Tag Archive for: Comic

Ransomware comic looks to bring detective noir to the computer age


“What do you know about Johnstown, Pennsylvania?”

“I know it rains.”

“Well grab your rain boots. I have a ransomware incident at Gotham Steel and I need your help.”

“Ransomware? Must be a day that ends in Y…”

Thus begins the new saga of Johnny Dollar, a fictional private detective turned insurance investigator whose old school, noir-ish, crime-fighting escapades are being reset decades into the future to tackle one of the most pressing and disruptive crimes of the digital age: digital extortion.

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar began as a radio serial on Feb. 18, 1949. Johnny, a hard-boiled private dick in the mold of Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade, earned his paycheck solving crimes for hire, chasing down mafiosos, murderers and fraudsters. The series ran for more than 800 episodes on CBS Radio before eventually ending in 1962.

Today, his story is being relaunched in the form of a new comic book being created by Allan Liska, an analyst at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Like Liska, the new Johnny Dollar will be spending his days investigating ransomware crimes and helping victims whose world has been turned upside down by ruthless gangs of criminals who use computers instead of guns to carry out their criminal schemes.

Insurance investigator Johnny Dollar gets the scoop on an emerging ransomware attack at a steel mill in Pennsylvania. (Source: Allan Liska)

Liska – as he takes pains to point out in an interview – is not quite old enough to have caught show during its original run, but he does have fond memories of listening to old radio shows Sunday nights while studying as a high school student. He’d catch Casey Kasem’s Top 40, then switch over Superman and the Lone Ranger, but “my absolute favorite one was Johnny Dollar.”

Unlike Superman and the Lone Ranger, no one ever made a successful follow up about Johnny Dollar after it’s radio run (several short-lived efforts to make a TV show never made it past the pilot-stage), something that allowed the franchise to lapse into public domain.

That provided an opening for Liska to create a new version of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, this time set in modern times and focused – like his work – on the scourge of…

Source…

More Comic Conventions Change Their Names After Crazy SDCC Attorney’s Fees And Injunction Ruling

We were just talking about the odd ruling that came down in which the court overseeing the trademark dispute between the San Diego Comic-Con and the former Salt Lake Comic Con somehow awarded $ 4 million in attorney’s fees, despite the jury award for trademark infringement amounting only to $ 20k. In addition to the award of attorney’s fees, Judge Battaglia also issued an injunction barring the Salt Lake show from calling itself any variation of the term “comic con” but, oddly, refused to issue a similar injunction barring it from calling itself a “comic convention.” As we noted at the time, it’s plainly absurd that the “vention” difference there is doing that much heavy lifting in the court’s mind.

But the reverberations of the ruling are now being felt throughout the country, with one company that puts on many comic conventions doing sweeping name changes for many of its shows.

Tampa Bay Comic Con has changed its name to Tampa Bay Comic Convention. The change comes less than two weeks after a federal judge in California ordered organizers of Salt Lake Comic Con to pay nearly $ 4 million in attorneys’ fees and costs to San Diego Comic Convention in a trademark infringement suit.

Tampa Bay Comic Con co-founder Stephen Solomon, a manager at Imaginarium, the company that has run Tampa Bay Comic Con and similarly-branded comic conventions around the U.S. since 2010, confirmed the name change Wednesday after re-branded images appeared on the convention’s social media. Solomon declined to comment on whether that ruling had anything to do with the Tampa Bay Comic Con name change.

He can decline to comment on that all he wants, but it’s pretty plain what is going on here. Those putting on other comic conventions throughout the country have been keeping a watchful eye on the fight between SLCC and SDCC. With this enormous award of attorney’s fees after such a paltry judgement, convention organizers are simply doing the math and realizing that even if they convince a jury that its infringement isn’t willful in the future, they can still get slammed with attorney’s fees. They also likely know that after the ruling on the injunction that prevents SLCC from using any variation of the “comic con” term, the SDCC is surely coming for them next. And, so, they unilaterally disarm.

It’s at this point that I will insist again on pointing out how absurd every last bit of this is. To allow “comic con” to be a trademarkable term, but to admit that “comic convention” is not because of its descriptive nature, is so silly as to make one’s head hurt. For millions of dollars to be exchanged because of the difference between those two terms, all on the pretense that the public is somehow confused as to whether the SDCC is in charge of all of these conventions, is crazy-pants. For the result of all of this to be tens or hundreds of other conventions proactively changing their generic names to slightly more generic names is downright infuriating.

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San Diego Comic-Con Petitions Judge To Have Salt Lake Comic Con Pay Its Attorney’s Fees, Bar It From Calling Itself A ‘Comic Convention’

Perhaps you thought that the legal drama between the famous San Diego Comic-Con and the Salt Lake Comic Con was over. Our ongoing coverage of this trademark dispute stemming from SDCC somehow having a valid trademark on “comic-con”, a shortened descriptor phrase for a comic convention, largely concluded when SDCC “won” in court, being awarded $ 20,000 after initially asking for $ 12 million in damages. With the focus now turning to the roughly gazillion other comic conventions that exist using the “comic-con” phrase in their names and marketing materials, this particular dispute seemed to have come to a close.

But not so much, actually. In post-trial motions, SDCC petitioned Judge Battaglia to consider the case “exceptional” so that SDCC can recover attorney’s fees from SLCC. The arguement for SDCC appears to mostly be that they spent a shit-ton of money on attorneys for the case.

U.S. District Judge Anthony Battaglia heard a host of posttrial motions Thursday, including San Diego Comic-Con’s request for over $ 4.5 million in attorney fees which have already been paid in full. San Diego Comic-Con attorney Callie Bjurstrom with Pillsbury Law told Battaglia Thursday he should find the case is “exceptional” so that attorney fees and costs can be awarded.

“This was a very expensive case; the reason this case was so expensive was because of defendants and their counsel and the way they litigated this case,” Bjurstrom said.

It will be interesting to see how Judge Battaglia rules on the assertion that SLCC’s defense of itself warrants its paying SDCC’s attorney’s fees. What exactly was SLCC supposed to do, not try to defend itself in the best way possible? One also wonders if SDCC would be petitioning for attorney’s fees had the jury found that SLCC’s infringement was not willful, resulting in the paltry $ 20k award. Perhaps, perhaps not. What this sure looks like is the SDCC realizing that this “win” came at the cost of a hilariously large amount of money and it is attempting to mitigate that loss.

SDCC also petitioned the court to bar SLCC from using its trademarks. That sort of thing would be par for the course except for two things. First, again, this trademark is ridiculous. It’s purely descriptive. Second, hammering home that fact, SDCC doesn’t want SLCC to even be able to properly describe the type of event it is.

But San Diego Comic-Con’s request went a step further than simply asking Battaglia to enjoin the Salt Lake convention operators from infringing its trademarks: it asked the judge to bar the Salt Lake convention from using the words “comic convention” or phonetic equivalents to “Comic Con” or “comic convention.”

That request should lay plain how dumb this all is. If a comic convention cannot refer to itself as such because that is too close to the trademark “comic-con”, then it should be plain as day that “comic-con” is purely descriptive and, therefore, invalid as a trademark. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this petition to the court turn up at the USPTO in a bid to cancel SDCC’s trademark entirely. That’s certainly what I would be doing if I were heading up any of the hundreds of comic cons out there.

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Salt Lake Comic Con Files For A New Trial And Seeks Round 2

In the wake of San Diego Comic-Con winning its years-long lawsuit against Salt Lake Comicon over its trademark on the term “comic-con”, much of the media coverage was somewhat apocalyptic as to what the consequences would be for cons across the country. Despite the payout for winning the suit being a paltry $ 20k, more focus was put on just how other cons would react. The early returns are mixed, with some proactively undergoing name-changes to avoid litigation and others staying stalwart. The point we have made all along is that this win for SDCC was not some ultimate final act on the matter.

And, as many predicted, it appears that win wasn’t even the final act with regards to its SLCC foe, as the Utah-based con has filed for a new trial.

The Salt Lake lawyers filed the paperwork on Tuesday in response to last month’s eight-day trial in U.S. District Court, during which jurors decided that the California convention’s trademarks are valid. The jury found that the infringement was not willful and awarded $ 20,000 in damages to the San Diego Comic-Con, which had sought $ 12 million.

The Salt Lake lawyers say evidence was wrongly excluded during trial and improper jury instructions undercut the evidence.

It will be very interesting to see where this goes, because many of us that observed the goings on of the initial trial were surprised at its outcome. From a trademark perspective, the arguments for genericide raised by SLCC seemed quite obvious. The evidence of genericide is present in every bit of follow up coverage one sees dealing with how many other shows with some version of “comic con” in their names are either changing those names or standing firm and continuing to use them. The phrase is everywhere in the industry, which only makes sense, given that the phrase is essentially nothing more than a description of the type of show being conducted. Part of the issue raised in the filing for a new trial appears to be how much the jury was allowed to hear about other cons using the term nationwide.

Part of the excluded evidence was testimony about the use of “comic con” by third-party competitors, which could make the term generic, the motion says. In addition, according to the motion, the trial judge gave a defective instruction that said competitive use is inadequate to establish genericness.

It’s easy to see how such misguided instructions and barring of relevant evidence would give rise to such an erroneous verdict. Regardless, it seems likely that there will be more to come in round two of the wrath of cons.

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