Here's a random story, found via Kottke, highlighting how Pixar came very close to losing a very large portion of Toy Story 2, because someone did an rm * (non geek: "remove all" command). And that's when they realized that their backups hadn't been working for a month. Then, the technical director of the film noted that, because she wanted to see her family and kids, she had been making copies of the entire film and transferring it to her home computer. After a careful trip from the Pixar offices to her home and back, they discovered that, indeed, most of the film was saved:
Now, mostly, this is just an amusing little anecdote, but two things struck me:

1. How in the world do they not have more "official" backups of something as major as Toy Story 2. In the clip they admit that it was potentially 20 to 30 man-years of work that may have been lost. It makes no sense to me that this would include a single backup system.
2. I wonder if the copy, made by technical director Galyn Susman, was outside of corporate policy. You would have to imagine that at a place like Pixar, there were significant concerns about things "getting out," and so the policy likely wouldn't have looked all that kindly on copies being used on home computers.

The Mythbusters folks wonder if this story was a little over-dramatized, and others have wondered how the technical director would have "multiple terabytes of source material" on her home computer back in 1999. That resulted in an explanation from someone who was there that what was deleted was actually the database containing the master copies of the characters, sets, animation, etc. rather than the movie itself. Of course, once again, that makes you wonder how it is that no one else had a simple backup. You'd think such a thing would be backed up in dozens of places around the globe for safe keeping...

It appears that Disney's Pixar division is engaged in two separate, but interesting, trademark battles (though the two are quite different). The first involves a Canadian oil company that decided to call its new division Pixar Petroleum. Turns out that Pixar isn't happy about that and is taking legal action. One of the points raised is that Pixar chief John Lasseter is a big proponent of alternative fuels and may not like any association with an oil company. Of course, that alone doesn't make for a reasonable trademark claim. In fact, I'm wondering if there is a reasonable trademark claim here at all. Trademarks cover the specific industries in which you use the mark in commerce, and despite movies like Cars, it seems like a pretty big reach to suggest that digital animation studio Pixar is in the same industry as oil producing Pixar. While it might cause a doubletake, I'm not sure that any of your traditional morons in a hurry would actually think that the characters from Toys were setting up oil refineries in Canada.

In this second dispute, Pixar finds itself on the other side of the coin. The major league baseball team, the Atlanta Braves, are apparently trying to dispute Pixar's attempt to register Brave as a trademark. Pixar wants the name because it's releasing a movie with that name. Of course, the baseball team doesn't actually hold a registered trademark on just "Brave." Instead its registered marks are on the plural version. This doesn't entirely exclude their protest, as they can argue a common law trademark or a likelihood of confusion.

Either way, I'm at a loss as to where the confusion would be here as well. I don't see anyone going to see the Pixar movie and then being disappointed that it wasn't a baseball game.

We usually focus on trademark lawsuits that make no sense at all... but effective trademark law exists to prevent confusion among consumers (i.e., it's really more of a consumer protection law, rather than an "intellectual property" law) and thus there are plenty of reasonable trademark infringement lawsuits out there. This appears to be one of them. Lamp maker Luxo is apparently suing Disney for selling real versions of Pixar's iconic computer animated lamp. Pixar, of course, has long used the lamp as a part of its logo: At first, I thought perhaps Luxo was suing Disney because of the similarities to Luxo's lamps. But the issue is that Disney is now selling a real version of the Pixar lamp... and bizarrely decided to market it as "The Luxo Jr." Yes, everyone admits that John Lasseter designed the lamp to look like the Luxo lamp, but why call it that when selling it? It's amazing that of all the trademark lawyers at Disney, none of them suspected there might be a complaint from the real Luxo, if Disney were to sell a lamp using the Luxo name. This is a situation where not only a moron in a hurry, but your everyday lamp buyer, might reasonably assume that the Disney Luxo Jr. lamp is actually made by Luxo.

So, two questions: who at Disney allowed this to go forward? And why didn't Disney and Luxo just do the most obvious thing and have Luxo make the lamps for Disney?