Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Patent and Trademark Center goes to the theater: An interview with "Trademark Girls" playwright Wendy Kramer

It’s easy to become lost in the minutiae of intellectual property here at the Patent and Trademark Center. And while it’s hard to dispute the necessity of rolling up our sleeves and helping people find information (this is a library, after all), it’s also important to occasionally step back and take a broad view of the role that patents, trademarks, and copyrights play in our lives.

I recently had the opportunity to do just that by attending a performance of Wendy Kramer’s original play, “Trademark Girls” at the first night of San Francisco-based Small Press Traffic's annual Poets Theater Fest & fundraiser on January 16th.

“Trademark Girls” is a cathartic (and funny!) exploration of the meaning behind all of those characters on boxes and cartons in the supermarket. It’s a hard, critical look at the political and cultural baggage included in each box of Aunt Jemima pancake mix, each can of StarKist tuna, each package of Morton Salt, in so many product labels. In the play, these trademarks step off of the shelf and speak up.

Trademarks are, after all, symbols, and, while poets and advertising agencies tend to have different ends, one could argue that the reliance on symbolic language and imagery to illicit an emotional response is crucial to both poetry and advertising copy.

Wendy was generous enough to have lunch with me and talk about her play and her perspective of the meaning behind trademarks.

Patent and Trademark Center: How did you get this idea to turn trademark girls into poetic characters?

I've drawn my poetic material from trademarks and logos for years, ever since 1995 when I started making verbo-visual collage poems made out of product labels, magazine clippings, junk mail, and other trash. These poems, when read, were performances in themselves, so the dramatic stage was not a big jump, especially in the context of Poets Theater. Product labels of all sorts combine text and images that can be read poetically in a literal or imaginative way. You can read a "Skippy's Peanut Butter" label and read it so that the skipping and the butter and the blue and tan-ness of the letters and the peanut butter comes forward. I don't know exactly how the "girls" in particular--Little Debbie, Sun Maid Raisin Gal, Morton Salt Girl, etc.--became characters, except that I had been collecting and noticing them for a long time; I had been sort of informally or mentally cataloging all the trademark girls I saw. There are dozens of them.


PTC: Tell me some more about how these characters developed.

I had been planning to write a Trademark Girls play for a couple of years. I had joked about and
discussed it with people and read some books about trademarks and advertising. I had taken a lot of notes and begun to imagine people I knew in different roles. But until David Buuck asked if I had any material for this year's Poets Theater, I hadn't actually sat down to write the script. Once he asked me and I had a deadline, it started to come together. And once I was writing the script and getting feedback and suggestions while simultaneously casting specific friends and co-workers and poets to play them, the characters began to develop. We had a 10-15 minute performance time limit, so we had to convey who they were very quickly. Visually, that's simple once you have the costumes. Tanya Hollis and Fran Blau did an amazing job of conceiving and making these costumes that used actual labels, thrift store clothes and hand-sewn props to make the trademark girl easy to identify: Blue Bonnet's bonnet, for instance, or the Hamburger Helper's helping hand.

That's the practical end of things. Interpersonally, the characters developed as cast members brought their personalities to them. Some characters were cast more deliberately than others. For example, once my teenager, Rafique, agreed to be in the play, I wrote the Chicken of the Sea Mermaid role specifically for her; her character was intended to embody some of the issues around gender and personhood that are a part of our daily life together. Clo the Cow (Nell Jehu) pretty much invented herself and sewed her own clover. People brought inflections to their lines that sounded more accurate and alive than anything I could have directed them to do.

The trademark girl characters developed as a way for me to make the societal question of who gets to be a person in public a literal one. Neighborhood gentrification and Prop 8 are two obvious real life examples of issues we've been living with that address or imply this question. Who gets to set the terms of discussion?

Blue Bonnet Onit is literally just a head, and she represents margarine. But if she were a person,
wouldn't she be so much more than a head and than margarine? We know that we ourselves are more than butter or margarine, that our individual and collective imaginations are different from the corporate processed foods we are sold in the supermarket. With this play, I wanted to take the corporate and advertising words and pictures in our allegedly public space and re-claim them for poems and play. Serious play.


Intrigued? Wendy says that plans are in the works for more performances later in the year, which I’ll be sure to post in this space. In the meantime, there are still two more weeks of Poet’s Theater left, where you’ll be sure to find some excellent (probably not trademark-related) work. For more information, visit http://smallpresstraffic.blogspot.com/.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Old video new to me: A Fair(y) Use Tale

Eric Faden, a professor at Bucknell University, cobbled together an excellent introduction to copyright and fair use using clips from Disney movies.

Did he get permission to use the clips? He most certainly did not.

Professor Faden's use of Disney materials to demonstrate fair use is particularly effective because the Disney Corporation has a reputation for lobbying hard for increasing copyright protection.


Saturday, January 17, 2009

A trademark suit not suitable for audiences under 18

An Austin strip club that has dubbed its amateur night "Stripper Idol" is being asked to take it off (take it all off!) of all of its advertising copy and waitress uniforms.

FreeMantleMedia North America, producer of the popular American Idol television show, has sued to stop Palazio Men's Club in Austin, Texas, from continuing its weekly Stripper Idol stripping contest. The Austin American Statesman is also reporting that FreeMantleMedia is also seeking to seize the club's profits from the contest.

The primary purpose of a trademark is to protect consumers by ensuring that branding is clear and that two businesses or products in the same classification of trade won't have confusingly similar names or marks.

The suit contends that the club's use of "Idol" implies an endorsement of the stripping contest. The club also uses a lettering and font style in their advertising copy that is similar to that used for American Idol.

The club's management argues that there is no resemblance between the TV show and their contest, and, therefore, no threat of confusion.

Friday, January 16, 2009

European copyright strong to the finish? Entertainment industry copyright news update

A feature about Popeye's European copyright expiration appeared on Time Magazine online yesterday. (I'm not so brash as to say that I scooped Time, but...)

I was hoping that the story appeared because the new year saw a lawsuit testing the extent of King Features' assertion that Popeye, while no longer protected by European copyright laws, still is under trademark protection. However, not enough time has elapsed for anything to play out in the courts; the story was more of an encapsulation of the whole issue of European copyright expiration and the various factions pushing and pulling the EU to address the issue.

The author seemed to be looking forward to European publishers taking a crack at using Popeye without permission, though I note that Chicago-based Time made sure to get permission to use an image of everyone's favorite sailor for the story caption.

In other comic-copyright (not to be confused with copyright-comic) news, the highly anticipated, at least by this patent librarian, film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic graphic novel The Watchmen, the release of which was threatened by a copyright dispute, will be released this spring, following a settlement between Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox.

Warner Brothers spent well over $100 million producing the movie -- Fox claimed that it had owned the movie rights since 1986. A judge agreed, so the two entertainment giants hashed out a deal outside of the courts.

I know I'm supposed to remain objective, but Watchmen is a seriously awesome book.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

"Copyright is eternal!"

Lawrence Lessig appeared on Comedy Central's Colbert Report last week to debate copyright law reform with Stephen Colbert's eponymous argumentative talk show host character. Mr. Lessig, who is something of a hero among progressive copyright enthusiasts, is promoting his new book Remix, in which he argues that our copyright is outdated and that Congress is wasting its time dealing with copyright while there are more important issues at hand. (It appears that it's pretty popular, so I'm going to order a couple more copies.)

My favorite exchange is when Colbert (again, meaning Colbert playing this character) becomes very upset with the prospect that somebody might remix his work:

Colbert: I will be very angry, and possibly litigious, if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remix[es] it with some great dance beat and it starts showing up in clubs across America.

Lessig: Actually, we're joint copyright owners. I'm OK with that. You can totally remix this. I'm fine with that.

Colbert: I do not give you permission.

There's a little more back and forth until Colbert exclaims "Copyright is eternal!" Watch the video below. (Hopefully Colbert is kidding about litigation because I'm posting this without permission.) Also note that Lessig has posted a few remixes of the interview on his blog.



Saturday, January 10, 2009

New in the PTC: Abraham Lincoln, the Model T, and an overview of major public works projects? Must be a new issue of Invention and Technology

There's no better way to ease into the new year than by posting a Patent and Trademark Center update, and in my hands is a doozie of a new issue of American Heritage's Invention and Technology. Featured in this issue:

  • A feature about the only U.S. President to obtain a patent, Abraham Lincoln. (Number 6469, A Method of Bouying Vessels over Shoals).
  • An article about sustainable power generation using the sea.
  • The Ford Model T's 100th birthday.
  • A timely look back at some massive public works projects.
The magazine will be on display at the Patent Center, so come on in and check it out.