Intellectual Property Law

Ban that man!

Posted on February 12, 2008
London’s Times: People who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet under new legislative proposals to be unveiled next week.Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt...

National Inventor?s Day 2008

Posted on February 12, 2008
I missed it, I guess, but “Anticipate This!” didn’t.

Blawg Review at The Invent Blog®

Posted on February 11, 2008
My friend Steve Nipper hosts this week’s Blawg Review.

Where is the love?

Posted on February 11, 2008
Love conquers all — but never, never when it comes to trademarks! The relationship was renewed only three days ago and yet Gucci’s love affair with NY is already hitting a stumbling block. New York City’s Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) is challenging Gucci’s use of the ‘Gucci (loves as symbolized by a heart) New York’ [...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Fishy business

Posted on February 10, 2008
Funny things happen to trademarks in the Casbah.  John Burgess at the Crossroads Arabia blog has a story about a recent incident of Saudi Arabia’s religious police overplaying their considerable hand in connection with the arrest of a Saudi woman for having coffee with a colleague at Starbucks...

Legal guidelines for bloggers

Posted on February 10, 2008
Everyone’s linking to this: For bloggers: A stay-out-of-jail card.

Damaged China

Posted on February 09, 2008
Michael Atkins looks at how China now calculates trademark infringement damages.

Microsoft gets it man

Posted on February 08, 2008
Here’s an interesting piece about the lengths Microsoft went to shut down and aid in the apprehension of a $900 million software piracy ring — and just how hard it had to work to stay, or eventually get, ahead of the bad guys: The pirates mimicked complex holograms stamped directly onto disks and packaging materials embedded [...

Getting intellectual about intellectual property

Posted on February 08, 2008
Erik Schmidt: Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, and creator of the GNU Public License (GPL) was also present. Stallman is known for his outspoken political beliefs and his attention to semantics. He … took issue with ?intellectual property,? a term he considers propagandistic and misleading...

Clever slogan, yes. Trademark, no.

Posted on February 07, 2008
Being a big company doesn’t mean you have to always be wrong — or even always be the plaintiff — in an IP dispute. Take, for instance, this situation, as described by the opinion handed down last week by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals: Many might associate the phrase MY LIFE...

Powerful precedent

Posted on February 06, 2008
The TTABlog: Whenever the TTAB issues a precedential decision, I try to discern what point the Board is trying to make. Good idea! When it comes to John Welch, that’s usually a pretty high level of discernment. But in the case linked to, you don’t have too read to hard to figure it out.

Virtual seizure of virtual counterfeits

Posted on February 05, 2008
Implicating, of course, real money.  Hat tip to Stacia Lay.

Hey, 19

Posted on February 02, 2008
More on the dumb trademark-abuse story of the season (we’ve dealt with the SUPER BOWL and trademark overkill here and here already). Now there’s this SUPERcilious beaut: After the Lakers won two straight NBA titles in the late-80’s, their coach Pat Riley trademarked the phrase “three-peat” so he could cash in on merchandising associated with [...

Large game

Posted on February 01, 2008
Forbes chimes in on the NFL’s heavy-handed IP campaign, and how much more this year has looked like flag football, or maybe “touch”: Clearly, brand owners need to be proactive to protect their intellectual property rights, which are enormously valuable assets and can be threatened by piracy and unauthorized third-party uses...

Dimming star?

Posted on January 31, 2008
Ann Althouse: Starbucks used to seem like a luxury brand, and now it feels like a fallback when you can’t get to the real thing. Ouch.  (Via Instapundit.)  Ann sees it happening in the automated coffee machines in the shops.  But could it have to do with branding incoherence typified by this?

Keyword advertising: Big IP pushing hard

Posted on January 30, 2008
Paul Alan Levy has brought my attention to this development, which he rounds up at the Consumer Law & Policy Blog: Corynne McSherry and Eric Goldman have posted a timely joint warning about an effort within the Trademark Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association to put forward a series of resolutions that are [...

Take a letter and get in line

Posted on January 30, 2008
John Berryhill: A recurring discussion within certain circles over the years has been the potential assignment of single character domain names in the generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Prior to the formation of ICANN, and despite assignment of a few single character domain names (q...

IP piggies

Posted on January 30, 2008
Ars Technica: Not content with the current (and already massive) statutory damages allowed under copyright law, the RIAA is pushing to expand the provision. The issue is compilations, which now are treated as a single work. In the RIAA’s perfect world, each copied track would count as a separate act of infringement, meaning that a copying [...

If you can’t beat ‘em

Posted on January 29, 2008
Name Wire: In what Agenda Inc. refers to as a ?highly ironic move,? notorious brand naming counterfeit hotspot Silk Street Market in Beijing has applied for a trademark to its own SilkStreet clothing label and warned counterfeiters not to copy it. In what must be the most lenient criterion for reselling a high end brand in [...

Patent reform

Posted on January 29, 2008
We joke about patents here, but it’s from love, believe me. If you have anything to do with intellectual property law, however, you are likely to get buttonholed by someone who wants your opinion about “the new patent law.” So if you have to read just one opinion about it — and I [...

Blawg review for the hobbit set

Posted on January 29, 2008
I don’t even know where to start on this topic. Lords of rings were never my things. More like Lords of Flatbush. But if you’re of a mystical bent, you will like this edition of Blawg Review.

EU privacy fetish protects file-sharers

Posted on January 29, 2008
No one really likes the record companies anyway: European Union countries can refuse to disclose names of file sharers on the Internet in civil cases, the EU’s top court said on Tuesday in a blow to copyright holders trying to fight digital piracy...

The Spirit of 76!

Posted on January 29, 2008
Counterfeit Chic’s Knockoff News is back in its 76th edition, with all due credit being given yours truly, and everyone else paying cash.

New advertiser!

Posted on January 28, 2008
Welcome to the Washington Independent!

Thanks, Thomson!

Posted on January 28, 2008
Thomson CompuMark’s home page lists this blog among a cozy coterie of worthy trademark resources. “Legal News and Perspective,” they call it. Thank you, Thomson. I must admit the Thomson people do a fine trademark search and an even better INTA party, unless you want to actually have a conversation with an adult friend...

Copyright in cease and desist letters? Not quite.

Posted on January 26, 2008
A law firm’s press release says: The US District Court for the District of Idaho has found that copyright law protects a lawyer demand letter posted online by the recipient (Case No. MS-07-6236-EJL-MHW). The copyright decision, in pertinent part, has been made available by Dozier Internet Law, and is the first known court decision in the [...

Libel per se

Posted on January 25, 2008
Glenn Reynolds, writing about the dustup at Brandeis over this letter (”marked up” here): And I think that false charges of racism aimed at a professor today are like false charges of unchastity or “loathsome disease” aimed at a woman in 1890 — libelous per se...

Digital analysis of images and counterfeiting

Posted on January 24, 2008
Yahoo! News: Swedish start-up Polar Rose plans to make its face recognition service publicly available on the Web in the second quarter of 2008 as it tries to become a must-have tool for sorting visual content. The firm says its technology can pick out faces in the swelling crowd of images on the Internet, thereby making digital [...

Don’t play games!

Posted on January 24, 2008
Nolo?s Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Blog links to this story here in answering the question, “How do I create a non-infringing board game”?”

Keeping tabs on the worst

Posted on January 22, 2008
John Welch presents the “Ten Worst TTAB Decisions of 2007.” I love stuff like this!

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.