Plaintiff Janssen Biotech had a fundamental structural problem with an agreement. The document was called an “Employee Secrecy Agreement,” but in addition to imposing duties of confidentiality on its employees the agreement also served as an employee invention assignment agreement, as is commonly, if not universally, done. Janssen’s structural problem was in the definition...
Read more →Moreno v. Pro Boxing Supplies, Inc. is a precedential decision and, IMHO, clearly contrary to the Board’s controlling precedent. Opposer and petitioner Julie Moreno is the exclusive US licensee of the unregistered trademark CASANOVA for boxing equipment: Applicant and Registrant Pro Boxing Supplies is the owner of a registration for CASANOVA in standard character...
Read more →What a confusing ownership case (which perhaps means that the wise reader stops right here). Errors on every level, at the end of the day unrecoverable. The parties are Paradise Biryani, Inc. (PBI), Paradise Biryani Express, Inc. (Express), and Biryani Point Paradise LLC (PBB) on one side, and Paradise Hospitality Group, LLC (PHG) on...
Read more →This is a bit of a “duh” case from the Federal Circuit, a nonprecedential decision. The only surprising part of it is that the trial court, Judge Sparks in the Western District of Texas, didn’t impose even greater sanctions. It was quite a show of generosity. The patent-in-suit has a short chain of title;...
Read more →To “plead yourself out of court” is to state facts in a complaint that mean you have already lost. Something like, in a personal injury case, saying “I rear-ended him because he stopped at a red light” would do it. In Reynolds v. Banks it’s not quite exactly that, but pretty darn close. Sandra...
Read more →I’m writing about an inventorship case mostly because I have to bone up before I speak at the AIPLA Mid-Winter Institute in a talk rivetingly titled “The Backlash from Mismanagement of Inventorship in Multi-Party Deals.” If you’re attending, consider Speedfit LLC v. Woodway USA, Inc. your homework assignment. The plaintiffs are an inventor, Aurel...
Read more →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 →Plaintiff Advanced Video Technologies has been around the block a few times already. AVT claimed to be the successor to a patent for a video codec. It had successfully asserted the patent against other defendants but ran into some problems when trying to sue HTC Corp., Blackberry and Motorola Mobility. Its first attempt failed...
Read more →As we all know, standing is difficult in patent cases. There are two types of “exclusive” licensees (in my view, making jurisprudence very confusing). First is the “virtual assignee” who has essentially all of the rights of the patent owner and can sue for infringement without having to join the patent owner. Second is...
Read more →This is my sixth post (recursive link) about the STOLI case. The defendant, Spirits International B.V., claims to own the STOLI and STOLICHNAYA trademarks as a result of privatization during the collapse of the Soviet Union and is listed as the owner of the trademark registrations. The Russian government, acting through state entity Federal...
Read more →Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
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