The Avandia law firm looks like it's using footage of Valley RR #40 for a commercial advertising services to sue railroads for past employee environmental exposure.

Have seen it several times on CNN lately - the 'firm' is simply an 800-number that I won't repost here.

It's a nose-on shot of 40, "Valley" is never identified or shown, but I somewhat suspect that the last people getting anything out of the is Valley.... not that I don't think injury and accident lawyers might ever do anything like that....

I have not seen the commercial, however Avandia is a trade name for Rosiglitazone, produced by Glaxo Smith Kline, which is used for managing Type 2 Diabetes. It is the subject of a major class action lawsuit and several smaller suits alleging a failure by Glaxo to fully disclose dangerous side effects.

I do not seem to be able to find a firm using Avandia as its name, but I did find a few where there is overlap between their FELA and Mass Tort practices who have been involved in the Avandia lawsuits.

Would you check the name if you see the commercial again and send me the phone number back channel?

Thanks
GME

Brother Wilkins - Are you aware of this?

This is likely to be one of those 'fake information sites' where people who may have been harmed by a 'bad drug' are encouraged to call a central toll-free number to find out if they are entitled to 'large money damages'. The actual law firms involved are hidden in the fine print, as is the actual response when anyone calls the number.

I thought it was settled back in 2012 that Glaxo Smith Kline was fined something like $3 billion by the Feds and then settled with the states for another $90 million. It would seem to me that this might make some individual class action suits lucrative with little downside risk, hence the happy TV budget...

As always, interested in hearing the practical legal nuts-n-bolts of these things from our ethical barristers.

Ignoring the specifics of the shady dealings in this case and the general proliferation of class action lawsuits, I wonder about the legality of using that image.

It could quite possibly be "Stock Footage" they purchased. You say the railroad is not identified or shown. I wonder just how generic an image of a steam locomotive has to be before it's acceptable. Certainly a select few will recognize it, but what about the general public?

If I'm a photographer selling train photos for stock images, how far do I have to go to make them stock? I've seen photos of diesels that were clearly UP or BNSF, but had the lettering Photoshopped out. Would that stand up in court?

Can I sell a photo of a Amtrak train, with Amtrak carefully air-brushed out to a lawyer fishing for claims of train wreck victims? It would still be easily identified I'm guessing.

Just tossing this out there for thought, as I suspect it's far too generic of a question to have an actual answer.

But I wonder what basis, if any, the Valley would have if the image was purchased as stock, and it is not readily identifiable to the average person?

I'm not a lawyer and don't play one on TV. Please seek professional help in case of a lawsuit lasting more than 4 hours. May not be reproduced without express permission from the commissioner of baseball.

My favorite class action commercial as the one urging visitors to call. "Have you or loved one experienced (random symptoms) or death, please call..." Do they get a lot of dead people calling? Maybe Chicago voters?

I haven't seen the ad, but it was in all likelihood stock footage. It may be difficult to restrict how such images are used once they're out there. Is it this clip from Shutterstock? https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-7433503-stock-footage-essex-connecticut-sept-the-essex-steam-train-of-the-valley-railroad-on-september-in.html?src=search/4Ruu6vzCbuvjCV2PyFLpMA:1:2/3p

The linked clip is restricted to editorial use only, not advertising, and appears to have been made with the railroad's consent.

I saw it a couple of times, and it reminded me of Nevada Northern #40

LOL, what a great way to express when to take something on pro-se versus get some help.

Anyway, if I shoot your train from a public space, I get to use the footage whether your logo's in it or not. Old Navy can't stop me posting pictures of a mall. Or even using them commercially. You may think that from larger TV shows which (often sloppily) cover up the names of products, readily apparent any time a laptop computer is seen. That's not a trademark liability issue. That's an unwillingness to promote any brand without a promotional consideration, perhaps from having asked and failed. They could do it anyway, unpaid, and many do, either because it's character-defining (Walter White's Pontiac Aztek, the hacker anti-heroine's stylized Macbook), or they want their sets to reflect the real world (every character has a different brand of phone), or to set a sense of time or place (The Studebaker), or the production is too small for product placement fees to be important.

Anyway I have seen plenty of movies with Union Pacific brand trains rumbling by in the background.

You are allowed to film the real world. The question is whether the work, taken as a whole, would cause a reasonable person to infer a business connection, endorsement, etc. That is, are they trading on your name?

And they can't say the train just happened to be in the shot. Directors "game" the presence of ambient trains in backgrounds of shots, to signify urban grit or a rural industrial town. They cue their actors to sync with the train movement. They haven't properly mic'ed the train, but they want viewers to notice it, so they have their foleys add train sounds back in - right down to the generic stock horn sound, with a crossing nowhere in the shot. So this usage goes far beyond the ambient presence of an unexpected, unsought train. Is this a business connection or not?

Clearly, history says "not".

Blurred/removed branding certainly does happen because of trademark issues... and sometimes that's not even enough. Remember UP's issue with Mike Watt 21 years ago? An armour yellow and grey locomotive with no lettering was enough to trigger legal action. And, yes, the issue was compounded by the action that took place in the work which was not becoming of what -according to the railroad- was clearly a UP train.

http://www.mtv.com/news/505936/mike-watts-runaway-train/

It was a good tune...

Diden't we already have this discussion with the attempted trademark of the 611. Trainlawyer feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but anybody can film or photo your equipment and sell videos or posters of it. As for trademark how many of you guys pay the trademark holders for the New Haven logo, Penn Central or Conrail logos on posters and other such merchandise you sell featuring your equipment that still have that branding on it?

Got me looking around, I found it on YouTube.

The lettering was still there--but the train was in HO scale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLPQOcaF0jo

Note--this is on YouTube at half speed for "copyright issues." click on the gear icon at the right to play at twice the speed it is posted at to get correct speed.

Thanks for the link! I don't recall seeing the "unblurred" version before.

For part of my time at MTV the office adjacent to mine was used by the standards & practices team to review new video. They had a tough job. My time there started a few years after the Mike Watt video came out, so I wasn't there for that discussion. Wish I could have been!

Rob

So that must have been back when it was Music TV instead of Moronic TV?

Now they don't seem to have much in the way of standards other than "will it sell?"