Intellectual Property Law

I enjoy being a trademark lawyer

Posted on March 27, 2009
John Welch at the TTABlog® has up what even he acknowledges is an “excit[ing]” post, in which he both imagines himself a woman and quotes this lively Trademark Trial and Appeals Board opinion excerpt concerning the resolution of the Chippendale’s dancer-boy trademark appeal I discussed a while back: Judge David Bucher ...

Virtually Aimee

Posted on March 26, 2009
Virtually Blind, a blog by Benjamin Duranske focusing on legal issues in virtual reality, reports (via IBLS): Second Life?s ?Aimee Weber? (Alyssa LaRoche) recently became the first avatar with a registered trademark. The application for the registered mark was filed February 18, 2007 approved for publication July 7, and published for opposition August 14...

The generic agony of defeat

Posted on March 24, 2009
The best LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® blog item title ever was evidently wasted  — and I’m sorry I didn’t keep you quite so up to date on this — but, as Ryan Gile reported less than two months ago on the case featuring the “my name is Coca and I am a cola; what’s the problem?” [...

Comments from another blog; or, Did I get chocolate in Marty’s peanut butter?

Posted on March 24, 2009
Marty, you got peanut butter in my chocolate! You’re considering the respective design and layout choices in isolation, seriatim, rather than looking at the whole and acknowledging, hey, peanut butter cups! Having said that: I acknowledge that this is a borderline case...

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Manners and morals for counterfeit hearts

Posted on March 23, 2009
Susan Scafidi: When complimented upon a counterfeit watch, should one confess its nefarious origins or simply say “thank you”? Philip Galanes’ “Social Q’s” column in the Sunday New York Times approaches this question as all good etiquette lessons do, by confronting the perplexed party with a point of view he hadn’t considered...

Tide, logic turns on eBay counterfeit cases

Posted on March 23, 2009
Choose the quote that was actually attributed to a leading business magazine: ?If Ford shoulders too much of the burden, its ability to wring a profit from the sales of cars with easily-ignited gas tanks could be compromised,? wrote BusinessWeek. ?If the financial institutions shoulder too much of the burden, their ability to wring a profit from [...

Whistle while you cringe

Posted on March 20, 2009
Dave Wieneke asks: Can the Seven Dwarfs of Menopause not be infringement? Note that this is the version up on Dave’s site.  There are others out there, relatively less safe for work.  But maybe not misspelling psycho.  Or dwarfs.  Not that I’m going to bring that up, exactly, you know...

Key decision

Posted on March 19, 2009
?Google makes money not by reason of the nature of the keyword, but by someone clicking on the keyword,? Google lawyer Alexandra Neri told a 15-judge panel of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg today. ?The decision to click or not to click belongs to who — clearly to the Internet user...

Statutory damages in copyright, and the Tenenbaum case

Posted on March 18, 2009
Statutory Damages and the Tenenbaum Litigation:  Doug Lichtman out at UCLA sends this along: Joel Tenenbaum looks a lot like every other defendant who has been accused by the music industry of illegally sharing copyrighted work online, but with one key difference: his defense attorney is Harvard Law School Professor Charlie Nesson, and Nesson is out [...

Download it fast

Posted on March 17, 2009
Brian Ledbetter finds the mother of all copyright hornet’s nests on YouTube.  He says it’s a masterpiece, too, but it’s only a matter of time — second, probably — before it’s pulled.

Properly classified — there’s no significant doubt

Posted on March 15, 2009
CORY DOCTOROW: Obama administration: releasing details of secret copyright treaty endangers ?national security?. Er, what? Good question, Instapundit.  Click through — the original story is here, at Wired.  But you can really see all you need to see by reading the letter from the Administration responding to the Freedom of Information Act request for disclosure [...

New “knockoff news,” TM prosecution blog

Posted on March 11, 2009
Rob Holmes, anti-counterfeiting investigator to the stars, has revamped and retooled his blog — check out his Knockoff Report:  News & Views in the World of Anti-Counterfeiting. Also, I see Michael Hall of Fairfax, Virginia has set up a blog focusing on trademark prosecution called Registration Ruminations...

Oy vey

Posted on March 09, 2009
Consider the other side of the aggrieved vandalism promoter Shepard Fairey, of HOPE poster fame: Gawker: “Obey” Trademark Law: Some guy in Pittsburgh sells little baby Steeler mascots with the phrase “Obey Steeler Baby.” Shepard Fairey demands that he stop infringing on his trademark, which he originally made famous by ripping off the image of Andre the [...

And miles to go before I sleep

Posted on March 09, 2009
Robert Frost?  Well, no, it’s Yehuda, he of the rhyming versions of Lanham Act and such. He’s rolled out the UK Copyright Law, in verse, and hey, you could do verse. What better way to enjoy intellectual property on this, the eve of Purim, the holiday that celebrates LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION!

Get out of jail, postage due

Posted on March 06, 2009
Bob Ambrogi reports on some cease-and-desist follies involving GET OUT OF JAIL FREE and Mr. Monopoly, which of course are the intellectual property of the Monopoly people over at Hasbro.  As could be expected with a friend’s blog, I put in my two cents in his comments; here I flesh ‘em out for a penny [...

Facebook in your soup?

Posted on March 04, 2009

Call for Papers: Cardozo’s IP 9th Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference

Posted on March 03, 2009

The infamy

Posted on March 03, 2009

Two centuries of Blawg Review

Posted on March 01, 2009

Meet some bloggers. Whatever.

Posted on February 28, 2009

More Obama poster postings

Posted on February 27, 2009

Destroy!

Posted on February 26, 2009
Computer security expert Ben Rothke on data destruction: In today’s litigious environment, there are a plethora of aggressive lawyers who would love to devour your organization for failure to take due care around document and media destruction. He makes that sound like a bad thing!

NJ Law Journal tutorial on online illegality

Posted on February 26, 2009
Is what Walter Olson calls a “How-to guide for harassing websites” that’s ” disguised as a perfectly respectable legal article in the New Jersey Law Journal”really just a primer on cyber-terrorism that you can try at home?

Nothing gained?

Posted on February 25, 2009
Sam Bayard sums up “thoughts on the Jones Day-BlockShopper Settlement”: So what did Jones Day get out of the settlement?  Not much actually.  BlockShopper agreed not to use “embedded links” back to the law firm’s website...

News to me

Posted on February 25, 2009
The Brooks Pierce law firm in North Carolina has a blog called the Newsroom Law Blog: The contributors to Brooks Pierce’s Newsroom Law Blog comprise our firm’s newsroom practice group, which includes Mark Prak, Charles Coble, Charles Marshall, Elizabeth Spainhour and Eric David...

The other side of anonymity

Posted on February 24, 2009
What happens when it’s the plaintiff that is anonymous, and wants to stay that way?

“Innovative” not a quality?

Posted on February 23, 2009
Michael Atkins reports: On Feb. 13, the Federal Circuit reversed Western District Judge Marsha Pechman’s denial of judgment as a matter of law in Baden Sports, Inc. v. Kabushiki Kaisha Molten, 541 F.Supp.2d 1151 (W.D. Wash. 2008), relating to the jury’s award of $8,054,579 for false advertising under Section 43a of the Lanham Act...

Intellectual property and its digestion

Posted on February 20, 2009
Back and forth in in social networking space — I digest some key ingredients of intellectual property as it applies to famous burgers (reprinted with Ivan’s permission): Ivan Kevin Alexander Today at 10:35am Hi Ron, I had an interesting IP question/hypo that’s been weighing on my mind the last couple of days...

The bitter billable hour

Posted on February 19, 2009
Is lawyer time billing a great big scam? The Bitter Lawyer says it is. I’m not so sure it is and I say so in the comments there, which unfortunately are not permalinkable. So hurry up and read it.

Avvo ranks us

Posted on February 18, 2009
From the Avvo Blog: [W]e threw together this auto-updating list of over 300 legal blogs ordered by their Alexa traffic ranking. Now you can: - Know who has the most popular legal blog based on objective, third-party data. - Understand why blogs rank where they do...

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