Intellectual Property Law

Truth, justice and the American way

Posted on April 01, 2008
Jeff Trexler writes about what he describes as an historic decision in a case pitting the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and DC Comics, also reported here in the New York Times. “Here’s the stirring conclusion,” he says: After seventy years, Jerome Siegel?s heirs regain what he granted so long ago ? the copyright [...

Little IP

Posted on March 31, 2008
Pennywit writes in: Seems to be a minor discussion of elfin IP over at Volokh Conspiracy (look in the comments). I’m curious — even if the elves own the process of forging magic rings, wouldn’t their failure to take action when Sauron crafted the Seven and the Nine contribute to some sort of dilution defense? Patents [...

MLB, IP piggies, strike again

Posted on March 31, 2008
Susan Scafidi writes about a guy who was stopped by Major League Baseball from selling “baseball shirts” that look like this (on the right): Huh? Her take: While typefaces themselves are not protected by copyright, their use is frequently an essential trademark element...

Knockoff News 79

Posted on March 31, 2008
We let this one slip by, just to see if you’d notice!

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Laughs, enlightenment assured

Posted on March 31, 2008
Declarations and Exclusions hosts this week’s Blawg Review!

The doomsday patent

Posted on March 28, 2008
National Public Radio: The U.S. atomic bomb was such a secret, scientists and engineers sometimes talked in code. It was the Manhattan Project, not “The Atomic Bomb Project.” Plutonium was referred to as “copper,” and the bomb itself as “the gadget...

What Brown can do to you

Posted on March 27, 2008
Go figure: United Parcel Service Inc., the world’s largest package-delivery company, sued a lawyer in Lakewood, N.J., for trademark infringement. Samuel Z. Brown, of The Law Offices of Samuel Z. Brown, infringed the parcel-delivery service’s various ?Brown? trademarks, the company claims in its complaint filed March 19 in New York federal court...

Defense not the best offense

Posted on March 26, 2008
Evan Brown reports on a failed attempt to utilize the affirmative defense of ?copyright misuse? as an independent cause of action.

Overlawyered

Posted on March 24, 2008
Check out Overlawyered’s new redesign! Rowr! 

Creeping famous-mark-ism

Posted on March 24, 2008
The TTABlog® comments on a TTAB decision finding, not surprisingly, that two similar looking trademarks are likely to be confused, but raises a key point about how the brand-equity-rich really are different: I think the marks PLAYBOY and PLAY BODY are just too dang similar in spelling: the latter could easily be misread to be the [...

Copyright belongs to the ages

Posted on March 23, 2008
Media Wonk: No wonder they call Economics the Dismal Science. At the Internet Video Policy Symposium in Washington yesterday (co-sponsored by Content Agenda), a chorus line of academic economists postulated that content owners face a far more difficult challenge than they know in monetizing their content on the Internet, and that the odds that we can [...

MLB whiffs on the right of publicity

Posted on March 22, 2008
Alec Rogers: In recent decades, Major League Baseball has made great strides in developing its business operation. No longer content to make money from tickets, concession sales, and a few radio and TV contracts, it has created an entirely new joint venture, Major League Baseball Advanced Media (?BAM?), that allows the baseball club owners to fully [...

Trademark rights, speech rights

Posted on March 22, 2008
Public Citizen: A federal judge today upheld a Georgia man?s First Amendment right to criticize Wal-Mart?s business practices by using satire to compare its destructive effects on communities to both the Holocaust and al-Qaeda terrorists.In rejecting the company?s claim of trademark infringement, the U...

Number Nine

Posted on March 19, 2008
Trademork: On March 11, 2008, two New Yorkers, eager to capitalize on the Eliot Spitzer situation, filed to protect the trademark Client 9 in relation to a variety of clothing items and apparel. Awful, and more or less a repeat of this kind of nonsense.

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

Posted on March 19, 2008
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. One thread, for example, on the “most overrated Princeton student” quickly dissolves into name-calling, homophobia and anti-Semitism...

When worlds collide

Posted on March 19, 2008
Patent and trademark… and Bill Patry and the Ninth Circuit (via US Law Blogs).

Update on Lady Voldemort

Posted on March 19, 2008
We first wrote about her lawsuit against a fansite operator here. Sam Bayard has the latest.  .

“Fraud on the PTO”

Posted on March 18, 2008
Here’s a special guest post on the TTABlog that lays out the state of the law regarding the increasingly confusing, and sometimes distressing, issue for trademark lawyers of what constitutes “fraud” in the prosecution and maintenance of federal trademark applications and registrations...

The Web is different

Posted on March 16, 2008
It’s a reasonably fair ruling, as reported, but the distinction is not obvious: Craigslist is not liable for discriminatory housing ads posted on its Web site, a federal appeals court has ruled. The decision is a victory for the Internet bulletin board where every month more than 30 million people post offers to buy, sell or rent [...

Who’s yer daddy?

Posted on March 16, 2008
Marc Randazza does a great job in explaining, and suggesting at least one answer to the question, “Is GoDaddy a Cybersquatter?”

Modern problems

Posted on March 13, 2008
Jonathan Gewirtz: If you submit electronic files e.g., digital photographs on a CD to the US Copyright Office as part of a copyright application, the Copyright Office stores your CD but does not transfer the files on it to its computers or other durable media...

Scrabulous update?

Posted on March 12, 2008
We wrote about the attempt by the owners of the SCRABBLE trademark to shut down Scrabulous a while ago.  So what ever happened with all that? I have no idea.  The application is still up on Facebook. I have never heard of a settlement or resolution, and searching for one via Google, I can’t find any [...

The latest on 47 USC 230

Posted on March 12, 2008
Catchy title, eh? Well, I’ll leave it to Eugene Volokh to explain: This statute immunizes Internet Service Providers, Web site operators, and others from being held liable for what their users post. Thus, for instance, if you post something defamatory in the comments, we won’t be liable for it to the defamed party, though you [...

What’s in a name?

Posted on March 11, 2008
If it’s a “meatball sundae,” perhaps very little you’d want to eat. How much, really, does a name matter in business success?  As I have mentioned before, clients have come to me with checkbooks in hand, eager to register trademarks for products or services as yet unproduced and unserved, with no business plan besides what they [...

Patent medicine

Posted on March 11, 2008
Victoria Pynchon collects and reflects on some of the recent thinking about whether patent litigation makes any sense for anyone besides patent ligitators.

Campaigning through trademarks

Posted on March 11, 2008
TradeMark Express runs down the latest in the horse race among the presidential candidates (and, it seems, those who want to profit somehow from their names) in the trademark registration sweepstakes. It’s a good and original blog post that demonstrates how utterly abused the IP system is in this country...

Prepothterouth Patentth

Posted on March 11, 2008
Forbes.com lays out the case for patent reform, the way we “soft IP” guys like it – in pictures.

Dare me!

Posted on March 10, 2008
Uncivil Society: If there were ever a must-read Trademark Trial and Appeal Board opinion explaining whether a mark is “merely descriptive” or eligible for registration, In re CauseForce would be it. Talk about throwing down the gauntlet!

Trademark and Branding Updates

Posted on March 07, 2008
TM Branding Cap, with yet another roundup feature!

Virtually athletic

Posted on March 04, 2008
Marc Edelman at Abovethelaw: On Friday, February 22, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, L.P. (?MLBAM?) and the Major League Baseball Players Association (?MLBPA?) filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court (No. 07-1099), seeking to overturn the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals? ruling that the first amendment protects free use of [...

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