Property, intangible

The BODY UP decision at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board has been appealed to the District Court for the District of Columbia.Body Up Dist. Ct. ComplaintThe text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Continue reading

I am pleased to be speaking at the 2012 North Carolina Bar Association Intellectual Property Law Section Annual Meeting on March 23, 2012.  My session is titled “Who Owns the Intellectual Property?”  I’ll be covering developing law surrounding the ownership of patent, copyright and trademark rights (what else?). Details here.  Hope to see you there.… Continue reading

Scanner Technologies Corp., the defendant in the declaratory judgment action, was the owner of 13 patents in the same family. There were multiple suits between it and declaratory judgment plaintiff ICOS Vision Systems, Inc. over “ball grid inspection devices,” which inspect the electrical connections between a microchip and circuit board. In 2008, ICOS filed a… Continue reading

Sometimes I find great dissonance between the application of trademark law and the marketplace realities. The parties line all their legal ducks up in a nice straight row, but there’s just such an inconsistency between what the legal outcome is and what consumers’ understanding of the situation might be. E & J Gallo v. Proximo… Continue reading

Plaintiff Olusegun Falana was hired to work on synthesizing chemical compounds for use in liquid crystal display screens. The compounds had to perform over a range of temperatures. Falana developed a protocol for synthesizing compounds and, using the protocol, synthesized “Compound 7.” Compound 7 had a much improved temperature range, but it still wasn’t adequate.… Continue reading

The only good thing about the latest Federal Circuit standing decision is that it’s nonprecedential.  This is the sequence of events, taken from both the majority’s and dissent’s statement of them:  In 2002, The Dow Chemical Company (“Dow”) assigned patents to a holding company, Dow Global Technologies, Inc. (“DGTI”). The dissent described the assignment as… Continue reading

Last April there was an interesting complaint filed (blogged here) by a woman who claimed that her uncle, Kenneth Timur, now deceased, had designed the New York Yankees logo in 1936 but hadn’t been compensated for it. The plaintiff’s proof of authorship was the fact that her uncle, when he revised the logo in 1952,… Continue reading

Sometimes you read a decision and don’t know what the arguments really are until you read the dissent.  Abbott Point of Care, Inc. v. Epocal, Inc. is one of those cases. Out of the Federal Circuit, it’s a question about whether a former employee’s duty to assign inventions survived various changes in the relationship and… Continue reading

Sherman & Associates, Inc. v. Oxford Instruments, PLC discusses the fairly commonplace question of whether plaintiff Sherman & Associates, who was only a patent licensee, has standing to sue. The answer hinged on interpretation of the contract between it and the patent owner, ASM America, Inc. Sherman & Associates was originally the owner of the… Continue reading

I last wrote about the licensing rights of a joint copyright owner as discussed in Corbello v. DeVito. The same case also had two agreements that the court needed to construe before deciding who owned what rights in the copyright. Plaintiff Corbello is the widow and heir of Rex Woodard, who wrote an authorized biography… Continue reading