Monthly Archives: June 2018

Enforce Your Trademarks Now Or You Might Be The Next Red Hen

If you needed another reason to take action against a third party using your trademark – and you shouldn’t need another reason – consider the Red Hen restaurant.  Which Red Hen?  That’s the point.

As everyone by now knows, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted a tweet over the weekend stating:

Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington,… More

No, Virginia, You Can’t Just Copy Stuff You Find On the Internet, Even if You Don’t Notice the Copyright Notice

I usually don’t write a whole blog post just to disagree with a sitting federal judge, even when it’s about copyright law’s most notorious disagreement-generating machine: fair use.

This is an exception. A recent decision by the Eastern District of Virginia may cause some individuals and non-profits to believe that it’s permissible to copy and use “publicly available” photos from the internet, as long as they don’t know whether or not the photos are protected by copyright.… More

Can a Trademark Licensee Keep Using the Mark after the Licensor Files for Bankruptcy? Circuit Split Heads to U.S. Supreme Court

All you trademark lawyers better sit down, because this may come as a shock: You are not “intellectual property” lawyers . . . at least not according to Section 11 U.S.C. § 101(35A) of the Bankruptcy Code, which intentionally omits trademarks from the definition of “intellectual property.”

Owing in part to this omission, there is an ongoing circuit split as to the rights of a trademark licensee when a licensor declares bankruptcy.… More

Flags as Trademarks: What are the Rules of the Road?

I never paid a lot of attention to Flag Day, until the year that my daughter was born on June 14.  Now Flag Day is a special day for our family, and of course there is a lot of flag waving on Independence Day which comes hot on its heels.  So this seems like a good time to review the rules on when you can register and use images of flags as trademarks.… More

Can We Give State Cannabis Trademarks Some Teeth While Waiting for a Federal Solution?

Cannabis trademarks. By now, most IP lawyers know two things about them.

First, even though cannabis is legal in an increasing number of states (9 allow recreational use; 29 allow medical use), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is refusing applications to federally register cannabis trademarks, no matter the home state of the applicant, until the substance gets reclassified by or removed from the Controlled Substances Act (which doesn’t seem to be on the immediate horizon).… More