<<For something to be legitimate Product Identity, it has to be one of
these things: "product and product line names, logos and identifying
marks".
>>
Here's where some punctuation might be useful... It is:
a) "Product Identity" means: product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; ...
or
b) "Product Identity" means product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including: trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations;
If a) then logos and identifying marks are just one category out of a laundry list.
If b) then these are merely meant to be examples of logos and identifying marks.
I think I may check the archives on this. But I think herein lies one source of the confusion over PI. I read it as a) if for no other reason than that I can't ever imagine a concept (except one rendered into a very specific fixed form) every being viable as a trademark. Similarly, you can't trademark a theme. A "theme song", maybe. But "the theme of good versus evil in this story"? No way.
And again, if this were meant solely to protect trademarks, then why the laundry list? Why not just say it protects marks in trade?
A storyline is clearly not a trademark. The title of a work or a character might be a mark in trade, but not a concept or a pose or a storyline. The name of a specific storyline, a rendering of a specific character in a specific pose, or a concept rendered into fixed form could all serve as trademarks, but the language here seems broader than the stuff of trademarks.
Further, some of that stuff is not really subject to copyright either.
Again, this leads me to reading a) above.
Were I firmly convinced that the entire PI section was useless drivel and could have been replaced with the phrase "logos, products, product lines, and identifying marks" (as a broad way of phrasing trademarks) then I might buy your reading.
The thing that undermines my take on things (but then renders the laundry list baffling to me) is that the end of the list reiterates "... and any other trademark or registered trademark...", implying that this is a laundry list of potential marks of service or trade. However, again, I can't imagine an "incident" being something viable as a trademark in any traditional sense. So, either people have much broader exposure to really exotic forms of trademarks which are legally valid (which is possible, since I'm not an IP lawyer or a lawyer of any kind, for that matter), or else any reading to construe all those as being marks in trade is in error.
I'm just wondering about the following statement:
Hobby Equipment means sporting goods, including baseball bats and tennis shoes; toys; model railroad trains; paints; board games; crayons; and anything else that is possible to use in a sport that is declared as Hobby Equipment by a store owner.
Here, clearly, the semi-colons are separating a laundry list of hobby equipment, very little of which is actually a type of "sporting good".
Were there a colon after means then you'd view this as a laundry list of separate items all of which are hobby equipment. Where it after including, then you'd assume I was daft and was trying to convince you that a crayon was a type of sporting good.
With no colon, the punctuation and the types of items on the list (many of which seem unrelated to sporting goods), leads me to the belief that it's a laundry list of unrelated items.
Lee
