Intellectual Property Law

Knock, knock!

Posted on June 08, 2010
Originally posted 2009-09-30 23:33:09. Republished by Old Post PromoterKnock, knock! Who’s there! Your knockoff! I knockoff who? You knockoff yourself! No, don’t worry — it’s not so bad that LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® is about to invite you to play Mafia Wars...

Grapes of Rath

Posted on June 08, 2010
Originally posted 2005-03-27 11:07:00. Republished by Old Post PromoterThe Patently Obvious Blog reports that the Federal Circuit, still clinging to antique notions of national sovereignty, quaintly rules that although the U.S. is indeed a signatory to the Paris Convention (of course! Paris!), “the Paris Convention is not ?self executing? and thus has no direct [...

Missing persons

Posted on June 07, 2010
Usually, as the bible of secondary trademark infringement explains, “contributory infringement . . . requires proof of direct infringement by a third party . . .  It is not necessary, however, for a plaintiff to bring both direct and indirect claims; rather it must demonstrate that the direct infringement did in fact occur...

More to Google*

Posted on June 07, 2010
Originally posted 2005-01-25 15:55:00. Republished by Old Post PromoterNow Instapundit links to this New York Times story: Google and Yahoo are introducing services that will let users search through television programs based on words spoken on the air...

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Jus good enough?

Posted on June 04, 2010
Property, intangible: “Jus tertii” – Wikipedia says Latin for “third party rights” – is a claim by a defendant that someone else has rights superior to the plaintiff’s that defeat the plaintiff’s claim...

Inevitable lawsuit by music people against MySpace

Posted on June 04, 2010
Originally posted 2006-11-19 21:18:48. Republished by Old Post PromoterThe Times gets the story down. (On topics not involving politics, regarding which the paper is hopelessly corrupt, it’s still very good.) Is clunky, social-networking-for-twenty-somethings pioneer MySpace really entitled to the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA? I’ve expressed my doubts about the [...

Cream of tweets

Posted on June 03, 2010
Yes, it’s time again for filler my hand-picked selection of the last few weeks’ topical Twitter traffic transmitted via @roncoleman.com.  Click these links and you’ll be every bit up to speed on all there is to know: RT @RogerBora: Domainers indignant over UDRP panelist’s comments concerning domain name asking price RT @internetcases: Trademark holder not entitled to [...

The Parody Bomb Goes Off

Posted on June 03, 2010
Originally posted 2005-01-27 14:11:00. Republished by Old Post PromoterWhen it rains, it pours. Via Andrew Sullivan (and reported here too) a report that Volkswagen is going to sue– in the UK — the pair who made that tasteless mock commercial circulating around the Internet in which a suicide bomber detonates himself but the explosion [...

Drink to me only with thine eyes

Posted on June 03, 2010
Originally posted 2007-03-27 14:42:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter A week or so ago it was the sad story of Jimi Hendrix on the bottle. Now the TTABlog reports on another famous-dead-guy-as-booze-trademark case: Applicant Anatoliy Bondarchuk failed to fend off a petition for cancellation of his registration of the mark MARC CHAGALL for vodka...

Blogger anonymity upheld against John Doe defamation claims

Posted on June 03, 2010
Originally posted 2006-05-28 09:59:40. Republished by Old Post PromoterThe defendant-appellant, John Doe No.1, anonymously posted allegedly defamatory statements about the plaintiff-appellee, Cahill, on an internet blog. Cahill brought a defamation action...

How Supreme Skateboard plays the edge

Posted on June 01, 2010
The new Case Clothesed blog out of New York Law School has a very interesting, if lightly sourced, piece about how Supreme Skateboard has managed for years to infringe a little bit here and a little bit there in order to maintain its status as a stylish, trendy “lifestyle/skateboard brand” without ever really getting in much [...

Defacing “The Face”?

Posted on May 28, 2010
Genius!  Plus studliness! Yes, in one post on his Licensing Law Blog, Richard Bergovoy brings together some of my favorite things: Jimi Hendrix-related intellectual property disputes Princess Diana-related intellectual property disputes Mortality-themed intellectual property disputes Good writin’: What do Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana all have in common? If you guessed that all of them are dead celebrities, [...

Trademark McCrisis? (Or, McArabia)

Posted on May 28, 2010
Originally posted 2006-02-15 12:28:00. Republished by Old Post PromoterIs this good for McDonalds’ branding (click here for my personal favorite URL)? I’m not so sure it’s that bad. Having your trademark publicly desecrated by the perpetually unhappy — the people, as Jonathan Rosenblum puts it, “for whom life itself is an insult” — because [...

INTA thoughts

Posted on May 26, 2010
On the tail end of the annual meeting of the International Trademark Association in Boston, which I’ve used as an excuse not to post much or any new material, some thoughts: I’ve heard widespread unhappiness about the quality of the programs, which in my experience seems to be largely justified...

Talk about your business method patents!

Posted on May 26, 2010
Originally posted 2007-06-01 01:02:52. Republished by Old Post PromoterSander Gelsing, Canadian Patent and Trademark Lawyer, picks up on a doozy. Talk about your business method patents! ©, .

“Meet the Bloggers” 2010

Posted on May 23, 2010
It’s going to be a Who’s Who of trademark bloggery! Here’s a sample of those intrepid secondary-meaners besides your hosts (see infra) who have blogged about the upcoming Meet the Bloggers extravaganza in Boston, beginning at 8pm this coming Monday night at Lucky’s Lounge, 355 Congress Streets: Seattle TM Lawyer:  ”It just keeps getting bigger [...

Bringing big IP plaintiffs down a peg — or two

Posted on May 23, 2010
Originally posted 2007-06-01 01:13:36. Republished by Old Post PromoterMike Atkins is paying attention to Microsoft’s IP docket, as a Seattle Trademark Lawyer will do. He’s reporting about a default judgment and award the software maker achieved in California, with a rather surprising anticlimax in the dollars-and-cents category: Microsoft sought more than $3 million in [...

To die for

Posted on May 21, 2010
I’ve long been interested in life after digital death.  It does seem to have caught on. Patrick Reilly writes: I spent the day at an unconference on the topic of what happens to your digital property and rights when you move on to the Big Cloud...

Signs of INTEL® again

Posted on May 18, 2010
Remember this one?: Intel has sued the operators of the Mexico Watch newsletter, because its domain is LatinIntel.com. Of course, the reason for that is that it is using the commonly accepted abbreviation of “intel” as short for “intelligence...

Cover me

Posted on May 18, 2010
Photo Attorney Carolyn Wright writes: Rebecca Tushnet over at the 43Blog reports on a recent case in New York where the court determined that the use of a woman?s photograph for a fiction book cover required a model release.  This ruling creates an anomaly with other NY cases where the court ruled that a photograph of a person [...

New AG OK

Posted on May 18, 2010
Originally posted 2007-09-18 10:29:19. Republished by Old Post PromoterThe increasingly ubiquitous Marc Randazza pronounces, on the INTA list: In doing some research on the new Attorney General nominee, I discovered that he was the judge who penned the opinion in Tommy Hilfiger v...

Humdinger of a copyright case

Posted on May 18, 2010
Originally posted 2007-12-18 12:59:56. Republished by Old Post PromoterHow can a statute of limitations for copyright infringement bar a state law claim for an accounting of profits between co-authors brought under diversity jurisdiction? Good question, right? I’ll let Bill Patry’s first paragraph serve as a fuller introduction to this fascinating post: The First Circuit has [...

Free speech for hosers

Posted on May 18, 2010
Originally posted 2007-04-04 23:38:57. Republished by Old Post PromoterThe headline: “Canada to trademark [sic] ‘winter’ for 2010 Olympics.” The funny thing is I thought they already had a pretty good monopoly on winter! Free speech for hosers ©, .

Louis Vuitton on the receiving end

Posted on May 18, 2010
Originally posted 2007-02-03 22:01:23. Republished by Old Post PromoterTwo retailers have sued Louis Vuitton seeking a declaratory judgment of non-infringement in response to a cease and desist letter sent by the feisty French perpetual knockoff victim: J...

Uplifting blog post on trademark protection

Posted on May 18, 2010
Originally posted 2007-05-20 13:14:04. Republished by Old Post PromoterHow to get that ® to rise above it all in Microsoft Word. Uplifting blog post on trademark protection ©, .

Mark their words

Posted on May 16, 2010
Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs — two websites run by friends of mine who have very clearly articulated views about Islamic radicalism, and controversial ones about what to do about it — are busy, and then some, with this story: A federal agency has rejected a request for a trademark by the organization “Stop Islamization of [...

If you see something… it’s probably “trademarked”

Posted on May 12, 2010
A while ago, while obsessing about New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its obsession with turning what might have once merely been viewed as functional municipal signage or insignia into “IP ,” I made fun of the MTA’s trademark application (since approved) for IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING...

South Korean court affirms ridiculous STARPREYA ruling

Posted on May 12, 2010
Originally posted 2007-01-12 11:45:09. Republished by Old Post PromoterMichael Atkins gives us the post-mortem on this case that demonstrates what could delicately be called the home field advantage. South Korean court affirms ridiculous STARPREYA ruling ©, .

Love means …

Posted on May 10, 2010
Jim Lindgren of the The Volokh Conspiracy writes (hat tip to Glenn Reynolds), a tad grudgingly, of a kinder, gentler left-wing Supreme Court nominee on the issue of that supposedly black-hearted fascist group I’ve been an active member of since 1985: Charles Fried tells part of the story about Elena Kagan?s appearance at a Federalist Society dinner at [...

Microsoft’s trademark master plan

Posted on May 10, 2010
Originally posted 2006-08-03 22:35:14. Republished by Old Post Promoter Microsoft appears therefore  to be leaning completely on a German trademark as a part of its international trademark strategy for a new product. On the face of it, this course of action for a US company is rather unusual, but there are nonetheless a few solid [...

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