The Internet has provided an unprecedented opportunity for individuals to disseminate information widely at a very low cost. This means that virtually anybody who wants to distribute a message can do so. <br>It is this sense of empowerment that may drive individuals to spend the time and energy to create sites devoted to complaints about a particular product, service, company, organization, or individual. Frequently these sites employ trademarks owned by their targets, sometimes in the site's domain name itself, and always in the text of the site. Internet search engines pick these references up, so that the gripe sites often turn up side-by-side with official corporate sites in response to Internet searches.
Kelly D. TalcottAn e-mail from the vice president of marketing arrives one morning with a link to a Web site that includes a client's trademarked business name, plus the ubiquitous .com.
Clicking on the link, you are transported to a site that is essentially a diatribe focusing on your client, complaining about the client's products and services and repeating less-than-complimentary news reports and court filings made about the client.
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An annual tradition continues as we present the responses to our Legalweek question. For 2026, it was "where are we with prompting"?
The volume and sophistication of work hitting law firm marketing departments is accelerating. That moves the burden from responding to being ready: ready with differentiated positioning, ready with competitive intelligence, ready to get a compelling pitch to the right client before a formal process even begins. That requires more sophisticated output, produced faster, by teams that are already stretched past capacity.
In categories where products are difficult to differentiate on performance, and that describes most of the AI industry today, customers do not choose on features, they choose on trust. Brand integrity, in those markets, is a material business asset.
The annals of copyright decisions could provide a reasonably representative catalog of what our culture has been up to over the past 200 years. A Feb. 3 decision from the Southern District of New York is a case in point. It involves a sex-trafficking conspiracy, Tweets attacking a troubled crypto firm, and a claimed transfer of copyright ownership through a restitution order in a criminal case, all over an undercurrent of competing First Amendment and victim-privacy concerns.
Matthew McConaughey secured eight federal trademark registrations covering his voice and iconic catchphrases in a novel legal strategy aimed at combating AI’s unauthorized use of his voice and likeness. The move signals an important evolution in the power dynamics between talent/brands and the companies providing generative AI tools.
