• Posts Tagged ‘license’

    Condition or Covenant? A Quiz

    by  • April 9, 2018 • copyright • 1 Comment

    When parties enter into an agreement that includes a copyright license, and there is thereafter a failure to comply with one of the terms in the agreement, a court will have to decide whether it is a failure to meet a condition precedent to the license, in which case the accused use is not...

    Read more →

    Redbox Wins (for now)

    by  • February 26, 2018 • copyright • 0 Comments

    The decision in Disney Enterprises, Inc. v. Redbox Automated Retail, LLC was, to me, unexpected. Who would have thought that Redbox would win a case about selling codes for digital download of Disney movies? The way Disney elected to distribute the codes was key to the outcome, so I don’t know how much ripple...

    Read more →

    Termination of a Public License

    by  • January 17, 2018 • copyright • 0 Comments

    I’ve been thinking lately about the concept of a “license.” This is a typical statement of what it is: license is not a contract; rather, a license is “permission to use a copyrighted work in a particular specified manner …” Saxelbye Architects, Inc. v. First Citizens Bank & Tr. Co., 1997 U.S. App....

    Read more →

    The EULA Working Against You

    by  • June 12, 2017 • copyright • 2 Comments

    GC2 Inc. v. Int’l Game Tech, PLC is a fairly unexciting copyright ownership case. The main argument involves construction of an ambiguous contract. (What other kinds are there?) GC2 provided “video graphics and artwork” for IGT’s gaming machines and conversion kits. The agreement had a license grant and it defined certain devices and fields...

    Read more →

    The Naked Registration

    by  • May 30, 2017 • trademark • 2 Comments

    I’ve written before about the trademark dispute over the Camellia Grill restaurant in New Orleans. The restaurant closed after Hurricane Katrina, after which the original owner, Shwartz, disposed of the business in various transactions with Khodr.1 The ultimate ownership of the CAMILLIA GRILL trademark is what I’ve been writing about. To briefly summarize the...

    Read more →

    The Contract Without End – What the Parties Did

    by  • August 18, 2016 • copyright • 2 Comments

    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...

    Read more →

    The Contract Without End

    by  • August 16, 2016 • copyright • 6 Comments

    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...

    Read more →

    I Called It (Sort of)

    by  • March 28, 2016 • trademark • 0 Comments

    I previously wrote about a case, Uptown Grill, L.L.C. v. Shwartz, with some boobery in the sale of a single-locale restaurant. There were two relevant documents, a Bill of Sale and a trademark license agreement, entered into 16 days apart. The Bill of Sale was between seller Shwartz and Uptown Grill LLC in exchange...

    Read more →

    What the Paperwork Says

    by  • March 7, 2016 • trademark • 5 Comments

    Here’s an utterly confusing situation, which I suppose is why there has been an arbitration, two lawsuits, and an appeal to the 9th Circuit with an unpublished decision. People, get the paperwork right. The situation involves Camelot Hair Care Products LLC, a woman named Nina Parkinson, and Robanda International Inc. A person named Tony...

    Read more →

    The Security Interest Quiz Answer

    by  • January 20, 2016 • copyright • 0 Comments

    I previously offered a quiz asking you to decide who, between a secured party and a licensee, owned the rights in an improved version of software. And the answer is — Pro Marketing, owner of the security interest. I missed it, but it is a straightforward answer. The key is that the collateral included...

    Read more →