Intellectual Property Law

A breath of fresh air!

Posted on March 30, 2011
Sometimes you just get to enjoy the view.  Ain’t I an environmentalist too?  Here, courtesy of the Salt Lake Tribune, is nature at its vicious, and revealing, best: Utah environmental activist Jeff Salt has been quarreling for two years with the green network started by Bobby Kennedy, son of the late Sen...

The fairest one of all?

Posted on March 28, 2011
  Last week we were talking about the issue of copyright morphing into trademark.  Well, how about public domain morphing into copyright, and then trademark? Well, garsh, kids, call me Goofy but — who is the “true Snow White“?  This website wants the world to know she’s not something who was invented by that rat [...

Patent medicine

Posted on March 28, 2011
Originally posted 2008-03-11 11:29:52. Republished by Blog Post Promoter Victoria Pynchon collects and reflects on some of the recent thinking about whether patent litigation makes any sense for anyone besides patent ligitators. Patent medicine ©, .

Lego loses

Posted on March 28, 2011
Originally posted 2008-11-13 12:51:07. Republished by Blog Post Promoter We reported on Lego’s overreaching years ago here and here.  They tried to use trademark rights as a way to protect the design of their toy and avoid competition.  But that is not what trademarks are, much less what they are for...

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Revoke this, I implied. Or something.

Posted on March 24, 2011
Only a real IP lawyer like Pamela Chestek can write about revoking an implied nonexclusive copyright license. And mean it. Revoke this, I implied. Or something. ©, .

Gee, Mail!

Posted on March 24, 2011
Originally posted 2005-09-18 12:14:45. Republished by Blog Post Promoter Didn’t you wonder how it could be that, so late in the game, Google could have a cool name like G-Mail in its pocket ready to go when it rolled out its new service in the last couple of years? (I remember when I first met [...

Shot to Dell

Posted on March 24, 2011
Originally posted 2008-08-18 12:38:47. Republished by Blog Post Promoter Dell’s CLOUD COMPUTING trademark application has gone up in a vapory mass of smoke: Dell cannot register “cloud computing” as a trademark because the term is a generic one describing services offered by many companies, the U...

Google Books settlement takes it on the Chin

Posted on March 22, 2011
I raised questions about the Google Books settlement ages ago. Now some of them have been answered, and Judge Denny Chin’s answer is “no”: While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the [Amended Settlement Agreement] would simply go too far...

Best of 2009: “Intellectual property and its digestion”

Posted on March 22, 2011
Originally posted 2009-12-24 19:57:33. Republished by Old Post Promoter This was first posted on February 20, 2009: Back and forth in in social networking space — once Facebook, I digest some key ingredients of intellectual property as it applies to famous burgers (reprinted with Ivan’s permission): Ivan Kevin Alexander Today at 10:35am Hi Ron, I [...

Ideological purity

Posted on March 22, 2011
Originally posted 2007-01-24 16:18:46. Republished by Old Post Promoter Yahoo News: Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to “purify” the Internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the countrys sprawling, unruly online population...

Scientology pushed back on copyright

Posted on March 22, 2011
Originally posted 2007-08-02 19:52:30. Republished by Old Post Promoter Scientology seems to do a lot better with the Internal Revenue Code than with the Copyright Act: A Colorado nonprofit group has won a critical round in a legal fight against the Church of Scientology, raising questions about whether Scientology has a legal right to keep [...

An answer to the musical question

Posted on March 22, 2011
Originally posted 2007-03-21 19:12:17. Republished by Old Post Promoter Unsurprising news: In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music...

Happy Purim!

Posted on March 19, 2011
Originally posted 2006-03-14 15:00:42. Republished by Old Post Promoter Purim – the holiday that celebrates LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION! Happy Purim! ©, .

More on the SUPER HEROES®

Posted on March 19, 2011
Originally posted 2006-03-30 23:31:07. Republished by Old Post Promoter Attorney Brian Cronin opines on the topic for The Comic Wire. More on the SUPER HEROES® ©, .

Fishy business

Posted on March 19, 2011
Originally posted 2008-02-10 23:19:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter Funny things happen to trademarks in the Casbah.  John Burgess at the Crossroads Arabia blog has a story about a recent incident of Saudi Arabia’s religious police overplaying their considerable hand in connection with the arrest of a Saudi woman for having coffee with a colleague [...

The dark side clouds everything

Posted on March 18, 2011
I am fascinated with IP disputes over costumes, and have written about a few of them.  I have also linked to this piece by Bill Patry, which would seem to be the definitive treatment.  It is, after all, by Bill Patry. Now is six years later though and perhaps we live in a galaxy far, [...

Good Job, Steve

Posted on March 18, 2011
Originally posted 2005-05-13 12:29:00. Republished by Old Post PromoterAs predicted in this space, Wired News reports that the publicity generated by Apple’s ham-fisted exile of a new book about Steve Jobs from its own stores has resulted in such strong demand for the book that the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, has “doubled the print [...

Piece of fake

Posted on March 18, 2011
Originally posted 2006-07-25 00:33:11. Republished by Old Post Promoter The Carnival of Fakes is up! Piece of fake ©, .

It was twenty years ago today

Posted on March 18, 2011
Originally posted 2007-02-05 10:10:12. Republished by Old Post Promoter Okay, not quite 20, but 16 years ago that Apple Inc. and the Beatles’ old record label, Apple Corps, entered into an agreement regarding the two companies’ use of Apple-related trademarks...

Zediva: The world’s longest extension cord

Posted on March 17, 2011
The AP reports that a small California (of course) company thinks it has a brilliant idea, a way to out-Netflix Netflix: Zediva Inc. is going to make available for viewing on subscribers? Internet devices new movies as soon as they are available on DVD...

Long time passing

Posted on March 17, 2011
Originally posted 2010-03-03 23:59:47. Republished by Old Post PromoterMichael Atkins asks the musical question:  Where have all the good (rock band) names gone? P.S:  Not here. Long time passing ©, .

Blogging is hard

Posted on March 16, 2011
Just a week or so ago I apologized for blogging about blogging, and here I am again — soon it’s going to be like Twitter around here, where all the social media gurus tweet about how important Twitter is. The good news, however, is that no one thinks blogging is important any more anyway, so [...

It’s Not Infringement if You’re Just an Indexer?

Posted on March 16, 2011
Originally posted 2005-10-31 00:05:56. Republished by Old Post Promoter Now the “your information wants to be free for me” crowd is, not surprisingly, lining up on the writers-vs.-Google litigation. The Holy One — no, not him – Lawrence Lessig writes (via Copyfight): Google wants to index content...

Brunt of the twitter

Posted on March 14, 2011
  It’s been a while since I’ve posted that one-in-a-million social media filler, Topical Tweets forwarded via @roncoleman.  So now I am: RT @abaipl: RT: @ipwatchdog The expansion of overlapping intellectual property rights | Or “claims” to such rights RT @ericgoldman: Savvy Louisiana ruling on metatags–Southern Snow v...

“Consumer fraud”: The new online speech control law?

Posted on March 14, 2011
Originally posted 2008-03-19 13:10:44. Republished by Old Post Promoter Get this: New Jersey prosecutors have subpoenaed records of JuicyCampus.com, a Web site that publishes anonymous, often malicious gossip about college students. Language on the site ranges from catty to hateful and offensive...

Ninth Circuit. Keywords. Trademarks. Hike!

Posted on March 11, 2011
Here’s a roundup of what other people are saying about the decision in Network Automation, Inc. v. Advanced System Concepts, Inc. involving keyword advertising using other folks’ trademarks (a form of the dreaded “diversion“!) and secondary liability for trademark infringement: Marty Schwimmer:  ”‘Forget it Jake, It’s the Ninth Circuit’ - I’m stealing that joke from Prof Tushnet’s [...

PatentRoom.com

Posted on March 11, 2011
Originally posted 2007-03-07 09:23:17. Republished by Blog Post PromoterIt’s a website about “Early Design and Illustration | Patent Design | Car Drawings | Building Design | Toy Design.” PatentRoom.com ©, .

Rhapsody of confusion

Posted on March 11, 2011
Originally posted 2007-03-29 00:19:32. Republished by Blog Post PromoterIn which we consider the musical question: Gershwin as a Trademark? Rhapsody of confusion ©, .

Dubious assignations

Posted on March 09, 2011
Steve Baird generously linked back to this LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® post in writing about the trademark status of some singer’s signature at the superb, now-two-years old Duets Blog.  His novel question: Do you suppose TS fans have an expectation that the Taylor Swift signature trademark represents her actual, personal signature? If so, would their decision to purchase goods be affected [...

Where there’s a will, there’s a Wii

Posted on March 09, 2011
Originally posted 2006-12-11 15:53:41. Republished by Blog Post Promoter No, it’s not an estate planning offer, but close. Robert Ambrogi reports that this patent lawyer — whose law firm has actually invented the best-ever, if not the only, useful, pleasing and amusing Flash introduction for a law firm — will file a free provisional patent [...

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