Intellectual Property Law

Bad moments in lawyer advertising

Posted on May 04, 2008
Above the Law reports: Belluck & Fox is a nine-attorney law firm in Manhattan. The firm worked out a deal with the radio station that broadcasts New York Yankees games, making it the official legal sponsor of Yankee radio broadcasts. The folks at Belluck & Fox must have misread the contract though...

Copyright protection for blogs

Posted on May 01, 2008
Sarah Bird explains how to do it right.  She explains why she thinks you would possibly want to bother here, conveniently omitting the uncomfortable fact that — unlike Sarah Bird — most of us don’t really have to worry about the copyright in our blogs being infringed...

Imagine no gelt-crazy gazzilionaire no-talent Beatle widows

Posted on May 01, 2008
Till then, though, Yoko Ono is out there.

“We also invented the color of ink”

Posted on May 01, 2008
Greg Beck: This has to be in the top five dumbest copyright threats I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying a lot. I’ll agree that Greg has seen a lot, but even saying a little less — boy, is this one dumb.

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Top of the heap thingy

Posted on May 01, 2008
LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®, it turns out, is on this new thing — Internet startup guru guy Guy Kawasaki’s “Alltop project“: We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from ?all the top? sites on the web. We?ve grouped these collections ? ?aggregations? ? into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, [...

Couture in Court

Posted on May 01, 2008
Fabulous filings for fashionistas — and those who just want to look like them!

Constitution? But we’re patent lawyers!

Posted on April 30, 2008
Maybe. Maybe not: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office may have a major problem on its hands — the possibly unconstitutional appointment of nearly two-thirds of its patent appeals judges. Such a constitutional flaw, if legitimate, could call into question the hundreds of decisions worth billions of dollars in the past eight years...

Blogger beats lawyer

Posted on April 30, 2008
Blogger Kathleen Seidel pushes back on the Clifford Shoemaker subpoena — all by herself, it seems — and wins.

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great

Posted on April 29, 2008
Those were the days!

Cardiac counterfeiting

Posted on April 29, 2008
It’s not a defense to trademark infringement or counterfeiting that your heart is full of good intentions.

Managing Trademark Litigation

Posted on April 28, 2008
This blog is a “media partner” sponsor for the following upcoming CLE seminar: Managing Trademark Litigation June 10 - 11, 2008 The Helmsley Park Lane New York, NY www.americanconference.com/tmlitigation Managing it? I couldn’t manage without it! Among the speakers are my former partnersBrian Brokate and Heather McDonald and my friends and colleagues Dawn Atlas, Barbara Kolsun and Stephen Feingold — all [...

The target keeps moving on keyword advertising

Posted on April 28, 2008
Searchengineland: Eric Goldman reports that a US District Judge in Florida ordered an advertiser using a trademark term to use the negative keyword option, to ensure that they would no longer bid on that term in the future. The judge ordered the defendant to stop using the word “ORION” in their search ad campaigns, by adding that [...

The trendiest of trends

Posted on April 24, 2008
“Green trademarks” that is. Green-themed, green-related, green to go, green for action! Well, trends aren’t just for marketers — you can find them in the media too. First, Susan Scafidi — trend-tracker extraordinaire, and, as you will see, a trend-maker too...

Mine goodness!

Posted on April 22, 2008
The New York Times: The ?my? prefix has become an easy and increasingly popular shorthand for suggesting that bond between consumers and corporations. Matthew Zook of ZookNIC, a business that analyzes domain names, said domains that start with ?my? more than tripled between 2005 and 2008, to 712,000 from 217,000...

Cyber… what?

Posted on April 21, 2008
“Cyberproperty”? A dubious concept, the dubiousness now analyzed and developed theoretically in this article by Michael Carrier and Greg Lastowka, via Marty Schwimmer.

Likelihood of extrusion

Posted on April 18, 2008
Reprinting my annual Passover post, adjusted for days of the week as they come out this year: Just as I started hitting some kind of [blogging] pace, I’ve been hit by pre-Passover preparations, plus the need to front-load my law practice to make up for the fact that I will be “out of pocket” Sunday and [...

Ben Stein trips over IP

Posted on April 18, 2008
Walter Olson: With all his lawyer chums from Milberg-witness days, you’d think Ben Stein could have saved the makers of his creationist movie from stumbling into textbook IP infringements [Myers, again, WSJ law blog]. Ouch.  Ben is an odd guy.

Strange bedfellows

Posted on April 17, 2008
Parlous times:  John Welch endorses the International Star Registry!

Facing the music

Posted on April 16, 2008
It’s war over the trademark for Facebook! Greenspan, 25, argues Zuckerberg, 23, had no right to trademark the Facebook name in 2005 because the term had been used generically for decades at Harvard University, where they first met. What is more, Greenspan maintains he used the term “Face Book” as part of an online service called [...

Chip off the old block

Posted on April 14, 2008
Is the Patent and Trademark Office the new venue for gossip-column developments?  It appears so: According to public filings, Ivanka Trump recently withdrew applications to [register the] trademark [for] her own name after her father/boss [short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump] signaled his intent to oppose her effort...

The color purple

Posted on April 14, 2008
Cadbury is purple in the face over not being able to secure the wordlwide exclusive rights to the use of the color purple in association with the sale of chocolate — even as against an Australian company that’s been using the two together for almost a century: Cadbury tells me it is ?vigorously appealing? against a [...

Stacking the deck

Posted on April 14, 2008
The National Law Journal, understandably skeptical about the U.S. News rankings, does its own analysis. UPDATE: Huh! And they aren’t the only ones: For many prospective lawyers, the best strategy may be a careful evaluation of the regional job market in the area of the country where they want to work...

A lawyer’s day

Posted on April 11, 2008
A little off topic, but not so much — a slice of life in the law over at Likelihood of Success.

What’s all this about Roommates.com?

Posted on April 11, 2008
It’s probably the most important legal decision involving the Internet of the year, especially because it does not merely affect narrow business or legal segments of the world.  Evan Brown rounds everything up.

Stoller update

Posted on April 09, 2008
The TTABlog® has the latest. I mean, some things you just have to stay on top of if you travel in our circles!

Metatags and infringement: Eleventh Circuit says, “Yes”

Posted on April 09, 2008
Search Engine Land: Eric Goldman reports that an 11th circuit, US Court of Appeals has upheld a district court’s decision that the use of trademark[-protected] terms in meta tags can cause confusion and thus can constitute trademark infringement...

Now you’re what Grammy Hall would call a real…

Posted on April 07, 2008
Right of publicity and trademark lawsuit by Woody Allen, that is! Marty Schwimmer reports and links, and has the complaint, too. Plus a picture of the offending billboard, which I can’t exactly figure out how to get a legit “fair use” copy of...

Subpoenas to bloggers

Posted on April 06, 2008
Walter Olson rounds up blogosphere reaction to the now-famous “Seidel subpoena,” which kind of underwhelmed me but evidently has everyone else up in arms. New Hampshire blogger Kathleen Seidel, whose weblog Neurodiversity presents a fearless, systematically researched, and frequently brilliant ongoing critique of autism vaccine litigation...

Google on the hook?

Posted on April 04, 2008
David Fish sends this along: Vulcan Golf, LLC filed a putative class action lawsuit against Google, Inc. and other defendants, including Oversee.net, Sedo LLC, Dotster, Inc. a/k/a revenuedirect.com. The Defendants sought to have the case thrown out on a motion to dismiss...

“Opening up a dialog”

Posted on April 02, 2008
An in-house friend passes this along, with the note, “A good entry for your continuing series on preposterous misapplications of trademark law”: Deutsche Telekom / T-Mobile demands Engadget Mobile discontinue using the color magenta Yeah, a cease and desist letter is one way to “open up a dialog...

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