Trademark applicants should exercise care when drafting descriptions of goods and services, particularly when marketing highly regulated goods.
Intellectual Property
Ask Dr. Copyright © About Legal Reasoning
September 22, 2022
Intellectual Property
Dear Doc: I’ve heard about how the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, and declared a century-old state law saying that you need a valid reason to carry a loaded gun anywhere you please because the matters in those cases were not part of the way people thought in 1789 (or 1868, either.) How […]
New technologies give rise to new intellectual property headaches. Non-fungible tokens or NFT’s are no exception. What is an NFT? For the uninitiated (and hermits), an NFT is a unique digital token that one can own, sell, or redeem. Bitcoin and Ethereum are examples of digital tokens. Cryptocurrency, however, is fungible. The Bitcoin I own is not unique […]
63 million U.S. jobs, or 44% of all U.S. employees, work in intellectual property (‘IP’) intensive industries that rely on the value created by patents, trademarks or copyrights. That’s from a report published by the USPTO.In other highlights from the report, employees of IP-intensive industries are likely to: The highest incomes are in copyright-intensive industries (that’s content […]
Those of you who know patents know that to be patentable an invention must not be obvious to a person who is knowledgeable in the field; that is, the invention must represent more than a trivial improvement over prior inventions. Inventors, the USPTO and the courts struggle with whether inventions are or are not ‘obvious.’ In general, […]
Dear Doc: I hear that in the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (the “Trump Tax Law”) inventors, authors, and other creators of intellectual property got screwed, contrary to the intent of the Founders, as expressed in Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 8 of the United States Constitution. What’s up with that? Signed,Screwed-Over Inventor Dear Screwed: Yup! You’re […]
Dear Doc:I heard that it’s now legal to take someone else’s photograph, mess with it, and sell it as your own. That can’t be right, right? Please tell me that the copyright law is not that insane. Signed, Every person who ever took a photo. Dear Every: Yes, I am afraid that copyright […]
I’ve read that you can’t copyright a recipe. The US Copyright Office says, “Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients. Nor does it protect other mere listings of ingredients such as those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions.” On the other hand, I’ve read that some things like colors (pink […]
Tangible or Intangible? This is actually an interesting question. If you erect a sign displaying a trademark over a store, isn’t that a tangible representation of a trademark? Of course it is. On the other hand, if you were to license your trademark for use by another company, you don’t transfer a physical representation of […]
Anyone who deals with patents should be familiar with the concept of prior art. ‘Prior art’ is critical to patenting and can prevent your invention from qualifying for a patent, even if it’s a great invention. Prior art generally is a prior publication such as a patent, patent publication, treatise, advertisement, article on the web, […]