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Celebrity Indicia/Licensee's Web Site
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled, in a motion for reconsideration, that an agreement for the defendant to use the right-of-publicity indicia of late baseball hero Mickey Mantle in a documentary and for related merchandise didn't authorize the way the defendant's Web site was designed. The Estate of Mantle v. Rothgeb, 04 CV 4310(KMW)(HBP). The district court noted that the 1989 agreement at issue in the case 'unambiguously requires that the Mantle Indicia be used only in reference to the Picture, and specifically prohibits using the Mantle Indicia for endorsing anything but the Picture itself. The court concludes that the following alleged Web site activities are not authorized by the Amended Agreement (1) Defendants' manufacture and sale of merchandise that uses the Mantle Indicia without referencing the Picture's title or logo; (2) Defendants' sale through the Web site of merchandise, produced by other manufacturers, which uses the Mantle Indicia without referencing the Picture's title or logo (the 'third-party merchandise'), and links through the Web site to products and services that have no relation to the Picture; (3) the Web site's failure to directly reference the Picture on approximately fifty percent of its pages; and (4) the Web site's self-description as 'The Official Mickey Mantle Website' and 'The Official Licensed Web Site and Catalogue.” But the district court nevertheless concluded that questions of material fact remained on the Mantle estate's breach-of-contract, contract termination and trademark-related claims over the Web site.
Film Exhibition/Use Tax
The Colorado Court of Appeals decided that a movie theater was subject to a city use tax on tangible property for income from films shown at the theater. Cinemark USA Inc. v. Seest, 06CA2549. The court of appeals noted in an unpublished opinion 'that the totality of the circumstances shows that the clear purpose of [exhibitor] Cinemark's transactions with the film distributors is Cinemark's use of a physical product, the motion picture film reel, and that this purpose renders the transactions taxable events. ' Cinemark is not buying an option to use an idea of the film distributors; the ideas and the artistic expression for the movie has already been used, edited, and published by the time it reaches Cinemark's theater in the form of a film reel.'
Film Production/Copyright, Unfair-Competition Claims
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