Lately we’ve been seeing an increasing number of trademark cases that revolve around the relative rights of different members of the same enterprise: a family of companies asserting a family of marks theory in Wise F&I v. Allstate Ins. Co., different chapters of the Salvation Army allowed to register similar trademarks in In re...
Read more →Almost 15 years ago I published an article about the then-common practice of creating a wholly-owned subsidiary to be an “IP holding company.” It was a tax strategy, where royalty payments, an expense to the parent, would be made to a subsidiary in a jurisdiction that didn’t tax the income on royalties. I don’t...
Read more →Short and sweet: after seven years of litigation, partial summary judgment, and an award against the defendant for $100,000, the court vacated it all because, a year after the award, the defendant’s new lawyer noticed the plaintiff didn’t actually own the copyrights, its subsidiaries did. In light of the recently unearthed determination that Plaintiff...
Read more →The TTABlog reports on a decision invoking In re Wella to try to escape a likelihood of confusion refusal. In re Wella is a 1986 Federal Circuit decision which held that corporate family members (in that case, parent and subsidiary) may own substantially similar marks without a likelihood of confusion so long as there...
Read more →Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
© 2013 Pamela S. Chestek. All rights reserved.