eSignature Legality for Assignment of Intellectual Property in Mexico

How to eSign a document: eSignature legality for Assignment of intellectual property in Mexico

greetings good afternoon everyone i see everybody's joining here we're getting our and participants are slowly coming up there my name is valerie horton and i am a reference librarian here at the san diego law library and you are here today with our wonderful esteemed east coast guest betsy golden kellum and jennifer lemmer posey and they are going to be discussing intellectual property media and the circus today so we're just going to wait a few minutes just get everybody a chance to log in but while we're doing that i wanted to let everybody know that i am posting the link for the presentation for today here in the chat and then after that i am going to turn off the chat so you should be able to access this this by link we also sent out the presentation notes about 30 minutes ago so you should see that in your emails as well and once this presentation ends you will receive your cle certificate via email so give us an hour or two and then that should arrive in your inbox if you have any questions of course you can always email us at the email i'm posting in the chat so if you have any questions about today's presentation or about the services that we offer here at the san diego law library feel free to email us and i see everybody is arriving here so we'll go ahead and get started because i know they have an informational and informationally dense presentation today very excited and i'm especially excited today about this presentation this is something that i have been working on for quite a while with our presenters and just to introduce them betsy golden kellum is an intellectual property and media attorney with more than 15 years experience supporting law firms and global brands she's also an entertainment historian whose work has been published in outlets ranging from the atlantic to vanity fair and she serves on the boards of the circus historical society society and the barnum museum and she has a very funny blog if you are interested um called drinks with dead people and it is a hilarious blog about history um and then we also have with us today um jennifer lemmer posey who is actually been my friend since the eighth grade and i'm very proud of that fact she is the typical curator of circus at the john and mabel ringling museum of art she's an expert on circus art history and its role in popular culture her work has been featured in multiple publications and you may also recognize her from the ken burns mini series documentary on the circus she has served as the editor of the circus historic history journal bandwagon taught courses on the circus and has served as an advisory scholar for for the 2017 smithsonian folklife festival and so we are very very happy to have them here with us today to for this presentation so i will turn it over to our our speakers thank you so much and welcome um so just a little bit of kind of level setting um we're glad you're all here um this may seem like an unusual topic for a cle but we're here to convince you that it really isn't um and in today over the course of the hour jennifer and i are going to be talking about um the historic circus about media and i p issues how law and entertainment business developed alongside or sometimes decidedly not alongside each other as a historian and an attorney i tend to ask a lot of the same questions actually i ask questions about how we consume media how we regulate media how entertainment influences the law and vice versa very often we think of entertainment as being kind of agnostic in this area but there's a lot of legal involvement and yes the circus really is a good way to look at it um in many ways and jennifer is going to get into this in great detail the american circus is a microcosm of society as a whole there's every conceivable issue present from animals to labor to tax to intellectual property so today we're going to ask uh questions about a variety of ip and media issues looking especially at how performers and promoters controlled their brands controlled their rights um we'll share historical context for law and circus as each developed and as i said look at ways in which the law didn't didn't keep up um you know who we are um valerie did such a lovely job introducing us uh but jennifer maybe you could start us off with kind of the context here so why why using the circus why was it important then why is it important to keep thinking about it now especially in a legal context absolutely thanks betsy and i'm happy to be here with everyone and i'm always delighted to have the opportunity to talk about circus it wasn't a topic that i knew that i would fall in love with but as betsy mentioned it it encompasses everything and and that is why we're here today because the circus and its history is a constant reflection of culture and social change and so it's an opportunity to explore almost anything you can imagine um much of the time period that we'll be talking about today is the really influential moment in circus history in america which is is really the last quarter of the 19th century into the first half of the 20th century at that time the circus was at its biggest and grandest traveling under canvas and it was a time before the nation had a network that connected it in any way for mass media you know you had newspapers but those were regional at best um we didn't have the tv radio much less the internet and so the circus was tremendously influential in this time and i think from a modern perspective it's easy to lose sight of that we think of the hijinx of clowns and the amazing aerial acts but we fail to see how the circus in the 19th century connected the events in new york city with what was happening in saint joe missouri or other places like that um part of how it connected was by its travel and and its huge scale in the audiences it could attract so by around 1920 which was when the american circus was at its very largest traveling under canvas they were carrying about 1400 people with them as the show's contingent some 300 performers and then the rest were the people that made it all happen that raised the tents worked with the animals all of these things and they would move every day so um just as a little bit of perspective the disneyland park today has about 4 500 employees working on site you know each day at any given moment so about a third of those people descending upon your town for 24 hours and then disappearing so it was this magical experience for people um and and because of that it drew a lot of attention people would shut down their towns to as a holiday for circus day in routing the show circus owners like like pt barnum and james bailey and the ringling brothers had to think about the business angles of them they had to figure out how to route and to create the right relationships with local businesses to have the resources that they needed on site when the show arrived and so for all of these reasons the circus touches on so many legal issues managing labor and employment permitting and licensing food sales performance contracts obviously immigration and animal care so on and so forth advertising intellectual property which is obviously what we're really focused in here but if you can think about it the circus had to to wrestle with it within their own little traveling community um and best of all especially for me as as a curator of a circus collection as such a large business the circus kept really excellent records and so what we have now looking backwards is listings we have we have contracts for all of the kinds of things that i've mentioned but we also have materials like route books that tell us where shows went who was on the show and gives the context of what was happening as the show moved across the country and so from all of these different pieces we here at the ringley museum get to encourage scholars to come in and try and dig into further legal talk topics or further topics of their interest but that is how betsy and i came to know each other is is she brought a whole new perspective to me on the circus so i'll give it back to you so thanks um today we're talking about two kind of general buckets here largely corresponding to a what modern sense of trademark and copyright brand and copyright um so we'll start with brand and identity um and modern business relies in very great measure on trademark law to establish a brand to set up its relative positioning versus competitors but as jennifer mentioned we're talking about this last quarter of the 19th century in many ways i mean obviously circus studies is broader than that but when you're looking at this formative period federal trademark law didn't exist until 1870 and the lanham act is a post-world war ii development so it's an interesting time to look and say what did businesses do what did brands do to be sure they could stick out in the marketplace at this point in american legal history and really they did the same thing that modern trademark holders try to do which is established secondary meaning and secondary meaning is the association that develops in the public mind between a brand a product and the brand owner so as an example if i say the word apple there is really no reason you should associate a fruit and consumer technology but apple computer has created this secondary meaning that makes your brain jump from one to the other and as a trademark owner this is what you want you want that instant consumer association so circus folks did this through relentless advertising um there were publicity stunts there were clever offerings there was a ton of print advertising and a use of rising mass media as jennifer mentioned this is the time when print media in the united states really expands circuses were very aggressive advertisers and shows in fact usually had dedicated press agents running ahead of that traveling city to make sure there was plenty of news and that wherever the show was due to arrive everybody knew about it um you know it's very interesting to look back at the use of language in circus advertising from the start shows were careful about what they would promise in advertising like couriers and posters um a courier was kind of like a mini circus newspaper but the most renowned circus press agents were known and even sometimes celebrated for exaggerating for you know some not all outright lies um john ringling claimed that the public wanted bombastic descriptions rather than the truth um so we're going to go through two examples in particular from circus history about how branding disputes were handled both legally and in the court of public opinion and how we can look back at them with a modern sense of ftc principles spin doctoring false advertising law brand recognition that sort of thing now those of us who do practice in the media and advertising space you know that the ftc act prohibits unfair or deceptive advertising in any medium and the ftc is empowered to act in the public's best interest in the consumer interest to prevent deceptive uh advertising to prevent unfair advertising and they've interpreted this to mean that a deceptive practice is one that's likely to mislead computer consumers and to affect their behavior or their decisions about a product or service um and in the ftc sphere acts can be unfair if they cause or are likely to cause damage that's substantial that's not counteracted by some other benefit and that you can't reasonably avoid so that's great but again that's the ftc act which dates to 1914 so what about before then um and despite his reputation um you might be surprised to see what pt barnum is saying here on this slide um those who deal with the public must be careful that their goods are valuable that they are genuine and will give satisfaction so despite his reputation that's what pt barnum is saying here this is a quote um from his comeback business text the art of money getting this was first given as a lecture in the late 1850s after barnum went bankrupt he had become incredibly successful on the back of the american museum and the jenny lin tour and then entered into a business arrangement to develop an area of east bridgeport connecticut and got was was trying to bring a clock company there and wasn't really paying attention to how many promissory notes he was signing there was kind of a shady deal going on and he ended up bankrupt um and went on the road with his art of money getting to to bring himself back so people tend to think of barnum as sort of kind of a shady carnival barker i think um but he was one of the most successful global business figures in the 19th century and he cared deeply about giving the public a square deal mostly because if you're a jerk to people they are not going to come back and buy tickets again and he wanted the love and the public and the ticket revenue that said he absolutely deserved his nickname as the so-called prince of humbugs you may have seen that printed on hugh jackman's hat in the greatest showman movie um a so-called humbug in the 19th century was a tease it was a bait and switch kind of entertainment that played on consumers expectations and their perceptions and these kinds of hoaxes and humbugs they were not only common but they were a big part of entertainment uh culture in the 19th century in 1835 there was the so-called moon hoax which was a series of articles in the new york sun that tried to trick readers into believing that a civilization had been found on the moon that include unicorns and human goat hybrids so this happened a lot and buyer beware was a very wise principal at the time so barnum definitely played in humbugs one of the most famous uh was his fiji mermaid which was actually a monkey fish a maquette that was stitched together and is alleged to be um the model that's in the collection of the harvard museums right now uh but he was very careful to raise questions rather than make promises when it came to promotional materials and he always maintained that visitors to his entertainments would get more than their money's worth in terms of their edification and their amusement he actually disliked outright lies and made an effort to go after spirit photographers and swindlers and people who cut fed liquor and sold snake oil um as he got older particularly and kind of more focused on his legacy barnum became a policeman of humbug he wrote a book called humbugs of the world which was an expose of popular griffs and schemes and he was a connecticut legislator for a couple terms and worked on some consumer protection legislation ranging from food safety to railroad price fixing that said a little bit of a detour um he was all for a good stunt to boost the brand so this is the bearded lady madame clefulia she was born in switzerland her her name is josephine boydeshane after her mother passed when she was young her father was convinced to put her on the show circuit which was not uncommon for people with unusual or non-traditional bodies at that time but she was very successful um had an excellent career fell in love got married uh to a man named fortune cofulia since the last name and together they had a family there were medical affidavits produced at the birth for semi obvious reasons and she was kind of unfortunately very used to doctors at the time asking to verify that she was biologically female she was engaged by barnum to entertain at his american museum in new york city in the early 1850s which was a big that was a big role to score the museum was on par with disney um in terms of its revenue and its attendance in the 19th century millions and millions of americans visited and by all accounts those visitors they enjoyed her presentation they considered her a perfect lady and this is part and parcel of a whole culture of curiosity that was big business around this time that itself is hugely interesting but it's outside kind of our scope for today so in 1853 a man named william charr files a false advertising suit in new york he argues that madame clefulia must surely be a man in drag and he demands his money back on false advertising grounds his complaint reads that quote deponent says that the person who was pointed out to him as the bearded lady is in his opinion a male and an imposter on the public and deponent therefore charges that the proprietor of the american museum has cheated and defrauded opponent by false and fraudulent representations out of the sum of 25 cents and prays that he may be arrested and dealt with ing to law in response barnum went right down to the tombs with madame clefulia her husband barnum doctors there's you can imagine this parade marching downtown um there was medical testimony provided that she was indeed biologically female and the magistrate dismissed the complaint so fascinating example of a mid 19th century false advertising suit at law this itself is perhaps maybe a little less interesting than the fact that most historians agree barnum instigated the lawsuit himself uh most likely to stir up interest because it was the upcoming fourth of july weekend um i'm going to turn it over to jennifer to talk about another example so barnum's humbuggery is certainly stuff of legend and we grapple with that today about um what the intent is how it deals with false advertising to betsy's point barnum barnum was known to enjoy being discovered for his humbugs he wanted the the public to realize the truth behind what it was said and and he usually dealt more in exaggerations and these kind of obvious questionable statements uh but in in his era in the late 19th century he and some of his contemporaries in the show world i would argue are the the kind of the genesis of our doubt in advertising because while barnum was happy to be found out and and to use that certainly to his advantage to sell one more ticket uh he had a number of contemporaries who really just had no problem with boldface lies to try to generate the same kind of ticket sales that they were seeing with barnum's work so um one of the the great examples in circus history of this is is what is now known to the very small group of circus historians i suppose as the white elephant war and and this was an intersection of advertising between pt barnum's show the barnum and london circus which um just for a quick background is the precursor to barnum and bailey there's one more partner um but it's the beginnings of of the show that we recognize now and it's the very beginnings of the three-ring circus uh so barnum's circus was growing quickly but there were competitors in in the area in the northeast that were equally well known in the time and one was the showman adam for paw his circus at the time from about 1880s up until 18 right around 1900 was really as large as the barnum bailey and is well recognized in its area but adam fourpaw was was quite a different figure as you'll see so um this all began in 1884 barnum announced that he had secured this rare beast this sacred white elephant uh from burma and that it was going to be arriving in time for the new circus season that would start in april barnum's announcements in the press played out like an adventure novel it was all about how his man had gone out in the world and had gone to various nations trying to secure this animal that no one would release because they were too special but they finally managed to convince one of the kings of burma to to give them a white elephant and so tong tulung the elephant was was set to be shipped to the the states and was going to be available for barnum's tour uh he was the animal was supposed to arrive in mid-january and just days before a week and a half before the arrival date of barnum's elephant adam fourpaw announced that his white elephant was already here um he had trumped barnum in on this had managed to get a beast to the states ahead of time so his would be the very first white elephant to step foot in the united states um so obviously there's a backstory this as i mentioned barn fourpaw was really kind of the opposite of barnum barnum as betsy has detailed already really worked to um to clarify live laws their lies and um he really wanted to move in social circles meeting with royalty befriending authors like mark twain he was aware of his image and how that was put out there in the world for his shows and for the american museum for paul was a horse trader he really cared very little about what his image was he had gotten into the circus business because he had sold horses to a showman who couldn't pay him and that's how he ended up with a circus um and he was known to sit at the front door of his circus and count the people going in so that he knew how much money he should have at the end of the day he was he was boots on the ground working man circus and what he wanted to do was generate revenue he also kind of reveled in legal battles because he realized that there was a press um equivalent to that that would get him that much more attention so in 1884 as he starts talking about his wonderful white elephant that has arrived he's in the middle of at least three different court battles two of which were with a previous performer who um was suing him for breach of contract and also for personal harm she had fallen from an elephant and was not able to perform in the course of her trials her attorney said such terrible things about adam fourpaw that he fourpaw himself started a suit against the attorney for slander and at the same time fourpaw was fighting a suit from another performer in the circus uh millie christine who was a conjoined african-american twin twins we struggle with the way that we speak of millie christine because she herself used the singular um but she was suing adam fourpaw for having called her a monstrosity and therefore cutting into her potential for profits so fourpa's got all of this going on and he starts this war with barnum claiming that he himself has brought this first white elephant it's in all the press left and right leading up to the april openings of the shows there are these claims back and forth from the showmen that their only their elephant is the true white elephant and one month before the season began about mid-april barnum brings forth george gillespie who was a man that had worked for an animal trainer in liverpool and gillespie testified in front of the pennsylvania society for the prevention of cruelty to animals claiming that he had been instructed to coat four paws elephant with paris white which is a chalky pigment that's made out of of a carbonite of lime so it you know not only did it color the elephant because itself was white but it also kind of bleached its skin uh barnum's hope was that by bringing this attention to the society for the prevention of cruelty that someone would raise such an uproar that there would be some legal battle that ensued no such thing happened however both barnum and fourpaw sold far more tickets for their shows than they would have in a normal year and so the fervor calmed down for a few months until the two of them were back out on the road opening in major cities again this time in chicago and boston and they boiled the controversy back up um and with the same set of claims again no legal precedent but what happened with all of this is that the public itself was left with this lingering distrust which i think still permeates a lot of what we think about advertising generally and circus advertising in particular um so that's that's our white elephant betsy yeah and another great like tidbit about four paw um it said that during the that time when he had the the multiple pieces of litigation going on that the root of his show would actually change to avoid certain states at that time because he did he wanted to avoid being served depending on what litigation he had going on it sounds just like adam fourpot yes yeah alrighty so moving over from brand to content different promoters used ip in different ways to achieve the same purpose um elevation of their brand financial success that's everything you just summed up about the the white elephant border so shifting gears here from branding trademark getting a little more into the copyright space where we get into thinking about kind of three the three major ip principles where we talk about attribution and giving owners credit um where there's ownership and control of rights and the motivation to create that that fundamental incentive um and when we think about cases in this area one of those three is usually negatively affected today copyright is pretty straightforward um once an idea is fixed in the tangible means of expression you have copyright protection and you can go ahead and slap that circle c notice on it federal registration is available of course and it helps with effectively litigating infringement issues and getting enhanced damages but it isn't strictly necessary this was not always the case for a quick historical tour the copyright act of 1790 was the first federal effort to codify a copyright law to enforce it in the united states but it was not the sort of law that made life easy for content creators in contrast to modern law which as i said you get that protection as soon as you have a tangible expression of the idea that 1790 law required authors to register their work with the government to pay certain fees and you had to file with the secretary of state's office not to mention that the threshold for um what kinds of works could be registered or what sorts of works were sufficiently original it was very narrow at first and that changed and evolved over time photographs for example weren't acknowledged in copyright until 1884 in a great case where a celebrity photographer sued over his rights to do a portrait of oscar wilde it's borough giles versus serenity if anybody's interested in looking that up bro giles had marketed unauthorized lithographs of the wild photograph as department store advertisements um it's a beautiful photograph of oscar wilde and his velvet jacket and his stockings it's very stylish and he was on a lecture tour of the united states at that time so they were just figuring they'd capitalize on the buzz um what happened there is uh you know as a result the majority of artistic work in the early us wasn't formerly copyright protected you didn't get photographs you know it was a very narrow thing there's also an old case involving gilbert stewart the painter who you know because he painted the dollar bill portrait of george washington um who sued in pennsylvania over unauthorized reproductions of his work and um very interesting in its comparison to a lot of modern um art and fashion cases the issue was that someone bought one of his paintings had it shipped to china where hundreds of reproductions were painted and shipped back for sale it was that economically viable and those portraits were so much in demand that they could afford to have chinese knockoffs made um but again because ipwall was really in its infancy it was decided more on equity grounds as an actual infringement matter and the court did side with gilbert's tour by the way so over time ip law developed both to expand that scope of copyright protection to dive into ideas um that we recognize today more like creative commons so i will talk about a couple circus examples related to both and yes i'm back to my friend pt um sharing content is a big part of the creative ecosystem today and there are definitely arguments for both strong copyright schemes and so-called copy left or creative commons arrangements among different creators and this is by no means limited to a modern legal discourse so pt barnum was a prolific writer he first wrote his autobiography in 1855 at a time when he was extremely successful the american museum was going gangbusters and he had just in 1850 managed the tour of jenny lind again both of those were part of the greatest showman movie if any of you have seen it and by the way um very little of that movie is accurate but it's really fun um in the late 1860s barnum rewrote his memoir kind of took his first draft played with a little bit expanded brought it up to date and reissued it as a book called struggles and triumphs and that title was very real for him at the time he had gone through bankruptcy and resurrection he had lost both his home and the american museum twice in a series of fires um he would reissue the book almost annually thereafter throughout his life basically every year he'd add another chapter that says hey here's what i've been up to and of particular interest to us here he made his memoir open copyright to aid in its spread um the intro to the 1888 edition on the front's piece says this book is not copyrighted any and all persons are at liberty to publish at all or any parts of it he really wanted his material to get out there he would give copies of it away with circus tickets it was it was viewed as a promotional vehicle versus kind of an artistic work so it's very interesting to think about how progressive this is and why barnum will do it again the most obvious answer being that given his attitude on advertising any publicity was good publicity and so now we're going to jump forward to the turn of the century and this case bleistein versus donaldson um again there are different approaches to protection barna made his memoir open copyright because he wanted it out there as much as he could get it and the litigants in this case wanted to use those ip protections to give their creations exclusive value um just as a little bit of a synopsis here's what happened in the donaldson case excuse me the great wallish show ran out of posters that it engaged the courier lithographing company to print and it figured it wouldn't just take that image and have a competitor donaldson um print these up courier was angry that its designs had been copied because if jennifer will get into this it was not just a matter of they were printing there was a lot of design and artistry involved in this so they filed suit this image you see here is one of the posters in question showing the stark family performing on bicycles so many people figured things like this were outside the scope of the so-called useful arts eligible for copyright there was definitely the sense that intellectual property protection existed to apply to fine art to things that were deserving that were worthy in donaldson the court established that commercial works could in fact clear their originality bar um writing for the majority uh oliver wendell holmes said that certainly works are not the less connected with the fine arts because their pictorial quality attracts the crowd and therefore gives them a real use if use means to increase trade and to help to make money a picture is nonetheless a picture and nonetheless a subject of copyright that it is used for an advertisement so basically the majority is holding here in the supreme court the courts should not be arbiters of artistic value that commercial works can in fact qualify for copyright protection and kind of perhaps the most important legacy of donaldson that originality is actually a pretty low bar um for copyright purposes and this was a real discussion throughout the 19th century if you go back to that oscar wilde case i mentioned the part of the reason that was so contentious the idea that copyright should be granted to photographs is that photography daguerreotypes 10 types this was all new technology and many people considered photographers just button pushers than not artists they were kind of going you're just operating a machine why is this different than standing in a factory and pushing a button in that case the court started talking about how well a photographer might inject certain decisions into the mix they might position their subject in a certain way or choose lighting or um props or something like that but that there's artistic value so copyright through this time and on this continuum is in many ways a talk about really what we're what we're doing in terms of originality what we're doing in terms of artistic value so this this circus poster here established commercial copyright and this was a huge case in terms of artistic merit evaluations and originality um but i think jennifer if you don't mind i was wondering if you could give us some color on this in terms of actually how genuinely artistic a lot of these posters in fact were i think there was a lot of dismissive talk about oh it's just a cheap circus poster but these were actually really stunning pieces of art yeah absolutely um i love i love that you asked me to give you color on this betsy because that's one of the things we talk about with circus posters here at the museum is the explosion of color because that's exactly what it was their importance to the circus in in the 19th century cannot be understated because again if a show is traveling every single day it's critical that people know when it's going to be in their town so that they've they've cleared their their schedules they have they have money from from the crops coming in or whatever it is that they're ready to to go and enjoy the circus and that they'll show up to fill those seats so that circus can move on to the next town um to that end large shows like barnum and bailey would invest about a third of their annual operating budget into advertising and most of that was into printing and so the largest commercial printers in the country actually had very tight business relationships with the circus to the degree that they would sometimes negotiate mergers at shows and courier company out of buffalo new york donaldson lithographing out of kentucky and strobridge lithographing company out of cincinnati are the biggest names that we look back to in commercial lithography for the 19th century show poster those houses were again very big business for a poster like the one that we're looking at right now you would probably have three to four different artists working on creating that image you would have the artist who was known for doing the typography because all of that's hand lettered onto the block onto each of the blocks for the various colors in fact and then you would have an artist who was able to render portraits like ben wallace up there in the corner and as as aside i realized as betsy was talking that it was pt barnum he was the first one that put his portrait i think on a circus poster i had to go back but there i can't think of anybody beforehand it's that branding element so it wouldn't surprise me so you have the portraiture and then you have these figures in motion or maybe you know for many of the posters you have animals horses and elephants all of these different components various artists within the lithographic firm would do their portion to that design and the designs were remarkably special each show had a different kind of style they were already considering what kind of visual aspect they wanted to to speak to their shows brand basically um and and so it was a big deal to go somewhere else and and then at the same time a lot of these shows show printers realized that there was business in having what we refer to as stock posters the kind of generic images that could you could print anybody's title over the top so the printing industry went both ways with these but it was it was on the up and up in terms of the stock posters circuses went in knowing that they were getting something that someone else had or you know in the case of the wallace posters that they'd specially ordered something like this so all of this was really critical to to crafting the brand for each of each of the shows traveling in the nation before they could have any kind of you know media advertising like tv or radio and um the posters themselves which i have to admit are like my my heart here in the circus collection uh we're really the start of the magic that that has entrenched the circus and the popular imagine popular culture imagination in america because weeks before the show came these colorful beautiful renderings were everywhere for everyone in the town to see you saw beautiful images beautifully printed of people doing phenomenal things and and it built up all of the excitement for the arrival of the show that's yell throw it back to you i believe yeah well and just another kind of bit on posters um you know many of them as you mentioned people were traveling ahead and you know wheat pasting up hundreds if not thousands of these and in many ways yes they're fine art but they weren't necessarily intended to survive always in the way that many of them have and there's this whole kind of very interesting modern collector's economy where you know these are highly sought after but many of them are you know they're very fragile or it's very interesting whereas for what was supposed to be an ephemeral art form it survived and become so kind of revered it has survived remarkably well and and is loved in part because they're fairly rare because they were ephemeral they were posted and worn away um but it related to that into copyright in general we have this this poster itself is from the library of congress and the show printers and the circuses were sending copies off so that they could record these original designs um and so the library of congress has a remarkable collection that was formulated because of that process not not because of the collectors like i've benefited from but but actually from the legal process so yeah and there's actually um the library of congress did a blog post at one point on one of their research blogs about how one of the earliest copyright deposits that they have is actually a circus poster so i think that's a really great point that kind of having to having to submit a specimen um has kind of done us a favor today in preserving a lot of these absolutely yeah that's really cool um so maybe jumping ahead to the modern day um you know today we approach these kinds of issues with much more well-developed uh legal and regulatory machinery in place barnum's efforts to deploy humbugs and to call out humbugs has been replaced by the federal trade commission brands can use federal trademark registration to go after infringers commercial copyright is now well recognized um but we're still trying to sort out how content can and should be freely shared um and the circus is still a player in these intellectual property issues um perhaps the most famous name among the big name circuses um is the ringling brothers and barnum bailey show um which was an incredibly tenacious trademark litigator as you might not be surprised to hear um both involving its name involving the greatest show on earth tagline its visual marks its word marks just a couple examples of disputes they won against peta the people for the ethical treatment of animals in the late 1990s for registration of a domain name involving the ringling remarks and which also ends up kind of being a very interesting early case in domain name litigation as well when we're trying to talk about trademarks and urls and kind of how the how those can be um policed um in 2017 and that's the year in which the show closed um they sued kid rock over his use of the greatest show on earth tagline that was settled and the utah license plate that you see here actually is an example of a time where the circus did not win out against its uh intellectual property competitors which it usually did either by victory or settlement um in this case utah had a long history of coexistence um and basically kind of it was agreed that there really wasn't a likelihood of customer confusion which is a a big principle in trademark law so it was allowed to stand um as they've announced a relaunch of the greatest show on earth in 2022 and beyond it will be very interesting to see how that brand is protected and promoted um i mean those of us kind of in the both legal and circus side of things are not surprised i think about the relaunch in part because those trademarks are have such tremendous value and goodwill um [Music] performers still try to protect their acts and we're still talking about originality um we're still talking about a lot of these issues that were kind of first identified and elucidated in the 19th century on a traveling circus show i think this is a good point we wanted to make sure we left a good 10 or 15 minutes for questions and i know valerie's been collecting them so i will pause here um because we'd love to talk about what you're interested in for a few minutes but um thanks for having us yes thank you all thank you for that and um we do have a a question i have one and i but we have one from one of our attendees that asks is there a reference to citations for the codes and cases you have previously mentioned you know um we talked about madame cofoulia and um adam forbaugh and some of those cases um do is there anywhere people can uh learn more about those cases so unfo this is one of the the joys in the pitfalls of researching 19th century legal um cases in some cases there isn't one um the madame clifford case for example uh is available because the transcript was printed in one of the new york newspapers at the time which was very common practice not all of these are reported in the case of jennifer mentioned the libel case that millie christine had filed against adam floorpaw that was an instance where um the original filings are available by the national archives but that was a case where litigation dragged on for two years and then they settled on a court um so there was not reported decision um there's a lot of relying on journalism um yeah madam cliff fulia no the white elephant case as you mentioned jennifer went just thinking that was louise montague right right yeah louise montague um was the performer she had sued adam thorpe in the breach of contract issue and then the elephant injury she had won a 10 000 beauty contest to be the lead in his grand spectacle um i don't know that those are published decisions either but i actually haven't looked those up um but kind of one of the things is you know we get to donaldson at the turn of the century that's when kind of more of these cases start getting consistently reported but there's a real problem with actually finding reported opinions for a lot of these um thankfully newspapers were really eager to send reporters to courtrooms and take transcripts sometimes you would also get pamphlets if something was really high profile enough there are some historical cases where people would sell just a small you know however long 10 20 30 page pamphlet detailing some court proceedings but unfortunately i don't have a lot that i can share in terms of pin sites so i have a question about the white elephant wars were either of the elephants actually white was there ever any confirmation about that so there were it was only everyone's uh word basically it was it was shown really um that that four paws elephant was not it was an elephant named tiny uh that had had indeed it was an average asian elephant that had been brought over and and had been been treated in some way whether or not the carbonite of lime was exactly it um it had really been whitewashed in some way barnum's elephant did come from burma and was what is truly a white elephant which is not white at all i mean they're they are um lacking a lot of pigment they're albinos but it tends to be splotches of pink and so you find in the advertisements or actually in the newspaper recordings a lot of people are put out because barnum's white elephant isn't white um as as betsy said about another topic that we've covered that becomes a whole another area where circus becomes a place where you can explore a lot about um you know consideration what is whiteness and in this day and age that's an interesting and very charged question um that the white elephant war also brings up for us so barnaba and i would say i would say two things one um jennifer on your kind of question about whiteness if you go to the public domain review website um and look up there's an article called race i believe it's race and the white elephant war which has a really nice kind of dig into a lot of what was going on then it has really great images as well that might be something but again this goes back to that idea of branding and advertising you know what what exactly are you promising to the public because people would inevitably using barnum in his museum as an example there would be something where people would get a little upset and he'd say yeah but all i said is that we have to mermaid you're the one that had the picture in your head of what that mermaid was going to look like and at least for barnum's part he he was certainly i don't believe he was trying to be malicious about it and the idea was well you're going to have a great time at my museum and you're going to get your money's worth that said there was a larger culture at the time and not everybody was so kind of um kind and altruistic about kind of public entertainment there was definitely a culture of um everything barnum talked about in humbugs of the world there was the trial he actually served as an expert witness um there was the trial of william mummler in new york who was the spirit photographer and at the time spiritualism um became popular after a few sisters in upstate new york decided that they were going to market themselves as spirit mediums and there's this huge movement where people have seances and spiritualist churches and one of the things people did was they would go to get their picture taken because certain so-called skilled photographers said oh well i can take a picture where the ghost of your loved one will appear in the frame with you and barnum thought this was really distasteful because he said look i'm i'm giving people joy and a good time and i'm not lying to them you're lying to people and taking their money and he at least made a big distinction between this uh mumler was arrested after the nypd sent basically a fraud sting after him um and there was a case where they basically said are you are you defrauding people um and barnum testified as an expert witness saying that he had engaged um a photographer to produce a spirit photo proving that this could just be manufactured on its own um and that he knew he knew from home bugs and that he had bought a few spirit photographs to display in his museum as examples of swindles because that was one thing he also started to do was to just hang things on the wall and say this is a um mumler actually did get off he was not convicted at that trial and there's a great headline that i'm going to paraphrase because i can't remember it but it was something about the spirits victorious which i always thought was great it's so interesting i think harry houdini also went through the same journey where he became very interested in defrauding um spiritually as well spiritualist spiritualism um had a 19s 20's resurgence because of how relevant to now not only world war one but the flute pandemic and so many people had died that the idea of talking to your dead relatives started to seem like it was very positive a consolation so yeah houdini was was kind of a debunker too and he and arthur conan doyle had this very weird antagonistic friendship um so not a question but a comment aaron says um this has been fascinating and well presented mcle thank you um and does anybody else have any questions for our speakers today no it sounds like everybody's pretty cool i just think i think it's a fast the circus is such a fascinating area and as as i get more and more into circus history the number of legal issues that pop up are just fascinating and as jennifer said at the beginning they just they ranged through the business and sometimes that's reaping through performance contracts and you know sometimes it's um libel and slander cases and sometimes it's animal rights uh issues you know pt barnum was actually involved in a dispute with hillary berg who founded the aspca um there's just so much interesting material legally speaking to kind of pull out of circus history and i always love doing it well it does seem like it holds multitudes um if anybody wants to learn more about madame clefulia i'm going to really quickly just pop into the chat an article from the atlantic about her so if you're interested in that particular topic let me see if i can get my chat here where'd i put it um and if you have if you would like to see more about the ringling museum where jennifer works they have a beautiful website and they also have quite a few presentations available online there as well they're very it's very beautiful um work that they have contained so here we go here is the link to that atlantic article about my article about madame clefulia and um if i'm just going to tell everybody thank you very much for attending today we really appreciate you being here um when this webinar ends you will have the opportunity to fill out a survey for us letting us know what you think about this presentation and if you'd like to see more content like this we would really appreciate you filling that out for us and i will give the last words to our speakers thank you guys i thank you all it's um it's been a joy and as always i've learned some things today so betsy thank you oh thank you likewise um i i love talking about this and as i said i i love finding ways that because the circus was this massive business it kind of just brought all these corporate and legal concerns with it wherever yes and valerie thank you for giving us the opportunity to to think about this topic together well we were happy to have you and i hope you guys have a wonderful evening on the east coast and everybody else have a great day and thank you for joining us today bye-bye thank you bye you