Imagine That IP Law Blog

With each Olympics, the iconic five interlocking rings and Team USA paraphernalia are inescapable. The high profile and high profit marks are tenaciously protected both on an international and national stage.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) earn billions of dollars worldwide through licensing use of their iconic rings, name, athletes’ images and other trademarks. In fact, being a top sponsor of the Olympics can cost a company hundreds of millions of dollars. Panasonic paid a cool $350 million in 2016 for an eight-year ... Read More ›

On February 12, 2018, Judge Frederic Block of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York entered judgment in the amount of $6.7 million dollars in favor of plaintiff graffiti artists whose building murals were destroyed in 2013 by the owner of the building, in violation of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (“VARA”), 17 U.S.C. § 106A. While the ruling in this case may seem like a coup for artists, the implication may be that building owners may be less enthusiastic about commissioning creative works to adorn their building’s exteriors.

THE LAW – The Visual ... Read More ›

Many consumers and companies are familiar in some form or another, but until a recent Federal Circuit ruling, companies and individuals looking to pursue tongue-in-cheek or risqué marks faced an uphill battle in obtaining federal trademark registrations. On December 15, 2017, the Federal Circuit ruled in In re Brunetti¹ that the bar on registering immoral or scandalous trademarks under the Lanham Trademark Act, Section 2(a), 15 U.S.C. § 1052(a), “is an unconstitutional restriction of free speech.”

Appellant, Erik Brunetti, founded the clothing brand “fuct” in ... Read More ›

Divided infringement, or infringement carried out by multiple actors, seemed like an easy escape from accusations of direct infringement for entities teaming up to perform different steps of a patented method. That is until the Federal Circuit ultimately expanded the scope of direct infringement in the recent Travel Sentry, Inc. v. Tropp¹ case. The Federal Circuit’s decision expanded the scope of direct infringement by loosening the standard used to determine whether all steps of a claimed method are attributable to a single entity.

In the midst of evolving case ... Read More ›

The identification of the proper venue for commencing a patent infringement or declaratory judgement action was rather straight forward for a number of years. However,  when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has exclusive appellate jurisdiction in patent matters, addressed the venue issue in  VE Holding v. Johnson Gas Appliance, 917 F.2d 1574 (Fed. Cir. 1990), it liberalized the venue requirement to where the defendant is subject to the court's personal jurisdiction. This decision lead to lower courts applying a liberal view of personal jurisdiction when ... Read More ›

The holiday industry in the United States is a multi-billion dollar business.  In 2016, U.S. consumers spent $655.8 billion dollars between Black Friday and Christmas Eve and the average household budget for holiday gifts came in at approximately $588.90.¹ Given the volume of consumer spending devoted to holiday cheer, most companies aim to capture a slice of the proverbial fruitcake.  Occasionally, this battle for profit can pit companies against one another, leading to less-than-cheerful legal showdowns. One case in particular comes down to a battle over a quintessential ... Read More ›

Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) is additional time added to the term of a patent based on delays by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during prosecution. The PTA is determined after an application has been granted a patent. An applicant or patent prosecutor should be cognizant of PTA during prosecution because any gain of PTA due to USPTO delay is reduced by applicant delay. In the lifetime of a patent that covers a successful product or technological standard, every day can be highly valuable. This is especially true for biotechnology and pharmaceutical patents for ... Read More ›

The United States Supreme Court’s decision in TC Heartland jolted the IP law community by displacing long-standing Federal Circuit precedent and leaving a divide amongst district court judges, as well as a bevy of unanswered questions.¹ Since TC Heartland, two more decisions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit help clarify the landscape for patent litigators. Additionally, a study from Lex Machina further outlines the shifting horizon of forum shopping.

In 1990, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided in VE Holdings v. Johnson Gas ... Read More ›

THE COLLABORATIVE SEARCH PILOT PROGRAM

In an attempt to expedite and promote the quality of patent application examination, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) began a Collaborative Search Pilot (CSP) program in partnership with the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO). The program is designed to provide USPTO examiners with the best prior art by collaborating with examiners at the JPO and KIPO that are examining corresponding Japanese and Korean patent applications.

In the initial CSP program, examiners shared and ... Read More ›

Every so often, intellectual property law leaps from the backrooms of scientific exploration, labs ripe with technological advancement, or the worn desks of learned men and women, into social consciousness via an unwitting member of pop culture’s elite. Celebrities, the cult of personality that surrounds them, and the brands they establish, are still subject to the same rules of intellectual property law as less-known inventors, authors and developers. The nature of being in the public eye, and ownership of personal brands, can sometimes prove headache-inducing for the ... Read More ›