Category Archives: Licensing

Upcycling at the Super Bowl

As we approach the Super Bowl, the world of “upcycling” also takes the stage. Upcycling refers to the process where garments or other materials are reused and transformed into a new or unique item.

This season, celebrities Taylor Swift, Simone Biles, and others have worn unique designs based on NFL jerseys and related team-branded gear. These upcycled garments were created by Kristin Juszczyk, the wife of San Francisco 49ers fullback Kyle Juzczyk and an up-and-coming designer in her own right.… More

The Top 5 Most Fashionable Intellectual Property Disputes To Walk This Year’s Runways at New York Fashion Week

New York Fashion Week (NYFW) officially kicks off tomorrow, February 7, 2020, with a week’s worth of captivating runway shows from top designers.  The timing, however, could not be worse, since the 92nd Academy Awards is airing on February 9th, dead smack in the middle of Fashion Week.  Due to this scheduling snafu, designer Tom Ford, who styles top actresses walking the red carpet at the Oscars,… More

New York Fashion Week: A Lineup of The Most Fashionable Trademark and Copyright Claims

It’s that time of the year again when New York City becomes the most fashionable place on the planet. While I would argue that Manhattan is always fashionable, New York Fashion Week adds a bit of extra excitement, glamour and coolness to the mix.  Fashion Week kicks off this Thursday, February 9 through Thursday, February 16, and as usual, the fashion world is all abuzz over who will be the designer-to-watch. … More

Sue-per Bowl Shuffle III: The Year In NFL-Related Intellectual Property Litigation

Two years ago, I started worrying about what would happen if someone at a Super Bowl party asked me to explain an NFL-related lawsuit, particularly one of those intellectual property lawsuits that sports fans assume IP lawyers know about. This anxiety led me to put together the Sue-per Bowl Shuffle I and Sue-per Bowl Shuffle II: guides to trademark, copyright, patent and other intellectual property disputes concerning the NFL during 2014 and 2015 respectively.… More

A Trademark Year In Wine And Beer 2016: Our Holiday Buyer’s Guide To Disputed Beverages

trademark-year-in-wine-and-beerJust in time for the holiday season, we present our third annual Trademark Year in Wine and Beer, a wrap-up  of alcohol-related trademark and trademark-ish disputes dating back to December 2015, when we published our last edition. Our scope includes lawsuits brought in U.S. Courts, actions before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (“TTAB”), arbitrations pursuant to the  Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (“UDRP”),… More

Justice Scalia on Trademark and Copyright: Dastar, Penguin-Shaped Cocktail Shakers and “Guilt by Resemblance”

ScaliaWhen we decided to mark the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia by recounting a few of his copyright and trademark opinions, we were somewhat surprised to discover that there really hadn’t been that many. In fact, we located only seven matters in which Justice Scalia contributed a written opinion on a substantive issue of trademark or copyright law, and only four were majority opinions. Here they are,… More

Sue-per Bowl Shuffle II: The Year in NFL-Related Intellectual Property Litigation

SBS

Around this time last year, I started worrying about what would happen if someone at a Super Bowl party asked me to explain an NFL-related lawsuit, particularly one of those IP-ish lawsuits that I’m supposed to know about. So I put together the first Sue-per Bowl Shuffle, a guide to the year’s gridiron disputes over trademarks, copyright, the right of publicity and other matters with a First Amendment flavor.… More

Patent Strategies For Start-Up Companies

GyroPatents can be vitally important for protecting the innovations of a start-up company, just as it is important for start-ups to be mindful of trademark, copyright, and domain name strategies (see our other guides for start-ups, including Trademark, Copyright, and Domain Names). A patent is a government-granted right that prevents others from making, using, selling, or importing a patented invention.… More

Authorship Credit for Scholarly and Creative Works: The Elusive American Attribution Right

creditWhat if were to tell you that I jointly authored this article with a colleague, but that I’m not going to give her any credit or attribution because I don’t feel like it? Can she sue me for copyright infringement? No, because we are joint authors, so I have as much a right to publish this article as she does. If we lived in Europe, my colleague might have relied on her inherent right of attribution,… More

Harry Potter Lawsuits And Where To Find Them

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On July 31, 2015, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling celebrates her 50th birthday, according to muggle sources. The enormous success of Rowling’s literary creation and its associated multimedia empire has spawned countless jealousies, countless imitators, countless parodists and countless pirates. The franchise has kept dozens if not hundreds of lawyers busy with precedent-setting copyright cases, trademark disputes, First Amendment battles over religious expression,… More

And the Lawsuit Goes to . . . An Oscar-Time Guide to “Best Picture” Intellectual Property Litigation

OscarThe film that wins the Best Picture Oscar this year is certain to attract more viewers and more box office receipts than it had before receiving the award. But Best Picture winners also tend to attract more lawsuits, including intellectual property claims. Plaintiffs show up out of nowhere claiming to be the true authors of the underlying work, infringing defendants come out of the woodwork to unlawfully grab a little bit of the success for themselves,… More

Ninth Circuit (Mostly) Skirts the Issue of Copyright Misuse in Most Recent Omega v. Costco Decision

quarterSometimes a cigar is just a cigar, as the saying goes. However, things are not always as they appear, and sometimes events unfold in ways you would not anticipate. Such is the case with the Ninth Circuit decision in the matter of Omega v. Costco. The case concerns Omega’s allegations that Costco was importing watches bearing the Omega symbol, thus infringing the copyright in that design.… More

A Trademark Year in Wine and Beer: Our 2014 Holiday Buyer’s Guide to Disputed Beverages

DrinkersIf you are hosting or attending a party this holiday season, you probably need to pick up something to drink. This year, why not pick up a conversation starter as well? See if your local liquor store (in our neck of the woods, a “packie”) carries one of the many beverages that were the subject of a trademark or similar dispute in 2014. In deciding an 1891 trademark case,… More

The PTO vs. The Phantom Marks: A Ghost Story

RRRRDon’t read this one before bed.

As autumn sets in and Halloween approaches, my mind turns to jack-o-lanterns, skeletons, and phantoms. Phantom marks, that is. Equally incorporeal though perhaps somewhat less frightening than their ghostly namesakes, phantom marks are registered trademarks that contain a “phantom,” or changeable, element.  A well-known phantom registration was _ _ _ _ _ _ FOR DUMMIES for various self-help books,… More

Wizard of Oz Celebrates 75th Anniversary & Victory in Copyright and Trademark Dispute Over Film Characters

adfsdfThis August will mark the 75th anniversary of the release of the classic film The Wizard of Oz. As Warner Bros. celebrates the iconic status acquired by the film and its characters during the past seven-plus decades, the studio will likely also be rejoicing over a recent victory concerning the intellectual property rights in images of the characters from the film.

In the early 2000’s,… More

Amazon’s Inability To Register Domain Name .Amazon Is An Interesting Case Study For New gTLDs

Do you want your company to control .app or .restaurant? Applying to operate a generic top-level domain (gTLD) isn’t for the faint of heart.  Although several hundred companies ponied up the $185,000 application fee for over 1,900 total gTLD applications, that’s only the first stage in the process.  Once filed, ICANN reviews each application for financial, technical, and operational competence, ensuring that each applicant has the financial wherewithal,… More

It Doesn’t Have To Be the Magna Carta! Alien Yogurt And The Writing Requirement For Copyright Transfers

StuffSunday (June 15) marks the 799th birthday of the Magna Carta (sometimes spelled Magna Charta), which famously limited the powers of the English monarch vis-à-vis his feudal barons.  Although often credited as a singular influence on the U.S. Constitution, and therefore on American law, it also gave rise to one of our favorite pre-internet copyright memes, courtesy of Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinksi in Effects Associates v.… More

Recent Copyright And Trademark Administrative Developments

Some recent administrative developments may be of interest to copyright and trademark practitioners:

Copyright Fees

Effective May 1, 2014, the U.S. Copyright Office has amended its registration fee schedule.  This includes reduced renewal application fees and increased fees for registering multiple works.  A complete list of the new fees is available here.

Updated Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure (TMEP)

On April 30,… More

Court Finds No Business In This Show Business Trademark Dispute

It is a basic principle of trademark law that a mark can only be assigned with the goodwill of the business to which the mark relates, for the good reason that the mark is in fact inseparable from the business.  But what kind of “business” is necessary to support ownership of a mark?  A recent decision by the Federal Court in the Southern District of New York in Creative Arts by Calloway,… More

Product Liability Risk in Licensing Trademarks with Technology

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A Connecticut Superior Court judge has upheld a jury verdict that once again demonstrates the product liability risks faced by trademark licensors, particularly those who license technology as well as their marks. In Hannibal Saldibar v. A.O. Smith Corp, the court upheld a $2.4 million judgment against the Tile Council of North America, which had licensed its trademarks and patented technology for dry-set mortar to tile manufacturers,… More

Risks of an Unrestricted License

The recent case of Edgenet, Inc. v. Home Depot U.S.A., Inc. (7th Cir., No. 10-1335, 9/2/11) illustrates the principle that a copyright license without restrictions will be broadly construed to encompass all rights. The facts of the case were that Home Depot had contracted in 2004 with Edgenet for Edgenet to develop a classification system (called a “taxonomy”) that was to be used to organize Home Depot’s product database.… More

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Trademark: Naked Licensing Can Mean Abandonment of Your Valuable Rights

A trademark is more than a designation of source. It is also a symbol of quality, attesting to the consistent, predictable nature of the identified goods or services. Consumers rely upon marks to insure that they purchase the same product or service they have come to know from prior experience.

For this reason, a company that uses its mark through licensees must control the quality of the goods and services that the licensees sell under the mark.… More

No Harm, No Foul: Acknowledgement of Irreparable Harm Doesn’t Create Irreparable Harm

It is common for contracts that grant intellectual property licenses or that include confidentiality obligations to include a provision in which the licensee or the user of confidential information acknowledges that breach of its confidentiality or license obligations will cause irreparable harm and that the other party will be entitled to injunctive relief to enforce any breach or threatened breach of the provision. Many an attorney has spent time negotiating the finer points of such acknowledgment provisions.… More

Apple and the Beatles: The End of a Long and Winding Road?

The decision by Apple Corps, the Beatles’ music company, to allow distribution of Beatles songs on iTunes appears to have been vindicated by the initial sales figures achieved (two million singles sold in the first week, reports Billboard). However, the release of Beatles’ music on iTunes, the final act in the resolution of the long-running trademark dispute between Apple Computer and Apple Corps, also illustrates the basic truth underlying the resolution of many trademark negotiations: the company with the biggest consumer footprint ultimately wins.… More

Trademark Licensors Beware: You May be on the Hook for Your Licensee’s Defective Products

The Massachusetts Appeals Court has served up a reminder to Massachusetts trademark licensors that they may be subject to liability for injuries caused by defective products bearing their licensed mark, even if they are not the manufacturer or seller of the defective product. Under the "apparent manufacturer" doctrine, a nonseller trademark licensor may be liable for defective products if the licensor "participated substantially" in the design, manufacture or distribution of the products.… More