TVSquad

The Chicago Tribune has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit to stop the Fox News Channel from using the name Red Eye for its late-night round table show. For those of you outside of Chicago, RedEye is a weekday offering from the Tribune aimed at readers in their 20s and 30s. The Tribune has also requested unspecified damages. You may be wondering to yourself, did the Tribune sue the film Red Eye, too? No, they didn't, but the Tribune isn't just delivering the karmic comeuppance to Fox for their own "fair and balanced" lawsuit. There's a reason why the Tribune has gone all litigious.

Because Red Eye, which features blogger Greg Gutfeld as its host, covers current events, politics and pop culture in a colloquial manner - much as the Tribune's tabloid offering does - the assumption might be made that the two are collaborating. I'm not sure who would make that assumption, but apparently, someone would. So, there you go, another day in the life of intellectual property law.

YouTube has kind of a weird policy when it comes to copyrights. Essentially, they will leave a clip up on their site until the copyright holder contacts them and tells them to take it down. I guess it's easier to do it that way than to police the thousands of clips that get uploaded to the site every day. But that does leave it open to infringement lawsuits.

So, the fact that no one's sued them until now is equally strange. Robert Tur, a freelance news reporter, is the first to do it, suing the site for putting up his report on the 1992 L.A. riots without his permission. Now, the folks at YouTube took the clip down after he requested it, but Tur decided to sue anyway. This ought to be an interesting case; even though the site cooperated with his request, was it still up long enough to infringe upon his copyright? The site says the case is "without merit", but I'm not so sure about that. What do you folks think?