Property, intangible

a blog about ownership of intellectual property rights and its licensing

Pamela Chestek

  • The SCO Group Wins One -Trademark, That Is

    The effects of the infamous SCO Group copyright lawsuits ripple on and on. I can’t begin to summarize the complexities of the cases, but if you’re interested you can spend a few years perusing this site. In a sentence, The SCO Group claimed to be the owner of the copyright in one prong of the… Continue reading

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  • Tweeeeet!!

    HT to Marty on the story about the bird graphic on the home page of Twitter. I hesitate to call it a “trademark,” although I would have but for the story. Wired reports that Twitter got the design from iStockPhoto and paid the usual licensing fee for an editorial use of the design. (I looked… Continue reading

  • Can POLAROID Still Survive?

    I previously reminisced about the grand brand that used to be Polaroid. It’s still is an income-producing mark in at least China, India and Brazil. We know, because Polaroid Corp. brought an adversarial proceeding to avoid the transfer of the Polaroid marks to Ritchie Capital Management L.L.C. Thomas Petters had used the marks to secure… Continue reading

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  • Scope of the MOU

    Memorylink Corp. v. Motorola, Inc. is a fairly routine story of a joint development agreement gone wrong, with the small, independent inventors at Memorylink complaining they were mistreated by the far larger Motorola. Most of the claims were rightly kicked on statute of limitations grounds, but there was one theory that I thought the court… Continue reading

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  • Coining a Geographic Identifier

    If you’re appealing a decision that “OBX” is generic for oval stickers with “OBX” printed on them, is it a good sign or a bad sign that the appeals court decision starts out “James Douglas cleverly invented ‘OBX’ as an abbreviation for the “Outer Banks” of North Carolina”? Bad. In a well-reasoned and well-written opinion,… Continue reading

  • But Wait – Meet WHICH Bloggers?

    While I can’t claim attendance at all the Meet the Bloggers events, I do claim attendance at the very first one (okay, I’m not in the picture – I must have been getting another cold one. I was there, really I was). I haven’t yet gotten my official invitation to participate as a blogger at… Continue reading

  • The Reason for a Declaratory Judgment Counterclaim

    Exclusive Rights blogged on a recent decision from the 11th Circuit. It involves the “Rooker-Feldman” doctrine on the availability of review of state court decisions by a federal court. I promptly mentally filed the decision in the category of “I’ll look it up if I ever need it,” but the brief summary of facts by… Continue reading

  • Jumping to Conclusions

    One thing lawyers are good at is exploiting weaknesses. A recently-filed case in Delaware used an incorrect admission in an unrelated case as grounds for a motion to dismiss, claiming that the admission demonstrated that the plaintiff was not the actual owner of the patent. The defendant’s motion was ultimately unsuccessful, but a lot time… Continue reading

  • The Risk of the Silent License

    A previous post looked at a contract that was silent on trademark ownership and licensing, leaving the court to sort out who owned the trademark in dispute. A similar problem, a contract silent on the trademark, was decided in the Northern District of Indiana on the same day. This time, it was decided in the… Continue reading

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  • Wild Things

    The IPKat gives us an interesting story of a failed joint authorship theory for a children’s book. The German court held that the illustrations were not a joint work of authorship with the literary work and characters because there was a lack of sufficient interaction between the illustrations and the plot of the story. It’s… Continue reading

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