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By: Sharon Urias, Esq. In January 2012, Eastman Kodak, the 131-year-old film pioneering company, filed for bankruptcy protection. Kodak was once one of America’s most notable companies, but has faltered in recent years due to the onset of digital photography, that has basically done away with the demand for traditional film. In a last ditch attempt to raise cash, Kodak announced in July that it will be selling its digital imaging patents as part of its bankruptcy proceedings.
The USPTO’s Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) includes many interesting but somewhat obscure provisions. One of the more useful examples of these provisions is § 707.02. Section 707.02 of the MPEP essentially imparts “special” status to older cases and cases in which a third Office action has been issued. Special status gives an application priority on an Examiner’s docket.
In September 2011, the Authors Guild, various international authors' rights organizations and one dozen individual authors sued HathiTrust, Cornell, and the presidents of the universities of Michigan, California, Wisconsin and Indiana, claiming that HathiTrust's online storage, searchability and public availability of a digital corpus developed as part of the Google Books scanning project constituted copyright infringement.
By: Sharon Urias, Esq. CFA Properties, Inc., the parent company of Chick-fil-A, lost its fight to close down the parody website ChickfilaFoundation.com for trademark infringement. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) heard the case and ruled the parody website to be a legitimate criticism of the restaurant’s anti-gay stance. Chick-fil-A was in the national spotlight earlier this year for owner Dan Cathy’s stance against gay marriage.
Software is complex, which makes threats to the software supply chain more real every day. 64% of organizations have been impacted by a software supply chain attack and 60% of data breaches are due to unpatched software vulnerabilities. In the U.S. alone, cyber losses totaled $10.3 billion in 2022. All of these stats beg the question, “Do you know what’s in your software?
By: Sharon Urias, Esq. Coach, the luxury handbag manufacturer, began Operation Turnlock in 2009, an anti-counterfeiting campaign. Since the inception of Operation Turnlock, Coach has had success and received monetary awards against the knock-off artists who have been selling counterfeit Coach handbags. Just in July of this year, a mother and daughter team of counterfeiters were hit with a $44 million judgment, and their operation was shut down by a Manhattan judge for trademark infringement.
By: Sharon Urias, Esq. A student from Thailand whose search for inexpensive college textbooks has now led to a legal battle involving federal copyright law that could determine the legal rights of Americans to sell thousands of used products on eBay, Craigslist and at garage sales and flea markets, as well. When Supap Kirtsaeng came from Thailand to attend college in the United States, he was shocked by the high price of textbooks.
By: Sharon Urias, Esq. Jimmy Winkelmann, the founder of two brands that parodied outdoor clothing and equipment maker The North Face Apparel Corp., has agreed this week that his most recent brand has violated a 2010 settlement of a trademark infringement lawsuit involving his first brand, The South Butt. A Missouri court ordered James Winkelmann, Sr., and James Winkelmann, Jr. and their company Why Climb Mountains LLC, to stop using The Butt Face, their most recent line of clothing, trademarks
By: Sharon Urias, Esq. Jimmy Winkelmann, the founder of two brands that parodied outdoor clothing and equipment maker The North Face Apparel Corp., has agreed this week that his most recent brand has violated a 2010 settlement of a trademark infringement lawsuit involving his first brand, The South Butt. A Missouri court ordered James Winkelmann, Sr., and James Winkelmann, Jr. and their company Why Climb Mountains LLC, to stop using The Butt Face, their most recent line of clothing, trademarks
By: Sharon Urias, Esq. For over a year Christian Louboutin, a famous French shoemaker, has been engaged in a lawsuit with French designer Yves Saint Laurent over Louboutin’s red-sole designer shoes. For over twenty years, Louboutin has been painting the soles of its pricey women’s shoes a lacquered red, which has made the shoes recognizable from quite a distance and highly coveted and popular, as well.
By: Sharon Urias, Esq. In April 2011, Apple Inc. filed its patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung demanding $2.5 billion from its smart phone competitor. Samsung lawyers said the company was simply and legally giving consumers what they wanted: Smart phones with big screens. They also said that Samsung did not violate any of Apple’s patents in designing the company’s smart phones.
By: Sharon Urias, Esq. On November 27, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized 132 counterfeit websites in its ‘Cyber Monday’ crackdown. Sites that were seized included those that sold clothing, jewelry, sporting goods, DVD’s, music, software and luxury goods. The Examiner reports this is the third year that ICE and European countries have worked together on ‘Cyber Monday’ to shut down websites that sell counterfeit goods to consumers.
By: Sharon Urias, Esq. There has been a trademark battle raging for more than a year-and-a-half over the term “App Store.” When some consumers hear the term, they think of Apple’s iTunes section for apps; however, when others hear the term, they see it as a more generic term for application store. Apple filed a trademark lawsuit against Amazon over the “App Store” term claiming they have excusive rights to the term.
Women and diverse employees have the technical skill and knowledge, yet their contributions are not patented at the same rate as those of their male counterparts.This toolkit can help organizations move the needle on achieving gender parity in innovation.
INTRODUCTION. Applicants who qualify as small entities as defined by 37 CFR 1.27(a) enjoy a 50% reduction in most government fees. And, in most cases, a small entity applicant remains a small entity throughout the prosecution of an application. This is not always the case, however. Through growth, acquisition, or sale, it is not uncommon for a small entity applicant to no longer meet the requirements for small entity status.
In an article published earlier this year, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Sandra Braman defined “information policy” as positions and practices that concern the creation, processing, flows, access and use of information. The term certainly includes content, much of which is subject to protection under this nation’s Copyright Act, and the telecommunication pipes through which that […].
INTRODUCTION. The provisions of 35 U.S.C. § 103 limit patent protection to claimed subject matter that would have been nonobvious to a “person of ordinary skill” in the claimed field of endeavor at the time of filing. This person of ordinary skill is a hypothetical construct – an ordinarily skilled artisan who is presumed to possess ordinary creativity and to be aware of all prior art in his field of endeavor, as well as prior art that is relevant to the problem addressed by the claimed inventio
“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!” — Howard Beale, Network (1976) 2011 will be known as the year of the occupation, with Occupy Wall Street being the most recognizable of the protest movements. Started in September in […].
This article discusses the impact of a the recent federal district court decision [pdf] that, for the first time, provides colleges and university with some guidance on the use of copyrighted works for instructional purposes. Case Summary In April 2008, Cambridge University Press, Sage Publications and Oxford University Press sued officials at Georgia State University […].
Librarians who pay attention to copyright long have believed (and have been taught) that the the law’s fair use and library preservation provisions work cooperatively (if not simultaneously) to allow libraries and archives the opportunity to use limited portions of protected works without requiring the owner’s permission, and without having to pay a license fee […].
Colleges and universities, however, have a major trump card to play to reduce the costs of higher education: they can reverse their longstanding custom against claiming work made for hire status. Instead, they could claim copyright ownership in scholarship as a way to avoid the scholarly publications crisis, and at once, justify this policy change as a way to cut the costs of education.
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