Syracuse Goes For the Orange and Google Scan Settlement Gets Stopped.
Syracuse University once were known as the "Orangemen". This arose from a hoax in the student newspaper about the fictional remains of an Indian chief being found during the excavation of a 
university building. Because of the racist stereotype, Orangemen was eventually changed to "Orange" and the mascot now is a rotund citrus fruit known as Otto. Now, Syracuse has moved to trademark the "Orange" . After all, the Fifth Circuit has held that a color scheme can be part of a identifying mark if likely to cause confusion. Other universities that embrace orange as a team color and use the term orange as part of their identifying marks and slogans have objected, including Tennessee and Auburn but surprisingly not Texas. Maybe burnt orange is sufficiently different so as to not cause confusion. After all, school buses, road cones, citrus fruit and pumpkins are different colors, right?
In Google's quest to rule the world, it entered into agreements with several large libraries to scan books, include "snippets" of such books in a database and allow searches of such scans. In 2005, Google predictably was sued for copyright infringement and just as predictably raised fair use as a principal defense. The suit was in the nature of a class action and Google had entered into a settlement of this case, which would have allowed Google to continue the scanning with the payment of certain fees. The settlement was subject to approval by the courts but the District Court Southern District of New York said "not so fast" and rejected the settlement. The reasons stated by the Court include that the settlement "...would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the c
opyright owners. Indeed, the [settlement agreement] would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case."
Back to the drawing board.
