Names keep entrepreneurs up at night. I recently read this post about Redmonk Development’s odyssey to claim ownership of their chosen handle. While their case never went to court, it took seven years for them to receive full web domain rights to their name after a slow and frustrating process of securing the official hand-over from the previous owner of redmonk.net and @redmonk.

This reminded me of another “what’s in a name” battle that I witnessed play out in a very different venue. In late 2002, I went to a punk show in my Texas hometown to see American Nightmare, a Boston band I had seen play the year before. I ended up seeing American Nothing, a band noticeably weighed down by litigation.

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“Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.”

Andy Warhol recognized the undercurrent of business running through the New York art world long before his contemporaries. Even as the banner of Abstract Expressionism was raised high by artists and the US establishment alike, Warhol envisioned a cool, detached idiom wholly alien to the passionate spontaneity of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. In 1957, less than a year after Pollock’s death, Warhol incorporated Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc., and went on to single-handedly create an artistic philosophy that would influence generations of “business artists.”

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The last time you flashed someone a peace sign or a thumbs up, you weren’t worried about committing a trademark violation. These signals are squarely in the public domain. However, if you were considering touching your index fingers and thumbs together and spreading your hands, palms outward, into a diamond, I would think twice. In the eyes of the law, you would be a thief.

That is an exaggeration. You would really only draw fire if you attempted to profit from the gesture in any way. This is because this hand sign has already been trademarked by Shawn Carter, the New York rapper better known to the world as Jay-Z. Mr. Carter has four registered trademarks on this hand-sign (#3584075, #3584076, #3568293, and #3568294 if you want to look them up yourself) protect his exclusive right to this particular design as it is used in clothing, apparel, and digital media.

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