Our guest bloggers this month will be Donald W. Layden Jr. ’82 and rising 2L Melissa Longamore. Many thanks to our May guests, Joel Teitelbaum ‘96, rising 3L Andrew Spillane, and Professor Erik Ugland of the Marquette University College of Communication.
Look around your home and you are sure to find no shortage of cheap promotional items carrying the logo of one business or another. In fact, I happen to have in front of me right now three pens emblazoned with the names of three different national hotel chains. None of the hotel chains are especially trendy, so it is hard to imagine that anyone would actually pay a premium to use the pens because of the presence of the trademarks. But some trademarks do have real cache — think Harley, Starbucks, or BMW — and there might be real money-making opportunities in selling pens, shirts, mugs, and so forth linked to those famous names. So, you might wonder, would it be legal to start producing and selling merchandise bearing famous names without first obtaining a license from the trademark owners?
As Irene Calboli explains in a new paper on SSRN, the answer has not been as clearly and satisfactorily worked out by the courts as you might think.
Few professional groups in our society are less popular than journalists, so it’s a rare occasion when legislators – obsessed as they are with reelection – take actions specifically designed to help the press.
The Wisconsin Legislature showed some of that political bravery this month when it passed the state’s first reporter’s shield law (although some members still seem a little sheepish about it). The new statute, signed into law by Gov. Jim Doyle on May 20, gives “news persons” protection from certain subpoenas seeking their testimony, work products or confidential information, including the identities of their unnamed sources.
Journalists have been fighting for these statutory protections since 1972 when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to recognize a First Amendment reporter’s privilege in Branzburg v. Hayes. Wisconsin is now the 39th state to have responded by adopting concrete statutory protections for journalists.
As anchorman Ron Burgundy might say, this is kind of a big deal. But so far the response has been muted: no significant news coverage, no pubic outcry, no dancing in the streets.