The story of how the trademark was registered is quite
strange. At first the US Patent & Trademark Office apparently turned the
application down, as the applicant’s mark ‘shows a false suggestion of a connection
with the famous actress, Louise Brooks’, but reversed its decision after the
applicant argued that Brooks had not left an estate to assert rights to her
name. It obviously wasn’t in the interests of the applicant to mention that, whatever
might be the situation with the actual words ‘Louise Brooks’, a company called Louise
Brooks Estate did exist at the time in Kansas, founded in 1998 and since 2014
overlapping with Louise Brooks Heirs, which is still going; both entities were
run by Brooks’s nephew Daniel, who is 76 and still lives in Wichita. Louise
Brooks Heirs has a supportive relationship with the LBS, but unfortunately it
never seems to have occurred to Daniel Brooks to do something as weird as copyrighting
his aunt’s name.
Craftslaw.com uses this case as a way of talking about how
trademarks work generally, especially in the online world. Most of the crafters
who might use Brooks’s image, and even her name, aren’t claiming that their
goods emanate from any kind of official source, only that a ‘Louise Brooks t-shirt’,
for instance, is a t-shirt with Brooks’s face on it. That’s not a trademark,
just a descriptor, and the law deems that ‘fair use’; but as Craftslaw points
out, most online platforms such as Etsy or eBay (not to mention Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram) will just play safe and take down any contributor complained
against, leaving it to the parties concerned to sort it out through the law.
Who’s got the money for that?
The founder and organiser of the LBS is Thomas Gladysz.
A couple of years ago I bought his book Louise Brooks: The Persistent Star, a
compilation of many of his LBS blog posts. Like a lot of fans of a lot of celebrities,
shows, or activities, Mr Gladysz comes across as amiably obsessive and the book
is a work of delightfully loopy scholarship. I really don’t know how he manages
to find out the things he does. My favourite example was this post, concerning billboard adverts on various suburban streets
in Kansas City for the 1926 comedy A Social Celebrity, in which Louise Brooks
took a prestigious second billing to the then major star Adolphe Menjou. This
is, of course, nuts, and yet it does tell you interesting things about the way
movies were marketed in 1920s America. A lot of the blog is like that: it
explores times, places and manners through the medium of this one actor, and
she becomes a prism for an entire world. It’s niche, but it’s genuine and even useful
work.
This makes it all the more galling that the entity
attacking the LBS is embodied in a slick-looking but horrible website whose articles
are either weird, general stuff lifted from easily accessible online resources mentioning
Louise Brooks from time to time, or personal attacks on Thomas Gladysz; and a ‘shop’
consisting of t-shirts or ‘art prints’ emblazoned with public-domain pictures
of the actress run through a Photoshop filter. If you want to spend your money on that, think of it as charity. There is no sign that it will
contribute much to what we know about Brooks and her times – to put it as mildly
as I can. I'm not going to link to it.
I hope that, if the trademark holder had an intention to remove the LBS blog as well, he would have done so by now. It’s there that the most valuable aspect of the LBS survives, the astonishing corpus of work Mr Gladysz has amassed over the course of 28 years of study, and for that to disappear would be a tragedy indeed.
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