Pamela Chestek
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Never Underestimate the Value of Section 7
We have a case at the intersection of band names and zombie marks, clearly one for which the melody lingers on. In 1997 there was a jam session at SXSW that included the band Los Lobos. In 1998 some of the SXSW performers created a Grammy award-winning album called Los Super Seven; petitioner Daniel Goodman… Continue reading
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The Subsidiary Standing In
Lately we’ve been seeing an increasing number of trademark cases that revolve around the relative rights of different members of the same enterprise: a family of companies asserting a family of marks theory in Wise F&I v. Allstate Ins. Co., different chapters of the Salvation Army allowed to register similar trademarks in In re The… Continue reading
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Update: All the Wrong Reasons
Update: I previously reported on Sebastian Brown Prods. LLC v. Muzooka Inc., a fairly routine trademark priority dispute with a troubling holding. In it, the district court wrote out the last sentence of Section 10 of the Lanham Act, essentially holding that an intent-to-use application cannot be assigned until the trademark is in use. As… Continue reading
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Cutting to the Chase
Props to the bankruptcy court in the Eastern District of North Carolina for cutting through to the meat of a trademark ownership dispute. We have a company, B6USA, Inc., doing business as “BaySix,” in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. B6USA was formed in March 2005 and was solely owned by Katherine D. Hite, who was also president,… Continue reading
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Choice of Law and Copyright Ownership
RCTV International Corp. v. Rosenfeld is a exhaustive examination of how US copyright law applies to works of foreign origin. Plaintiff Radio Caracas Television RCTV C.V. is a Venezuelan television company that created the telenovela series “Juana La Virgen”1. RCTV Caracas hired defendant Perla Farias De Eskinazi (“Farias”), also Venezuelan, on four different annual contracts… Continue reading
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A Family of Marks with Different Owners
The “family of marks” concept in trademark law is a difficult one to win. We all understand the concept, which is that consumers realize that when trademarks share a similar trait, like restaurant food products that start with “Mc,” the goods come from the same source. Proof of a family of marks is challenging, though.… Continue reading
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Isn’t It the Corporate Secretary’s Job …
Isn’t it the Corporate Secretary’s job (and in this case, the same person was also the General Counsel) to make sure that documents are signed by the right entity? In East West Bank Co. v. The Plubell Firm LLC, not once, but twice the Corporate Secretary, Douglas Krause, executed trademark maintenance documents for the wrong… Continue reading
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Copyright Notice and Ownership
Eminent scholar Jessica Litman has published What Notice Did, 96 B.U.L. Rev. 717 (2016), an interesting article on how copyright notice has shaped copyright ownership jurisprudence. Most interesting to me was the “head’s I win, tails you lose” nature of notice. Since 1870 an assignment had to be in writing, but publishers would name themselves… Continue reading
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You Will Never Get a Copyright Registration Right
I previously wrote about the licensing discussion in Palmer/Kane LLC v. Rosen Book Works LLC, but the decision also points out what is the near impossibility of successfully registering the copyright in a work so that you can actually have a lawsuit claiming it was infringed. Palmer/Kane originally alleged the infringement of 19 works, but… Continue reading
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If It’s Retroactive It’s Not a “License”
This is a big one. As I’ve written about in the past (recursive link), there is a huge upheaval in the stock photography industry over the use of photos in textbooks. In Palmer/Kane LLC v. Rosen Book Works LLC, plaintiff Palmer/Kane licensed the rights in its photos through several agencies, the relevant one here being… Continue reading
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