Intellectual Property Law

Legal aspects of blogging

Posted on October 03, 2008
General practice and other non-bloggy lawyers seeking an introduction to legal aspects of blogging can now get one, along with continuing legal education credit in California, Illinois and New York, from Lawline, the web-based CLE provider. The online introductory presentation, which in fact is called “Legal Aspects of Blogging,” is given by the MBA’s [...

Secure your place among innovators — read Blawg Review

Posted on October 02, 2008
This week’s edition of Blawg Review is at Securing Innovation! And what could be more innovative, or more secure, really, than the item at the top of the post:  The good old ball-point pen, in honor of this week’s birthday of Laszlo Biro! It’s worth clicking Blawg Review if only to learn what the name of the [...

AOL and blogging — uh, no.

Posted on October 02, 2008
Jacqui Cheng writes at Ars Technica that AOL, perhaps in many ways the cultural antithesis of the blogosphere as Internet companies go, is making the logical move of getting out of any pretense of being a player as a blogging platform: The two services being cut are AOL Journals and AOL Hometown...

Bull market

Posted on October 01, 2008
Are trademark filings really an economic indicator?  This is from the Philadelphia Inquirer (via David Ardia, who cites Marty.) Glenn Gundersen . . . [a] trademark and copyright lawyer at Dechert L.L.P. has been tracking trademark filings since the early 1990s...

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Scrabbled in India: Copyright no, trademark yes

Posted on September 29, 2008
No time to blog on the eve of Rosh Hashana, but we had to pass this development in the Scrabulous story on before the sun begins its descent: Mattel, which owns the international rights to Scrabble, said today it would appeal last week’s court ruling in India that the Scrabulous online word game did not violate [...

For copyright, a crown

Posted on September 28, 2008
Last post: Copyright ridiculous. This post: Copyright sublime. From Wired (via Jane Coleman, who found it on Instapundit): U.S. lawmakers approved the creation of a cabinet-level position of copyright czar as part of sweeping intellectual property enforcement legislation that sailed through the Senate on Friday...

A back seat for copyright

Posted on September 26, 2008
Let’s get apolitically political here (via Instapundit, Mr. Diversity himself): An informal national coalition of Internet pioneers and users with widely divergent political views will issue a letter Friday morning calling on John McCain and Barack Obama to open the remaining debates completely to the public domain...

Sue this way

Posted on September 24, 2008
The AP reports (via Mrs. LOC again!) a pretty unusual intellectual property (well, let’s say abstract property) lawsuit involving bloggers.  Steven Tyler, the man who made Mick Jagger’s lips look those of Frank Burns, is suing anonymous bloggers who have posted blogs purporting to be written by him and which are evidently very invasive: In a [...

Social networking for… the rest of us

Posted on September 24, 2008
This, via the Avvo blog … via Facebook (not so ironically): Are you befuddled by Twitter?  Not sure if you should be on Facebook?  Carolyn Elefant, a noted expert on setting up a solo legal practice, recently released an e-book entitled Social Networking For Lawyers (download available)...

“Scandalousness” remains a lightning rod at the TTAB

Posted on September 24, 2008
John Welch reports on an interesting, not quite safe for home viewing case called Boston Red Sox Baseball Club Limited Partnership v. Brad Francis Sherman in which the TTAB sustained an opposition to a trademark brought by the Boston Red Sox, owners of the RED SOX mark, regarding a mark we will not name here [...

Freelance tips

Posted on September 23, 2008
Goyishe Kop sends along a link to this piece on legal tips for freelancers.  What’s not to like?

Key shift

Posted on September 22, 2008
Google has long played fast and loose with the sale of key words, leaning this way or that but claiming to have content- or politically-neutral rules of general application.  Like a good big new media company, it may ultimately make whatever changes it has to get the heat off it, but it seldom acknowledges it [...

Another black eye for Starbucks

Posted on September 22, 2008
Has there ever been a more star-crossed brand maintenance campaign than that of that troubled leftover from the dot-bomb days, Starbucks? No respect in Korea…  embarrassed in Africa… cross-branding eye-crossing in Manhattan… compromising in Arabia… and now this: Looks like the Rat City Rollergirls will get to keep their logo after all...

Ninth Circuit: eBay not a portal to jurisdiction

Posted on September 17, 2008
We spill a lot of pixels here blogging about the question of just how transparent, nay ethereal, eBay is as, say, a facilitator of transactions premised on trademark infringement, such as the sale of counterfeit goods.  Regular readers know we’re somewhat wed to the suggestion that eBay knows enough, makes enough and controls enough to [...

A Jones for masochism

Posted on September 16, 2008
What, Jones Day doesn’t know about trademark law?  Hardly thinkable. Well, maybe it doesn’t know that in the Internet age, you can’t send comically meritless cease and esist letters on the assumption that the recipient will merely curl up and die when he gets it?  No, Jones Day has to know that...

Thelen’s accelerated schedule

Posted on September 12, 2008
Grim branding days at Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner! What do you do when you’re called Thelen Reid & Priest, having once been Thelen, Marrin, Johnson & Bridges and having changed your name after merging with Reid & Preist, and you like how that went so much that you figure why, let’s do it [...

Build American! Or hire good lawyers.

Posted on September 11, 2008
When it comes to manufacturing, it’s all about price, right?  Brand management and licensing gurus Oliver Herzfeld and Richard Bergovoy beg to differ, writing in Managing Intellectual Property that a casual attitude toward offshore manufacturing could end up costing a fortune in brand equity: In a brand owner’s worst nightmare, goodwill that has taken years to [...

Go chutzpa!

Posted on September 10, 2008
GoDaddy, better than anyone, realizes that the margins in domain sales are slim and getting slimmer.  Economics teaches us that in a perfectly competitive market, there is no profit in the long run.  Domain registration is rapidly approaching that level of efficiency...

In real life, Voldemort sometimes wins

Posted on September 08, 2008
The decision has come down in the J.K. Rowling lawsuit against the authors of the Harry Potter Lexicon, which we reported on most recently here. Outcome:  Not fair use, but copyright infringement.  Judgment for plaintiff, upon a very detailed and well-reasoned opinion (on first scan)...

Chasing confusion

Posted on September 08, 2008
Chasing confusion Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman This explains why it’s so hard for the rest of us to get legal work from Chase.

Which exit did we get off, again?

Posted on September 07, 2008
Well, maybe we’ve been too hard on the Democrats here at LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®.  Perhaps unlike the GOP, they’ve got good, progressive IP counsel out there, and maybe an Obama Administration will take a more realistic view of what you can and can’t do on the Internet...

U.S. District of Arizona: “No automatic injunction upon a finding of copyright infringement”

Posted on September 05, 2008
Not that the plaintiffs in the Designer Skin case didn’t get an injunction:  They did (here it is); a narrow one utilizing proposed language by defendants explicitly permitting S&L to use its own photographs of Designer Skin merchandise on its website (see the prior post)...

Fat lady sings: Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law in Designer Skin v S & L Vitamins

Posted on September 05, 2008
The District of Arizona ruled today in a case we defended through trial and have reported on here extensively.  The decision is here; the minute entry on the electronic docket reads as follows: FINDINGS OF FACT AND CONCLUSIONS OF LAW - that S & L Vitamins has infringed Designer Skin’s copyrights in the electronic renderings of [...

Likelihood of somniloquy

Posted on September 04, 2008
The New York Times: ?Trademark is the sleeping giant of intellectual property,? said Paul Goldstein, a professor at the Stanford law school. Who’s sleeping?  No one sleeps around here, believe me.

M-I-C . . . see you in court!

Posted on September 03, 2008
Could there be a mouse hole in Mickey’s larder?  The Los Angeles Times reports: All signs pointed to a Hollywood ending with Disney and Mickey Mouse living happily ever after - at least until a grumpy former employee looked closely at fine print long forgotten in company archives...

New LinkedIn group for law bloggers

Posted on September 02, 2008
Having recently had a pleasant experience beginning an alumni group on LinkedIn, we thought it might be a fun idea to have a group for law bloggers. That’s about the best rationale we have for it, okay?  It could be a fun idea.  “A fun idea...

Football Redskins live to fight another day

Posted on September 02, 2008
This story won’t die — especially judging from the prominence of related words among search terms that reach this blog.  The latest, which we missed when it came out in July and we were otherwise engaged, is that the NFL’s Washington Redskins again prevailed in a lawsuit brought by a group of American Indians, but [...

As if malpractice weren’t its own reward

Posted on August 31, 2008
Steve Nipper notes a number of changes in the US Patent and Trademark Office’s regulations that make it really obvious what a bad idea, and how sore they will be, if a non-patent-admitted attorney or other agent tries to get a piece of the patent action in any form...

The Copyright Act: It’s a law, dude

Posted on August 28, 2008
We don’t mince words at LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® regarding the misuse of copyright and trademark, but we’re having trouble finding anything wrong with this at-first-blush shocking story from the Reuters “news agency”: Federal officials on Wednesday arrested a man on suspicion of violating copyright laws for placing songs on the Internet from an unreleased [...

Even the MSM has to worry about free speech sometimes!

Posted on August 27, 2008
These days you’d think perhaps — maybe from reading this blog — that free expression, commercial or otherwise, were solely an Internet issue, and the MSM is mostly on the other side of it, hiding behind some pretextual body of law or another...

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