Lawn Managers, Inc. v. Progressive Lawn Managers, Inc. is about a trademark and a divorce, a case we’ve visited before. Where we last left it, the federal court was abstaining to allow the parties to figure things out in family court. As it turns out that order was vacated; on reconsideration the court concluded...
Read more →This case is not just a trademark suit with a domestic relations background; it is a domestic relations dispute over the ownership of marital property, which happens to be a trademark. It is a marital settlement that makes any trademark attorney’s heart sink. While they were married, exes Randy Zweifel and Linda Smith held...
Read more →Songwriters Daniel Cohen and Julie Didier owned their own publishing company, Bayou Blanc Music Company, which owned the copyrights in their songs. When they divorced in 1985, the divorce decree incorporated an agreement that Didier would continue to own Bayou Blanc but she would transfer Cohen’s pro rata share of the copyright ownership in...
Read more →When we last visited Taylor v. Taylor Made Plastics, Inc., the trial court held that the spouse of the inventor acquired a legal ownership interest in the inventor’s patent in the divorce. I was a bit surprised; the language in the divorce was this: The Court finds that the proceeds from the production of...
Read more →It’s divorce week here at Property, Intangible. I just reported on a case before the Supreme Court of Hawai’i that decided the relative ownership interest of divorcing spouses in copyrights created during the marriage. Now we have a case about patents, this time a federal district court case deciding standing. The statutory sections involved...
Read more →I recently wrote about a little-used (or so I thought) section of the Copyright Act, Section 201(e). It is a quirky little section that prohibits involuntary government transfer of copyright in certain cases: Involuntary Transfer.— When an individual author’s ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, has...
Read more →Co-inventor Mundi Fumokong was married to Fonda Whitfield when he filed for two related patent applications. In California, all property acquired by a married person during marriage is presumed to be community property, including patent applications. Fumokong and Whitfield later filed for a “quickie” divorce (those are the court’s words), more formally called a...
Read more →Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
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