Court Rulings
LET'S NOT GO CRAZY
The cherubic little fellow pictured on the right is at the center of a closely-watched case involving the “takedown” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (“DMCA”). His mom, Stephanie Lenz, posted a 30-second YouTube video of the tike “dancing” to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” which can be heard playing in the background.…
Read MoreBLURRED LINES IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE
The jury has spoken in the Robin Thicke “Blurred Lines” copyright infringement case, finding that the song infringes the copyright on Marvin Gaye’s 1977 “Got to Give it Up” and awarding the Gaye estate over 7 million dollars in damages. The case has been framed by music industry talking heads and the press as one…
Read MoreA BFD INDEED: FLO & EDDIE HIT PAYDIRT
Last year the corporate alter ego of former Turtles frontmen Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman—Flo & Eddie, Inc.—filed a class action lawsuit against Sirius XM. Their claim is that pre-1972 sound recordings, such as the Turtles’s classics “Happy Together” and “Eleanore,” which have no federal copyright protection, are nonetheless protected against unauthorized use under California state law. In…
Read MoreSUPREME COURT SHUTS DOWN AEREO
A few weeks ago, in writing about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Petrella v. MGM, in a post entitled “The Breyer Ascendancy Deferred,” I hazarded a fearless prediction: I am wagering that Justice Breyer will, despite this setback, be voting with and perhaps writing for the majorities in the two most important IP cases coming…
Read MoreTHE WASHINGTON PRO FOOTBALL FRANCHISE
As has been widely reported, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board has ruled that “redskins” is deeply offensive slur and can not be federally registered as a trademark under 15 U.S.C. § 1052(a), which prohibits registration of marks that contain “immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living…
Read MoreCONAN DOYLE ESTATE DOWN FOR THE COUNT
We have been following the rather swift progress through the courts of Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, a case which raises the fascinating question of when copyright protection on “franchise” literary characters who develop over a series of works, published over a period of many years, expires. Klinger, the editor of books containing original stories based on the Sherlock…
Read MoreTHE BREYER ASCENDANCY DEFERRED
In some earlier posts (titled The Breyer Ascendancy and the The Breyer Ascendancy, Part II) I have suggested that we may have reached an inflection point where Justice Breyer is no longer just the Supreme Court’s leading skeptic on intellectual property protection, but where he is primed to lead his colleagues in a major retrenchment of IP protections. Though I…
Read MoreSPLISH-SPLASH, REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
It has been almost 25 years since Laramie, a small Philadelphia-based purveyor of “rack” (read “knockoff”) toys switched roles and scored an enormous hit with its TV-advertised, patented, and SUPER SOAKER® branded line of air pressure water guns. As Laramie’s chief intellectual property enforcer at the time, I remember well several frenetic years of legal…
Read MoreCONAN DOYLE ESTATE LOSES ROUND 1
Early this year, we reported on the filing of Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate in the federal district court in Chicago. Leslie Klinger is the editor of a collection, called A Study in Sherlock, containing original stories based on the Sherlock Holmes character and other elements of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. He has prepared a sequel entitled In the…
Read MoreGOOGLE BOOK SEARCH FAIR USE, JUDGE CHIN HOLDS
We have been following the ups and downs of The Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., the long-running copyright dispute over Google’s plan to digitize all the world’s libraries, since the inception of this blog. After the parties’ grand bargain, which had the potential to create a unique on-line repository of virtually all the world’s…
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