Norman Sheppard

The value of copyright and registered trademark laws is undeniable. Anyone that provides a product or a service can put forth the effort to create a brand that will effectively represent their work and when one reaches a level of success they can rest easy knowing that there are laws in place that protect their efforts and their brand from being copied. This is fair play, a by-product of our democracy where everyone is allowed their shot at the American dream as well as a right to defend it once they are successful.

Recently, Rock Art Brewery, a small, homemade company in Vermont just received a cease and desist order on their newest product called The Vermonster. This order came from the Hansen Beverage Company, makers of the Monster Energy drink, stating that Vermonster is too close to Monster and could prevent the large company from successfully extending their brand to alcoholic beverages in the future.

Husband and wife team Matt and Renee started their brewery in their basement, worked hard and had success. Their new creation called Vermonster was made to celebrate their tenth year in business. This is an American dream come true, an inspiration to anyone seeking to make a living doing what they love.

The Hansen Beverage Company is a billion dollar giant which in many ways IS the American dream. They will take Rock Art Brewery to court over the name of their product and they will lose the case costing Rock Art tens of thousands of dollars, pocket change to the corporate heavy weight Hansen. Hansen will appeal and take Rock Art to court again, and again, and again until Rock Art is facing bankruptcy and forced to comply.

“I have input from 5 trademark lawyers in various states saying: no infringement issue. Clearly a ‘nuisance lawsuit’. You will lose because they have the financial resources that can wear you down till you can not afford to fund the fight, (and) they win by default”

Monster Energy Drink vs Vermonster Beer

Monster Energy drink is another one of those Red Bull copy cat drinks, an overpriced, crappy tasting alternative to coffee. Vermonster is an alcoholic beverage, a barley wine which I have never tried. They are different types of beverages and they market to different demographics yet they are both indeed beverages with the word monster in it. One school of thought says that Hansen should respect the family owned, start up business and let them have their shot at success. But, consider a product called X, and some other company puts out a similar product called VerX. Perhaps VerX is trying to get in on X’s action via name association.

This story is not unique, it happens all the time. “Money talks” and “everyone has their price” are mantras we’ve all heard many times. Companies with huge bankrolls can afford legal procedures and hire lobbyists and are able to get away with malefactions against the environment, and against their fellow business men using the same system of  laws and constitutional rights that enabled them to grow their own companies in the first place. This is the just the nature of the beast. I truly can not say I wouldn’t do the same because I don’t have a big company or a brand to defend. The law of the wild is survival of the fittest and we are indeed wild animals, the most ruthless, self serving ones on the planet. I think the main point here was stated by Allyn Hane on his blogger illustrated website, wouldn’t it have been more productive if Hansen gave Rock Art a call and tried to work something out before sending in their dogs.

Tags: American dream, Hansen Beverage Company, Monster Energy drink, registered trademark laws, Rock Art Brewery, Vermonster

Checking out a new service called TypeKit. If you are a web designer then you know well the fact that you are quite limited in what fonts are available when using HTML. SEO Web Design is the practice of making pretty sites that are also optimized for the search engines, too bad you can’t use pretty fonts without using images. Alt tags help but it just isn’t as effective as good old HTML text.

see update below

Have a look at the titles on this blog. Pretty cool eh? It’s HTML and it’s a wacky font. This is Typekit. These guys are bridging the gap between web sites and the font foundries. Way, way back in the good old days you could upload a font and call apon it with CSS using the @font-face style but the foundries didn’t like this willy-nilly usage of their products so they outlawed it. Typekit has started to make deals with many of these foundries so that us web designers can use them… for a price of course. I heard about Typekit a while ago and got on the waiting list, now that the service is out I got a free trial. I’m not sure how long it will last but hey, I have a wacky font on my site using good old HTML.

All you have to do is sign up and sign in, fill out a form so they know what site (singular) you’ll be using the fonts on, copy and paste a script into your header, then go and choose what fonts you want to use. The free trial I’m using has about 62 or so fonts in several different styles. Script fonts, grunge, block etc… You will need to know a little CSS because you need to assign the Typekit font to an id or a class. The interface is really simple, it took me about 3 minutes to figure the whole thing out and get the wacky font on my site.

You can use this service on 1 site for $30/yr. 5 sites for $50/yr. or 10 sites for $50/mnth. I’m guessing the thing to do is to run it by the client and see if they want to pay. I definitely know of several designers that I do programming for that will be on this like white on rice. They will have no problem convincing clients to either pay for the 1 site subscription or pay them a small fee to help pay for their monthly subscription. Maybe not, fonts are really important to some while others don’t really care as long as it’s readable.

Font faces are really important to a lot of designers especially those who come from a print background. On the other hand, I’m thinking that the average person starting a new website or redesigning an old one just wants it to be legible and the differences between Arial and Humanist are too minute for them to even notice let alone pay extra for. In any case, it will be interesting to see how this progresses.

This is what it looked like

update: I have removed the TypeKit scripts because they are breaking this site for IE users. Oh well. Read more at the typekit blog

Tags: css, design, fonts, html, Search Engine Optimization, seo web design, web design, website

Licensing for Photoshop has stopped working

WTF Adobe. I just spent an entire day trying to fix a bizzare licensing issue with Adobe CS3 and it seems I am not alone.

I was just working along as usual, I had Photoshop and Dreamweaver open like I always do when all of a sudden I get a popup that says

“Licensing for this product has stopped working. You cannot use this product at this time. You must repair the problem by uninstalling

and then reinstalling this product or contacting your IT administrator or Adobe customer support for help.”

What the… I click the X and everything went away. When I tried to re-open Photoshop the same popup appears and the program will not open, nor will Dreamweaver or Flash. I freak out, this how I make my living. Next I’m Googleing like a bat out of hell trying to figure this anomoly out and there in the number one spot is Adobe with a solution page. They have this “License Recovery” exe and a whole page of “if that doesn’t work try this” … “or this” … “or this” etc… I tried every one of there solutions. I was opening up System folders and renaming them, changing FLEXnet settings and nothing worked.

This page at Adobe crashed Firefox every time as well. I’d get about 3 minutes before my machine would freeze. I’d do the old three finger salute, cntrl-alt-delete, nix Firefox and everything was OK. I had to do this about seven times before I got through all the “This did not help” comments. Finally near the bottom of the page a comment gave me the idea that finally worked out.

The enlightened one, iBookmaster, inserted the installer disk and unchecked all the applications. This causes the installer to repair/install shared applications such as the copy protection files. This worked for me as well and finally, 5 or 6 hours later (minus lunch and a swim) I could open Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver again. Here is the Adobe page that crashes Firfox after 3 minutes… http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/401/kb401528.html

This got me thinking, does Adobe have any competition in the realm of image editing. I don’t think so. Photoshop is like the Bell Telephone of desktop image editing software. Paint.net is good for fixing photos and has layering but is definitely not as comprehensive as Photoshop. Does this worry me? Well, it didn’t until today. Still, Adobe is a rock solid company and I have NEVER had a problem with them. There stuff is a little pricey I suppose but I use the baJesus out of them and make the money back in less than a week.

Tags: adobe, CS3, photoshop, web design