Property, intangible

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

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

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

I have not been shy in expressing my opinion about the copyright registration system. I’m not a fan of the requirement that one must have a registration before a lawsuit can be filed; as a result, the first stages of a copyright infringement lawsuit are collateral attacks on the registration. Cisco alleged infringement of the… Continue reading

I asked in a prior post whether plaintiff Joseph Cooper had the right to publish his videotapes of performances of famous comedian Steve Harvey, taped at Harvey’s Texas club in 1993, based on this invoice: Click here for larger version Unfortunately we don’t know yet, because it’s most certainly a question of fact, not one… Continue reading

Click here for larger version Can Cooper, the videographer, put his videos of now-famous comedian Steve Harvey on YouTube? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Continue reading

Golly, the things you have to explain sometimes. Plaintiff Ubu/Elements, Inc. claimed to have purchased all of the assets of Defendant Elements Personal Care, Inc. UBU/Elements accused the defendant of continuing to use the trademark AFTER THE GAME after the purchase. The Asset Purchase Agreement said this about the trademark in dispute: If you can’t… Continue reading

I previously described a situation where unhappy licensees refused to acknowledge that there was a new licensor. Bruce Kirby, Inc. was the original licensor of the defendants’ rights to build Kirby Sailboats granted in the “Builder Agreements” and then in 2008 Bruce Kirby sold his business to Global Sailing Limited (GSL). The Builder Agreements didn’t… Continue reading

This case relates to some kind of intellectual property, denominated in the agreement as “copyright” and “industrial design” rights, although the true nature of the rights was not examined by the court. It’s a mess of a problem, with a “solution” that turned out not to work quite as the parties planned. I’ll set out… Continue reading

Don’t let the tax department screw up your patent infringement case. Or, when they do, I hope they saved more on taxes than you lost on the patent case.1 W.L. Gore & Assocs., Inc. v. C.R. Bard, Inc. is an example of what can happen. In 1983, Gore set up a patent holding company, Gore… Continue reading