Here’s a a short and sweet one. Two guys, Mohammad Jarrah and Justin Truesdell, had some kind of business relationship—Jarrah claims Truesdell was an employee and Truesdell claimed he and Jarrah were partners. Whatever it was, the relationship ended. Jarrah then opened an establishment in Houston called “Rebels Honky Tonk” in August, 2009. Then...
Read more →It’s divorce week here at Property, Intangible. I just reported on a case before the Supreme Court of Hawai’i that decided the relative ownership interest of divorcing spouses in copyrights created during the marriage. Now we have a case about patents, this time a federal district court case deciding standing. The statutory sections involved...
Read more →For a two-week period of time, from July 16, 2012 through August 8, 2012, Craigslist presented users with the following statement when submitting a post: Clicking “Continue” confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without...
Read more →I recently wrote about a little-used (or so I thought) section of the Copyright Act, Section 201(e). It is a quirky little section that prohibits involuntary government transfer of copyright in certain cases: Involuntary Transfer.— When an individual author’s ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, has...
Read more →We routinely include arbitration provisions in agreements and I often wonder whether an arbitration is really any easier or cheaper than litigation. But what I didn’t realize before was how much latitude arbitrators have in what they can award, including, in this case, reforming the contract to grant a license far beyond what either...
Read more →John Welch recently blogged about a case in the Southern District of New York where a trademark registration was cancelled for fraud. The case has an interesting twist, because the fundamental question really was: who owns a pen name? Plaintiff Melodrama Publishing, LLC and defendant Danielle Santiago entered into two contracts for Santiago to...
Read more →Go read this story: “Firefly Hat Triggers Corporate Crackdown.” It’s a situation that is just so misguided. I’ll note that I’m taking the facts in the article as true; perhaps, as is often the case, there is more to the story. But the article tells the story of a hat, this hat:
Read more →It’s black-letter law, as black as it gets, that in the United States a patent is initially owned by the individual inventor. As stated by the Supreme Court: “Since 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor.” Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford...
Read more →Here’s a bankruptcy practice tip—you can’t just go signing documents when your company is in bankruptcy. Defendant Deep claimed to own the copyright in the “Aimster” software of yore. He accused plaintiff XAC, LLC, a subsidiary of Xerox, of copyright infringement. Deep had three different theories for why he owned the copyright in the...
Read more →To have constitutional standing for a claim, the remedy must provide some redress for the claimant. In the case of correcting inventorship on a patent, it generally means the correction will provide a financial advantage, although in theory it could be a reputational advantage. But Shukh v. Seagate Technology, LLC shows that’s pretty hard...
Read more →Apparently in the Northern District of California, an exclusive licensee can successfully sue under Section 32 of the Lanham Act even though it doesn’t claim to be either owner or registrant.
Read more →You all know that I’ll be having a “what were they thinking!” moment when I see a trademark case with a caption something like Del Monte v. Del Monte. We’ll start with the court’s opinion on the wisdom of the arrangement:
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