Consider this: You’re a domestic pig, a Sus domesticus. You’ve spent your entire life in a spotless pen, cared for by nice people in white coats. They feed you, they clean your pen. It’s not a bad life. Sure, you’d be better off rooting around in the mud, but the pen is all you’ve ever known. […]
Dear Doc: What is the strangest form of intellectual property protection you’ve ever run across? Signed,Ronald McD. Dear Ronald: Without a doubt, the most unusual form of protection of an idea or expression is the Clown Egg Register in Wookey Hole, England (the “Register”). The Doc is indebted to David Fagundes and Aaron Perzanowski and […]
The U.S. Supreme Court has played hob with the U.S. patent system, ruling that many wonderful, new, non-obvious, useful inventions cannot be protected by patent. A few brave legislators* are proposing a bi-partisan fix for what the Supreme Court has broken. The Background The right to a patent is set out in Art. 1, section […]
Over the years, we have written about many trademark-related concepts and many times we have referenced the consequence of “abandonment,” referring to the penalty that a trademark owner may suffer for not adhering to trademark formalities. But what does it mean for a trademark to go abandoned and under what circumstances does it occur? What Causes Trademark […]
Dear Doc: Political campaigns seem to have become entertainment, featuring musical introductions, interludes between speeches, and soundtracks to commercial spots. But what if a musical artist disagrees with the positions of the sponsor of the event? Can she prevent the use of her music entirely, or charge a very high royalty, which she then donates […]
Cast your mind back to your earliest memory. Mine is of little green bottles of Coca-Cola on the back seat of our Plymouth, out of gas, somewhere in southern Indiana. Now think about your grandfather’s earliest memory. I’m not sure what my grandfather’s first memory was, but Grover Cleveland was President and the Wright brothers […]
By now, we are all familiar with the term “deepfake.” If you are not, the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language defines “deepfake” as a “video that has been digitally manipulated to replace one person’s likeness convincingly with that of another, often used maliciously to show someone doing something that he or she did not do.” Over a year […]
In the May and June newsletters, we wrote about a proposal by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to transfer marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. Under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), Schedule I substances are considered to have no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Possession and sale of cannabis is illegal under U.S. federal […]
Dear Doc: I understand that under United States Trademark Law, you can’t register marks that are “primarily geographically descriptive” as you can in other countries, but you may register “geographic indications” as certification or collective marks. For example, in France, champagne has to actually come from Champagne and Roquefort has to come from Roquefort. The […]
Your team created a new invention, say, for a vending machine that dispenses bullets.* The patent law requires that the name of each “inventor” be listed in the patent application and the inventors’ names are included on the issued patent. Being an inventor on a patent can be a huge feather in the cap of an employee. […]
