Please join us 9/27/2021 at 1:00pm for a discussion: United States Patent and Trademark Office Crackdown on Scammers. For years, owners of United States Trademark Registrations have been plagued by scam letters requesting payments to renews trademark registrations. Though trademark registrations must be renewed, these letters did not come from the actual USPTO but a [...]
The FENDI Decision is out! After 5 long years, the Shanghai High Court issued its final judgement in the case of Fendi v. Yi Lang. Defendant Yi Lang (no relative of this week's presenter, SoCal IP Partner Marina Lang) can no longer operate his "Fendi" stores in China, stocked with parallel goods. We will discuss [...]
Sirius Gets a Win on CA State Copyright Claims In Flo & Eddie, Inc. v. Sirius XM Radio, Inc., No. 17-55844 (August 23, 2021) (available here), the panel reversed the district court’s grant of partial summary judgment to Flo & Eddie, Inc. in its action against Sirius XM satellite radio, seeking royalties for pre-1972 songs [...]
Please join us on Monday, August 23 at 1:00 pm, when Mark Goldstein will lead a discussion of two recent cases, one addressing whether patents are invalid for claiming abstract ideas and the other about asserting trademark infringement resulting from the use of internet keywords that are the trademarks of another. (Access the cases by [...]
On Monday, August 12, Michael Harris will conduct a discussion of two cases, one dealing with the prior art status of a printed publication, and the other about unclean hands as a defense to trademark infringement. The 2021, Ninth Circuit case of Metal Jeans, Inc. v. Metal Sport, Inc. (case here) is the unclean hands case. [...]
On Monday, August 9, 2021, Chris Kopitzke will lead a discussion of the Copyright Office’s refusal to register the most recent version of the Golden Globe statuette, and the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s finding that evidence submitted to prove non-use of a trademark was insufficient to establish a prima facie case of abandonment. In [...]
"Burst Bubble." by jcgoforth is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 In the wake of the collapse of the Internet bubble circa 2000, a public outcry about patent trolls caught the attention of Congress and the federal courts. A wild mix of reforms of the patent system resulted between about 2005 and 2015. Sometimes Congress did [...]
Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial Dist. Ct. 141 S.Ct. 1017 (2021) For our discussion, we will analyze how the Supreme Court expanded personal jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants. The majority held that a Court’s specific jurisdiction standard includes suits that sufficiently “relate to” a defendant’s forum contacts, even in the absence of a "causal [...]
For our weekly SoCal IP Institute meeting on Monday, November 13, 2017, we will discuss the following cases: Dan Farr Productions v. United States District Court, (9th Cir. October 10, 2017) (available here). In a trademark dispute over who may actually use the term "Comic Con", the Southern District of California gave a “Suppression Order” [...]
For our weekly SoCal IP Institute meeting on Monday, November 6, 2017, we will discuss the following cases: Savannah College of Art and Design, Inc. v. Sportswear, Inc. , (S.D. Ohio October 3, 2017) (available here). Defendant owned a website where it sold sports apparel affixed with the plaintiff’s trademark for “SCAD” and “SAVANNAH COLLEGE [...]