Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The laws governing intellectual property rights tend to be set up to require you as the rights holder to defend them. It's largely on you to look for and take action about rights violations, with the corollary that if you don't defend your rights, you may lose them.
For example, some years back some fans wrote to SF/fantasy writer Katherine Kurtz. They wanted her permission publish a magazine of fan fiction set in her Deryni universe, which they would then sell. Kurtz sad "no". They did it anyway. Katherine had to sue, or risk losing rights to her own creations. She sued, won, and the fans were out large amounts of money for legal fees, court costs, and ads in the relevant trade papers admitting that Katherine had the rights and they had violated them.
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It's my understanding that you don't have to defend copyright, but you do have to defend trademark or lose it.
A copyright owner can give permission, tacit or explicit, for use of their content to any number of people without losing the right to restrict it from other uses. If fans make a magazine & sell it, and Kurtz doesn't stop them, that does *not* give Universal Pictures any right to make a movie without permission.
The right to control usage includes the right to grant consent at will.
Trademark is different--because the purpose of trademark is (ostensibly) to avoid customer confusion, if you don't stop a tm'd property from being used w/o your consent, you have allowed public understanding of the mark to include products that aren't yours, and lose your right to demand exclusivity for that trademark.
(The best example of a real understanding of this is Second Life's
"Proceed and Permitted" letter to the creator of getafirstlife.com.)