Watching the Bratz litigation has become a bit of a hobby for me. Law.com reports that MGA applied for a writ of mandamus with the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, asking it to overturn the district court’s denial of the motion for mistrial that MGA filed when it learned that a juror...
Read more →This IP Finance blog post points us to a publication by the UK Intellectual Property Office giving some basics for licensing intellectual property. It looks like a useful handbook to remind us of the various points to remember when doing licensing work.
Read more →No mistrial in Bratz. Trial on damages to continue tomorrow.
Read more →The Bratz story just keeps getting more interesting. Seems one of the jurors commented that Iranians are “stubborn, rude”, and as “thieves” who have “stolen other persons’ ideas.” The CEO of MGA, the company with the Bratz line of dolls, is Iranian. Juror dismissed, motion for mistrial filed. AP story here. Previous entries on...
Read more →It’s perhaps a bit off-topic for this blog to post about ownership of tangible property, rather than the ownership of the IP itself. But the disagreement over when an object that contains copyrighted work is sold or merely licensed is heating up. There are three recent district court cases in the 9th Circuit that...
Read more →Following up on a previous post, in an unsurprising outcome the AP is reporting that the jury found that the designer of the Bratz dolls conceived of the idea while employed at Mattel, hence the concept is owned by Mattel. It’s not quite clear from the AP article what exactly Mattel owns, since the...
Read more →Professor Patry‘s primer on the termination provisions of copyright (straightforward to him, convoluted to the rest of us). Don’t miss his “About Me” portrait on this one – Updated August 5, 2008: Here is a link to the decision in Classic Media, Inc. v. Winifred Mewborn that I have posted since it is no...
Read more →Malibu Textiles, Inc. v. Carol Anderson, Inc. is a good demonstration of the confusion that, almost 20 years after CCNV, still surrounds whether a work is a “work made for hire.” In Malibu, designs for lace were created by an independent party but Malibu filed copyright applications for the lace designs listing ownership as...
Read more →The Los Angeles Intellectual Property Trademark Attorney Blog reports here that there is an ownership dispute over the music in a 1987 live-action version of Snow White. The blog reports: MGM asserts that defendant, Arik Rudich, is an individual now residing in Israel, who composed certain music and/or songs included in the picture, which...
Read more →I’m a little late to the game, but I just got around to reading Robert Brauneis’ “Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song,” available here, blogged here, here, and here. It’s an interesting and thorough investigation into whether “Happy Birthday” is still protected by copyright. The telling of the story covers initial ownership of...
Read more →Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
© 2013 Pamela S. Chestek. All rights reserved.