• Posts Tagged ‘divorce’

    Licenses, Consents or Assignments?

    by  • July 31, 2017 • trademark • 1 Comment

    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...

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    The Family Name

    by  • January 16, 2017 • trademark • 0 Comments

    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...

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    Refusing to Execute the Documents

    by  • August 25, 2014 • copyright • 0 Comments

    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...

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    Why There Are Nonprecedential Decisions

    by  • May 14, 2014 • patent • 0 Comments

    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...

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    Patents and Divorce

    by  • May 6, 2013 • patent • 5 Comments

    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...

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    Copyright and Divorce

    by  • May 1, 2013 • copyright • 3 Comments

    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...

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    Divorce Entitled to Full Faith and Credit

    by  • August 11, 2010 • patent

    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...

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