Plaintiff Tegu is a toy company. It hired defendant Vestal Design Atelier LLC to develop its first toy line. Vestal created prototypes for Tegu for blocks with embedded magnets. These are the relevant provisions on ownership of the intellectual property rights in the agreement: 2.0 Ownership of Intellectual Property. 1. Ownership. Intellectual property rights...
Read more →Ownership of the trademark for a location-based business, like a restaurant, a theater, or a hotel, is always interesting. I don’t think there is any consistent outcome; it depends on the very specific facts of the given situation. Today’s installment is about a little bakery called The Long Grove Apple Haus. The original business...
Read more →There’s a recent decision out of the Second Circuit about an after-the-fact work-made-for-hire agreement. There is a circuit split; the Seventh and Ninth Circuits have held that a “work made for hire” agreement must be executed before the creation of the work. However, the Second Circuit held in Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Dumas that...
Read more →You’ve all seen this language before. This is from an agreement to transfer rights to a formula for nutritional products in exchange for royalties: If you can’t read the image, it says In consideration of the sum of $1.00 payable by Synergy to HealthBanc upon execution of this Agreement, HealthBanc hereby transfers and assigns...
Read more →Licenses and releases for after-acquired affiliates can be tricky things to draft. Are after-acquired affiliates also licensed to the rights? Are they licensed on a forward-going basis only, or does the license or release cure earlier infringement? It all depends on how you write it. On November 24, 2016, plaintiff Oyster Optics, LLC sued...
Read more →The Copyright Act of 1976 made a fundamental change to copyright law by making copyright divisible. Authors can give someone else exclusive rights in a portion of their copyright, for example the exclusive right of first publication, retaining no right of first publication for themselves. The drafters of the Copyright Act also contemplated that...
Read more →Apparently someone is still interested in the Amiga operating system. In 2009, non-party Amiga, Inc. and defendant Hyperion Entertainment C.V.B.A. entered into a settlement agreement that resolved a number of lawsuits between them. The plaintiff, Cloanto Corp., was a licensee of Amiga at the time of the settlement agreement and mentioned in the agreement...
Read more →We have a rare win under Copyright Act § 117(a), a section of the Copyright Act that allows someone to copy or adapt a computer program under very narrow circumstances. Invocation of the section has been largely unsuccessful because it only applies where one is the owner of a copy of the program. However,...
Read more →Something that license drafters need to think through is how a license grant works, as a permission, not a prohibition. If there is conduct that a licensor wants to prohibit, then it has to ensure that it addresses that need in the agreement. The licensor also needs to think through what remedies will be...
Read more →Sometimes a case sends you back to the basics. This was one of those cases for me. Copyright infringement claims against Dollar General appear to be the driving force behind a sequence of assignments of the copyrights for some toys. The relevant chain of title for the copyrights was Acquawood => Focus Brand Limited...
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