Intellectual Property Law

Best of 2009: “All that know-chow costs some scratch!”

Posted on January 01, 2010
This was first posted on August 26, 2009. Legal Blog Watch: Pet food giant Purina is like a dog that won’t give up its bone — or in this case, its chow. Three years ago, Purina sent a cease-and-desist letter to Chow, Baby!, a Baltimore area pet supply shop and Web site owned by Robin [...

Some intel on INTEL®

Posted on January 01, 2010
Had you heard about this one from Mike Masnick? Chip giant Intel has a bit of a reputation for being a trademark bully at times, threatening or suing many companies just for having “intel” in their name somewhere — including a travel agency and a jeans company...

Best of 2009: “Fraud on the PTO: Is it real, or all in my mind?”

Posted on January 01, 2010
This was first posted on September 3, 2009. Big decision, via the TTABlog®: The worm, finally, finally, has turned on the issue of the cancellation of trademark registrations based on “fraud on the PTO,” typically arising where the description of goods and services in a registration application is found to be innacurate...

Fabulous logos

Posted on January 01, 2010
Republished by Blog Post PromoterRadar considers “The World’s Gayest Logos.” I’m just glad to see a little talk of optimism and glee in the trademark field, believe me.

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Writing on to Blawg Review

Posted on January 01, 2010
Originally posted 2005-04-11 00:00:00. Republished by Blog Post PromoterI didn’t “go out” for law review in law school — don’t get me started – and my career has been a pretty sordid exercise since then because of it...

Best of 2009: “The LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® Twitter manifesto”

Posted on December 31, 2009
This was first posted on July 27, 2009. The authors of many of the blogs I read that are topically related to this one now use Twitter. So do a lot of other people, and mostly they seem to talk about Twitter. They not only fail to recognize this as a problem, but I [...

Best of 2009: “Infinity Dollars” — IP damages and the jury”

Posted on December 29, 2009
This post, which is the first of two parts (the second part can be found at the link at the end) was first posted on June 19, 2009. A lot of people, including judges, lawyers and civilians, don’t seem to really understand what statutory damages are all about...

Guest post by Ritchie Fliegler: “Where you stand depends on where you sit”

Posted on December 28, 2009
I’ve never had a guest post in response to a LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® item before, but that’s only because no one with the stature to respond to something I’ve written here based on personal knowledge of the facts has ever had the nerve to ask for one — not until I entered the rock and [...

What is this?

Posted on December 28, 2009
Republished by Blog Post PromoterWhy, its Blawg Review #92!  Pip pip pip and how-da-ya-do!

Coca-Cola, Bolivia and all that

Posted on December 28, 2009
Republished by Blog Post PromoterWilliam Lozito at Name Wire (the newly renamed “Product Naming Blog” — hurray!) reports on the Bolivia / COCA / Coca-Cola, er, dustup. He notes the unmistakable parallel with the Ethiopian coffee trademark problem brewing with Starbucks.

Best of 2009: “Keeping it real — the ultimate use in commerce”

Posted on December 27, 2009
This was first posted on May 7, 2009. The TTABlog® reports, again, on the fraud issue, but that’s not what interests me here so much this time. Rather, it’s the question of the lifecycle of a trademark’s “use in commerce” status when plotted against that of a specific product which may no longer be manufactured, [...

Best of 2009: “Orange you glad you’re such mullahs?”

Posted on December 26, 2009
This was first posted on April 29, 2009: William Lozito at Name Wire writes about a counterfeiting double-cross, or is it triple-cross or something more?, that is so byzantine in its fruity dimensions that only the wretched Zionist Entity could have hatched it...

Not So Plain Dealing

Posted on December 26, 2009
Republished by Blog Post PromoterInstapundit links to this teef-gnashing item from Michael Silence about this super-secret scandal, based on leaked documents, that the Cleveland Plain Dealer would for sure be investigating and breaking wide open ‘cept that those meanies on the Supreme Court make you go to jail if you won’t tell a criminal [...

Best of 2009: “While my guitar gently weeps”

Posted on December 25, 2009
This was first posted on March 31, 2009. One of the first posts on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® was about Gibson Guitar Corp. v. Paul Reed Smith Guitars, LP, 70 UPSQ2d 1911 (M.D. Tenn. 2004), and the question of whether “only a Gibson guitar can make a Gibson-looking guitar...

Best of 2009: “Intellectual property and its digestion”

Posted on December 24, 2009
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 had an interesting IP question/hypo that’s been weighing on my mind the last couple [...

Google Patents

Posted on December 24, 2009
Republished by Blog Post PromoterSearch patents on Google. A paradigm shifter? Maybe. May very well be. UPDATE:  Dennis Crouch explains: One problem: Google is best at finding the top-twenty references related to your search.  Google is much worse at doing exhaustive searches...

So shoe me!

Posted on December 23, 2009
Staci Riordan reports on the big shoe-vs.-shoe design lawsuit everyone’s talking about — invoking copyright plus one Lanham Act and two New York law varieties of “unfair competition” that seems to fold in a trade dress claim (huh?) — between a couple of shoe designer guys, such as they are...

Fair use is for “E”veryone

Posted on December 23, 2009
Republished by Blog Post PromoterThe IP Rights and Games blog gets my attention with a little proprietary link-and-wink (are we becoming the “brand” for LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION?! I sure hope so) in an interesting and well done analysis of, guess what, trademark overreaching: Uber gaming blogger Kotaku got some interesting flak for the Entertainment [...

Best of 2009: “Adverference?”

Posted on December 22, 2009
This was originally published on January 22, 2009: Working from home today after a bruising few weeks at work (see yesterday’s post!), I finally figured out what was going on with banner ads on my Internet browsing. It raises an interesting question about Internet-related copyright and trademark law...

Copywrite

Posted on December 22, 2009
Republished by Blog Post PromoterThis Copywrite blog is really good.

Cover banned?

Posted on December 20, 2009
Now this is an interesting twist on IP rights and wrongs.  It’s interesting, though, more as a sign of the desperation of the dead-tree media to raise cash — even at the expense of relationships with the hands that feed it — than in terms of any particularly new legal ground being plowed here...

Those who are not with us today

Posted on December 18, 2009
CNN has a nice piece on “Brands We Loved and Lost in 2009.” Okay, we didn’t really “love” Home Depot’s Expo design centers and we never quite could let down our guard about Microsoft’s Encarta.  But Kodachrome?  A branding icon...

Swan song

Posted on December 16, 2009
Someone say something about getting all introspective and stuff?  Well, the Drug and Device Law blog’s Mark Herrmann is, as he so curmudgeonfully puts it, outta here: After 20 years at Jones Day, I’ve been made an offer that I can’t refuse: I’m resigning from Jones Day’s partnership at the end of December 31 to begin [...

Bratz, foiled again!

Posted on December 15, 2009
Remember the Bratz dolls case, and the phenomenal legal fees application that followed? It’s back!   The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the trial judge’s order basically liquidating the Bratz.  Here’s what the WSJ Law Blog reported last week: The Ninth Circuit on Wednesday ruled that Bratz maker MGA Entertainment can continue selling its dolls, despite [...

Blawg Review # 242

Posted on December 14, 2009
Welcome to Blawg Review.  Cold, rainy, prematurely wintry greetings from metropolitan New York. No exclamation point.  It has been that kind of year, it seems.  Nothing depressing about it, or it shouldn’t be.  That’s just life, and in particular that’s the way life feels at that dreary moment when you’re living it clustered around the winter solstice...

Chanukah, here we come!

Posted on December 11, 2009
Tonight, that is — it’s the first night of Chanukah. That means that I’m going to be hosting the annual Blawg Review next Monday, at LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® (here’s last year’s). Just a heads-up.

It’s Those Nutty Adwords!

Posted on December 11, 2009
Check N’ Go sues Google over trademark.

Nuts to us? Or a “real” Charlie Brown Christmas?

Posted on December 11, 2009
Instapundit links to this item about the incredible shrinking Charlie Brown specials — warmly-remembered favorite scenes from the annual Peanut broadcasts being incrementally excised from annual broadcasts to make room for more and more commercials...

Trademark on the Left Bank

Posted on December 10, 2009
Interesting discussion, on one level or another, among non-specialists including Matthew Yglesias of a leftish stripe on the politics of trademark infringement at TPMCafe. They’re disappointed that Democrats are going along with the proposed changes to the federal dilution statute, and they should be...

But you let THEM register a trademark like that!

Posted on December 10, 2009
Michael Hall of Registration Ruminations is wrestling, as more and more trademark practitioners are, with the increasingly ubiquitous problem of inconsistency within the PTO on trademark registrations — a topic on which he’s developed genuine expertise...

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