Copyright Infringement

As noted in the “What Is Copyright” section, copyright infringement is a “strict liability”, and as such is one of the primary reasons (from the KIAA perspective) for treating it somewhat differently than music piracy. For a detailed explanation of “copyright infringement” please refer to the section on “What Is Copyright Infringement”.

Trademark Infringement

Trademark infringement occurs when a company’s wordmark or logo (providing the logo was registered as a trademark and not copyrighted in which case would be a copyright infringement) has been copied or used without permission of the rightful owner of the trademark, in similar fashion as to the bootlegging scenario below.   It can also be deemed a trademark infringement if a trademark has been designed to look like or cause confusion in the marketplace with another existing trademark.

Another variation of trademark infringement is what is known as trade dress infringement.  Often times when a company brands its products many of the features associated with those products such as colour schemes or other features used to identify with those products, become “inherently distinctive” and therefore are protected against unauthorized exploitation by others.

Bootleg

While bootlegging covers a wide category of violations, the term however is often reserved to depict counterfeit products.  It is usually accomplished by either placing the trademark(s) of a particular company on a counterfeit or knock-off product or vice-versa.  A good example of bootlegged products would be that of the counterfeit Rolex watches that proliferate the sidewalks in the city of New York.  Bootlegging and counterfeiting is big business and the revenue from these black market industries have even been used to fund terrorist organizations and other unscrupulous groups.

In the karaoke industry bootlegs are not as big of a problem as in other industries such as the footwear and designer fashions industries but nevertheless have still made their way into the karaoke marketplace.   What is increasingly becoming a problem however, is a different form of counterfeiting where audio content from existing karaoke products has been stolen and used to “re-author” with new onscreen lyrics to create a counterfeit brand.  The KIAA has taken note of this and has already begun to investigate some of these products which are suspected to have been produced in this manner.