Intellectual Property Law

My readers aren’t geeks!

Posted on May 05, 2009
But as a matter of professional due diligence, they should at least still be aware of the 64 Things Every Geek Should Know (via Evan Brown).

“The Facebook Police” and likelihood of confusion

Posted on May 04, 2009
There are more developments on social-networking brand management, as you would expect.  Nick O’Neill at the All Facebook Blog writes: This morning I got an email from the owner of the ?Cristiano Ronaldo? public profile stating that he had been disable[d] after attracting over 2...

It’s the thought that counts?

Posted on May 04, 2009
I’ve talked about the odd issues of “fraud” in the trademark context here and here.  It’s a mess. Jeremy Phillips of IPKat and TTABlogger John Welch, reports the latter, “shared the microphone on an IP Think Tank podcast (here) last week, mainly discussing the issues of bona fide intent and fraud and how they may impact [...

Blog hurts

Posted on May 01, 2009
Do you read blogs so much it hurts? The Government is here to protect you! see more Lolcats and funny pictures

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Tweetmark infringement

Posted on April 30, 2009
When I essentially retired from Twitter a few months ago (it’s all the rage!), I did so by politely bidding farewell to my 500 or so “followers” and then scattering the whole cloud of them by canceling my Twitter account. I then counted to five… and quickly re-registered for Twitter using the same name...

Orange you glad you’re such mullahs?

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.  So, what happens when Jew oranges infiltrate the Islamic Republic of Iran’s citrus bins, formerly believed impregnable against the Elders [...

Father of all Blaw Reviews

Posted on April 28, 2009
Blawg Review #209 is a quirky tribute to a great American.

Gutless in San Francisco?

Posted on April 28, 2009
Threat Level: U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel?s contempt for the media is widely known by the San Francisco tech press. Patel, a Carter appointee, presided over the Napster trial in one of the smallest courtrooms in the San Francisco federal building ? despite unsuccessful press pleas that the high-profile case be moved to a substantially [...

Magnesium ad nauseum

Posted on April 27, 2009
Ryan Gile reports that it’s Coke vs. Pepsi on behalf of their sport-drink proxies, Gatorade and Powerade: Coke?s advertising . . . makes the claim that Gatorade is “missing two electrolytes” ? calcium and magnesium ? that are found in Powerade...

The Sound of silence

Posted on April 24, 2009
Michael Atkins is beside himself with intellectual-property-enforcement frustration about the use of an image of the Seattle Space Needle — a tall pointy building what they have there instead of skyscrapers — on the logo of some foreign-sport team called the Sounders: Which of course brings me to trademark law...

Turn the other one? Or liberty? Or death?

Posted on April 23, 2009
Right — we will resolve these all here and now.  Key issues.  Fish or cut bait.  Or we most assuredly will all hang separately! The Daily Mail reports, ” Cheeky team applies to use ‘Obama’ as a European trademark“: A group of enterprising Spaniards is set to win the European trademark rights to a word with instant [...

Trademarks, the Internet and people

Posted on April 22, 2009
Here’s a nice feature on my friend Ellen Shankman, the go-to gal for trademarks in Israel.  Two key quotes: “The Internet has changed the landscape in ways that are impossible to overestimate,” she goes on. “E-commerce growth has fueled the rapid growth of counterfeit goods sales online...

Florida: A nice place to visit, but…

Posted on April 20, 2009
Internet Solutions operates recruiting and Internet advertising businesses, including one called VeriResume. Tabatha Marshall runs a blog and website at www.tabathamarshall.com that monitors “phishing,” including dubious job pitches. One section of the blog focused on VeriResume, and the various users posted comments criticizing VeriResume...

“Liberals Against the First Amendment”

Posted on April 19, 2009
Marco Randazza again, this time on naked state-backed censorship at the University of Massachusetts: The UMass conservative organization, the Silent Majority, publishes a newspaper called ?The Minuteman.? The most recent issue of The Minuteman exposed some financial irresponsibility in another student organization, Bridges (an organization that is supposed to spend its funds to tutor minority students), [...

The three C’s

Posted on April 19, 2009
CNN, copyright and censorship? It is a kind of censorship, I think we can say by now, to cynically use the copyright laws to shut down embarrassing publication of obviously non-infringing works.  It’s particularly ugly when media outlets do it, though...

From the highest yardarm

Posted on April 17, 2009
Techmeme / New York Times: A court in Sweden on Friday convicted four men linked to the notorious Internet file-sharing service The Pirate Bay of violating copyright law, handing the music and movie industries a high-profile victory in their campaign to curb online piracy...

“Mr. Lincoln, call your agent!”

Posted on April 17, 2009
“I have been to the mountain and I have secured the rights to the promised land!” The AP reports that the pimps family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. got $800,000 for “the use of his words and image” on the national memorial to his memory on the National Mall — another story I’ve [...

The best of the best. Of the bestest.

Posted on April 14, 2009
Only Marco Randazza can put certain things in certain ways — and on those occasions when he’s actually right (like when he’s discussing law and not politics! ;-)), man, he’s right on. Well, he’s right on today. As Marco explains in his not-quite-safe-for-work post, a man called Morgan, whose name only ironically reminds us of [...

Virtually alive

Posted on April 13, 2009
It’s Passover, and as Jewish tradition teaches, the Exodus implicates issues of resurrection — of which there’s been a lot at LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® lately!   First we had the update on an early LOC item, the Gibson guitar case.  Now further developments related to “I read dead people’s email,” the attempt by parents of an [...

Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts and a prize! That’s what you get from –

Posted on April 13, 2009
Roller derby! Quinn Heraty reports on the trademark battle to make us forget SPAM v. Spamarrest – the CRACKERJACK derby: Frito-Lay has filed an opposition to the registration of Crackerjack?s trademark with the USPTO. Crackerjack is [the professional name of] one of the founders of the Mad Rollin? Dolls roller derby league and is the president of the [...

Wherefore art thou trademark use?

Posted on April 08, 2009
I wrote a couple of days ago — and once again got hit hard by a learned commenter who disagrees with my view of the matter — about the Second Circuit’s ruling in the Rescuecom v. Google case that keyword advertising can be trademark use giving rise to an action to infringement...

Don’t be stupid

Posted on April 08, 2009
Paraphrasing the poet and writer Don Williams, Jr.’s words about fame and riches: ?Defamation and retainer fees are fleeting.  Stupidity is eternal? In other words, in most cases, the only thing worse than defamation is poorly-lawyered defamation action...

Likelihood of extrusion

Posted on April 08, 2009
Reprinting my annual Passover post, scrubbed and cleansed and covered with vinyl shelf paper for this year: This year Passover takes up two weekdays, Thursday and Friday, and abuts against the Sabbath, so I’m “out of pocket” through Sunday and essentially on mission-critical-only duty for most of the rest of next week, too...

Write This Way

Posted on April 07, 2009
People always want to know about the value of a successful blog for lawyers.  They want insight, tips, theory, strategy, and sometimes they ask me for those things, because they think I have a successful blog.  And perhaps I do. What I often tell them, however, is that they first have to come to terms with [...

Second class on the First Amendment

Posted on April 06, 2009
The Administration believes bloggers can’t be trusted with free speech the way everyone else is, it seems.  Reports FT.com (hat tip to Marco): Advertisers in the US are bracing themselves for regulatory changes that they fear will curtail their efforts to tap into the fast-growing online social media phenomenon...

Second Circuit and the whole of the law on confusion

Posted on April 06, 2009
This is big, but stay calm.   Though I hardly can. I took some heat a little while ago for suggesting, contrary to my generally skeptical view of what constitutes trademark use in commerce (a legal premise of infringement), that there’s something very flabby about the argument that the use of trademark-protected words as search terms by [...

Reflecting Fool

Posted on April 03, 2009
George M. Wallace, better known to law blog readers by virtue of his Declarations and Exclusions blog, moons us all and has published an “extra” April Fool’s Blawg Review Appendix on the first of the month. Extra, meaning there was another one already, right?  Right — the moon, after all, only reflects the greater glory of [...

How to describe a Catch 22

Posted on April 02, 2009
Michael Hall considers the PTO’s “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose” policy on trademark registrations used as evidence to refuse new applications on the basis of “descriptiveness”: [T]he Office routinely relies upon them in issuing merely-descriptive refusals, yet when an applicant introduces third-party registrations to support its position, the Office will often dismiss them with a [...

Avast ye social networker file-sharers!

Posted on April 01, 2009
The Sweden Pirate Bay trial is long over, and the verdict is due in a couple of weeks.  But even if you didn’t think it was safe to go back in the water yet, Marty Schwimmer links to this story, suggesting double-decked linkin’ and sinkin’ liability for Facebook due to a new  “feature that makes [...

While my guitar gently weeps

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.”   Not long after that decision came down, Gibson’s rival Fender filed for what it now [...

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