Intellectual Property Law

Tiffany update

Posted on August 25, 2008
Susan Scafidi reports: If Dad says no, ask Mom. And if the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York says no, ask the 2nd Circuit. As expected, Tiffany has filed a notice of appeal of its loss last month to eBay in a lawsuit alleging, among other things, that eBay should bear more [...

Slamming the DOORS

Posted on August 25, 2008
History repeating and all, ya know.  First time, tragedy.  Second time — farce.

We are the world

Posted on August 21, 2008
A classic explanation, via the case method, of trademark law’s doctrine of foreign equivalents: Affirming a Section 2(d) refusal, the Board found Applicant’s mark AMMIRAGLIA for “wines, sparkling wines, liqueurs,” likely to cause confusion with the registered mark FLAGSHIP for vodka...

Shot to Dell

Posted on August 18, 2008
Dell’s CLOUD COMPUTING trademark application has gone up in a vapory mass of smoke: Dell cannot register “cloud computing” as a trademark because the term is a generic one describing services offered by many companies, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has said in an initial ruling...

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Running on empty

Posted on August 14, 2008
Urk.  Remember when I told you the GOP was getting lousy IP advice?  It hasn’t gotten better: Singer, songwriter, liberal activist and now John McCain scourge Jackson Browne filed a lawsuit today against the presumptive GOP nominee and the Republican Party for failing to obtain a license to use one of his songs in a television [...

“Free license” doesn’t mean free to do what you want

Posted on August 14, 2008
Larry Lessig (links added): So for non-lawgeeks, this won’t seem important. But trust me, this is huge. [T]he Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE “IP” court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them “open source”) copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others...

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help

Posted on August 13, 2008
Would Barack Obama’s election lead to revival of the “Fairness Doctrine” — and if so, how would that affect bloggers, who basically didn’t exist as of the last time the Fairness Doctrine governed political speech in the media?  The FCC’s chairman, Robert McDowell, suggests that bloggers wouldn’t be too happy about such a development...

Tank you very much

Posted on August 13, 2008
Ryan Gile reports that Cartier is upping the ante on its efforts to assert its IP rights in the “Tank watch,” shown below, and has sued Donna Karen over its knockoffs of El Tanque. This is interesting to LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®, because we have some background in watch trademark work and represented Cartier in what seems [...

Tiffany’s escalates it

Posted on August 11, 2008
A peeling machine. Tiffany’s is, not surprisingly, appealing the decision dismissing its claims against eBay.

And worth every penny!

Posted on August 11, 2008
Free (and apolitical) IP advice for bloggers over at Right Wing News.

The ultimate license

Posted on August 07, 2008
We’ve written before about the preposterous concept of asserting that stuff you buy is really just a “license” you buy.  Well, here’s something even “better” — and while it may make users fume, it may be completely legal, and it doesn’t require judges, statutory damages or even any kinds of lawyers to work: Apple apparently can [...

Dell’s cloudy IP planning

Posted on August 07, 2008
Has anyone figured this out? Dell’s newly-acquired trademark for the term “cloud computing” may have all the durability of a glass hammer, meaning it will shatter the first time they try to use it. The law is not exactly on the company’s side in this argument...

Copywrong

Posted on August 05, 2008
Copyright doyen Bill Patry explains why he shut down his brilliant copyright law blog. Some of it had to do with his inability to prevent people from ascribing his personal views to his employer, Google. Some of it had to do with a sort of spiritual exhaustion (despite being a pretty spiritual guy)...

Blawg review settles

Posted on August 04, 2008
In a way: See this week’s edition at Victoria Pynchon’s IP ADR Blog!

Let’s brand together and make a BRANDED COMMUNITY!

Posted on August 01, 2008
Another one: A blogger on ZDNet had a post about “enterprise communities” where the phrase “branded community” was used. That’s a descriptive use and a perfectly reasonable one. Yet, the owner of some marketing firm wrote a semi-threatening letter claiming to hold the trademark on “branded community” and demanding that the blogger “refrain from using the [...

Revival of the dead

Posted on July 31, 2008
Just this morning a client told me about this company, River West Brands, that finds ways to obtain some semblance of the “rights” in abandoned consumer-products trademarks and “revitalize them for modern relevance, reconstruct the business model for today?s marketplace, and ultimately return these brands to the consumer...

Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim

Posted on July 29, 2008
Liability insurers gotta deny coverage: As the Trademark Blog reports, American Guarantee & Liability Insurance Co. is balking at the prospect of paying any part of the $305M judgment Adidas America, Inc., obtained against Payless Shoesource, Inc...

Likelihood of persuasion

Posted on July 28, 2008
Rick Hasen expresses understandable concern over a footnote in a recent Supreme Court opinion suggesting that a certain set of studies is not worthy of consideration because it was “litigant-funded.” Here’s the footnote: The Court is aware of a body of literature running parallel to anecdotal reports, examining the predictability of punitive awards by conducting [...

How many points is INFRINGEMENT?

Posted on July 27, 2008
We had been wondering who had the “Z.” Now the other tile drops, and probably right onto a triple word score — Hasbro, owner of the SCRABBLE trademark, has sued Scrabulous: The general manager for digital media and gaming at Hasbro said yesterday that the company had waited until there was a “legal” version of [...

A beauty, a doll

Posted on July 25, 2008
The WSJ Law Blog reports: A federal jury in Riverside, Calif., determined Thursday that MGA Entertainment?s hugely popular Bratz dolls (pictured left) were designed while the designer worked for Barbie?s home, Mattel Inc. . . . [I]t?s a big win not only for Mattel but also for Mattel?s attorneys, a team led by John Quinn of Quinn [...

Imagine no religion

Posted on July 24, 2008
Guy makes a video parodying the deification of Obama Barack, and posts it on YouTube.  Looks like it hit a little too close to home.  After a slew of complaints of hurt feelings by His ministering angels, the video has now been put beyond a registration wall by Google on the grounds that it is, [...

Fake this book

Posted on July 23, 2008
Facebook is looking over its shoulder at the competition, and doing what comes naturally for succesful businesses based on a model, if not a technology, fundamentally simple to replicate:  Suing the competition for IP infringement: Facebook filed a complaint last Friday accusing [social networking site] studiVZ of copying the look, feel, features and services of [...

Knockoff News is smokin’!

Posted on July 22, 2008
Susan Scafidi treats us to a hot-summer edition, volume 80 to be exact, of Knockoff News over at Counterfeit Chic!

Eat hot cross buns!

Posted on July 21, 2008
Instapundit: THE MUSIC INDUSTRY PICKED ON THE WRONG MOM.

DMCA days

Posted on July 21, 2008
Mike Masnick on a key question:  Whether copyright fair use, no matter how obvious, may be ignored by a would-be copyright owner when sending a DMCA takedown notice that but for the fair use defense is “reasonable”: The DMCA has provisions for a copyright holder to assert ownership, at which point the service provider needs to [...

10th Cir. on DJ’s in TM

Posted on July 20, 2008
The DeMoines firm of McKee Voorhees & Sease has a very interesting looking IP blog called Filewrapper®. Here they report on a Tenth Circuit case clarifiying the applicable standard for declaratory judgment jurisdiction in trademark infringement cases: The court held that the “reasonable apprehension of suit” standard [previously] applied in trademark cases was supplanted by [...

Designer Skin v. S&L continued: “S & L had a perfect right to sell this product”

Posted on July 18, 2008
Unfortunately for future defendants in the position of Internet retailer S&L, Judge James Teilborg’s decision from the bench dismissing the damages claims of suntan lotion manufacturer Designer Skin will not be officially published, being an oral opinion...

Grand Old Persecution

Posted on July 17, 2008
Paul Alan Levy sends this along: The latest abuse of trademark law to suppress discussion of topics of substantial public interest comes from not from a company, like most of the trademark abuses previously discussed on this blog, such as here and here, but from the Republican National Committee, which has threatened to sue CafePress...

Designer Skin v. S&L Vitamins trial update

Posted on July 17, 2008
The remaining issues in the case, you may recall, were copyright infringement and Arizona unfair competition. Here is the status per this morning’s minute entry in the court’s electronic case filing docket: Minute Entry. Proceedings held before Judge James A Teilborg on 7/16/2008: Jury Trial - Day 2 held...

Trial call

Posted on July 16, 2008
Phoenix eve Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman Unbelievable day at trial in the Designer Skin v. S&L case yesterday.  Maybe we’ll talk about it some day. Let’s see how today goes! Have me in mind…

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