for today and one for a later post: first, how much of a success or failure was the litigation campaign? And second, what next?

My very good friend and former colleague Eric Goldman has recently posted a link to trademark filings and merchandising related to President-Elect Barak Obama. As you will see, the various logos (as the one in the picture) are certainly cute and/or funny, as often it happens in trademark cases. Yet, these trademarks can open several questions as to the legitimacy of using the President-Elect’s name and image without his (explicit or implicit) consent.  What are the limits of these uses?  Should these uses be allowed?  Are they in any way offensive?  Can a third party prevent others from using the President-Elect’s name and image on competing goods or services?  Where is the line here between free speech and commercial use?  These issues (much simplified here), and similar ones based on many similar cases, will be, in part, the subject matter of my Trademark Seminar next semester. It will be, as is always the case with this course, a lot of fun!