OWNING HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Stick around until the lights come up after any movie in which characters sing “Happy Birthday to You” (and there are probably a dozen of those every year), and one of the last credits you see will be a copyright notice for that song, noting that it was used with the permission of Warner/Chappell Music,…

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THE BREYER ASCENDANCY, PART TWO

In a post here a few months ago, I noted that a series of dissents in intellectual property cases over the past decade had established Justice Stephen Breyer “as one of the Supreme Court’s leading intellectual property law skeptics, along with now-retired Justice John Paul Stevens.”  “Not coincidentally,” I added, “Justices Breyer and Stevens were…

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OWNING OWN THE POWER

Some of my favorite trademark cases involve “reverse confusion.” Instead of the usual scenario in which a rich and powerful senior trademark user crushes a little start-up for trading on its good name, the essence of a reverse confusion case is that a rich and powerful entity has flooded the market with much more promiscuous use of a…

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