Heraeus Germany makes dental products and distributes them in the United States through a sister company, plaintiff Heraeus Kulzer LLC (Heraeus America). Defendant Omni Dental Supply imports gray market products it claims are made by Heraeus Germany but intended for distribution in other countries, primarily China. In order to stop Omni, Heraeus Germany made...
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 →Ah, here’s an interesting one. The plaintiff claims to be an exclusive patent licensee, the defendant is the United States, the case properly filed in the Court of Federal Claims, and the defendant has challenged standing. But rather than the usual situation where the court is examining whether enough rights were transferred for the...
Read more →I don’t normally write about what some might characterize as “copyright trolls,” others cover it well enough. You know the story, though, a company is set up solely to do copyright enforcement and starts suing masses of people. The problem is that copyright law does not permit the assignment of a cause of action;...
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 →It’s black-letter law, as black as it gets, that in the United States a patent is initially owned by the individual inventor. As stated by the Supreme Court: “Since 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor.” Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford...
Read more →Here’s a bankruptcy practice tip—you can’t just go signing documents when your company is in bankruptcy. Defendant Deep claimed to own the copyright in the “Aimster” software of yore. He accused plaintiff XAC, LLC, a subsidiary of Xerox, of copyright infringement. Deep had three different theories for why he owned the copyright in the...
Read more →To have constitutional standing for a claim, the remedy must provide some redress for the claimant. In the case of correcting inventorship on a patent, it generally means the correction will provide a financial advantage, although in theory it could be a reputational advantage. But Shukh v. Seagate Technology, LLC shows that’s pretty hard...
Read more →Apparently in the Northern District of California, an exclusive licensee can successfully sue under Section 32 of the Lanham Act even though it doesn’t claim to be either owner or registrant.
Read more →I gotta think that book publisher Pearson Education has lousy recordkeeping. I found 10 reported cases filed against it, not including this one, alleging that Pearson Education exceeded the scope of the license for photographs it uses in books. The plaintiff in Minden Pictures, Inc. v. Pearson Education, Inc. claims “that Pearson has been...
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