bc magazine received a legal threat from Time magazine today about Ryan Lau’s concert poster. A poster that’s been visible around Hong Kong for at least a month, yet not until 4 days after the concert took place did Time allege it infringed their trademark, engage lawyers and make threats of lawsuits.
While time doesn’t legally affect any trademark claim Time may have against Ryan Lau, that it took Time almost 4 weeks to notice the artwork doesn’t say much for the magazine’s observation skills or supposed finger on the pulse of Hong Kong reporting. The poster has been online since before tickets for the concert at KITEC’s Music Zone@E-Max went on sale in September – bc’s not exactly sure of the exact date the tickets were first advertised.
Instead of a polite email asking bc to remove the poster until any dispute Time had with Ryan Lau over the poster was settled. Time threatened bc with a lawsuit and to include bc magazine as a co-defendant with Ryan Lau and Chessman (HK) Ltd.
And this was so important and time sensitive that the work had to be done on a public holiday, a nice bump to someone’s billable hours! We’ve now received the email 6 times – does that makes Time an email spammer?
As far as bc magazine is concerned the use of the poster in-relation to informing our readers about the concert constitutes ‘fair use’. A concept Time relies on all the time in it’s articles and reports.
Until Time’s threat, I’d not personally ever thought of Time in relation to Ryan Lau’s My Time concert and still don’t. Here’s Time’s intimidatory threat letter. According to the attachments, Time only has a trademark for newspapers and periodicals, the artwork is a poster for a concert called My Time.
