Property, intangible

Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. v. Cinram International Inc. is, for the most part, about whether an “essential” patent in a patent pool was necessarily an infringed one (it’s not – or the license would not have said “for the avoidance of doubt, in the event that the manufacture by Licensee of CD-Discs within the Territory… Continue reading

John Welch pointed me to a curious new site – “USTrademarkExchange.com.” According to the home page, USTrademarkExchange.com is a new website that connects registered trademark sellers and buyers. Many industry professionals view trademarks as a unique kind of intellectual property (IP), quite different from either patents or copyrights. As as a result we have created… Continue reading

Wikipedia is a registered trademark, owned by Wikimedia Foundation. A New York Times article says “nearly every time Wikipedia has come to a fork in the road where the project could have chosen to impose more restrictions on who could edit what — even insist on a bit of expertise — it has chosen not… Continue reading

I’ve been reading The Starfish and the Spider. The premise of the book is that some organizations are centralized and top-down, which is the spider – you cut the head off and it dies. But there are decentralized, non-hierarchical organizations that are like a starfish – if you cut it in half, it becomes two… Continue reading

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

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

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

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

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

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