The U.S. District Court of New Mexico recently decided a case in which the infringement was obvious and the defendant was absent. Viacom v. Mark Anthony Baca and Guardian Anti-Bullying Campaign, Inc. concerned the trademark and copyright of the internationally famous Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. The defendant was the driving force behind what was billed…
In Preston Wood v. RZ Enterprises, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) brought the house down. Architectural firm Preston Wood entered into an agreement with real estate developer RZ Enterprises in which Preston Wood produced architectural plans for a multi-building residential development. Then, much to Preston Wood’s chagrin, RZ Enterprises used a different architect. They not…
The rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd was the subject of a recent Second Circuit decision in which the widow of band founder Ronnie Van Zant sued to enforce a contract against drummer Artimus Pyle and Cleopatra Films. On October 20, 1977, a Convair propeller plane carrying the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd and a 20-person entourage ran…
I’ve written before about the legal battle between the bands Led Zeppelin and Spirit. Randy Wolf of Spirit wrote a song called “Taurus” and his estate”s representative alleged that “Stairway to Heaven” infringed on the copyright of that song. According to Wolf, the opening notes of “Stairway to Heaven” were substantially similar to the opening notes of…
Sometimes patience is a virtue. I have a client who owns an apartment, on the next-to-top floor of a small building. Her upstairs neighbor has a penthouse — and a greenhouse. One day, the greenhouse started to leak. The client complained to the upstairs neighbor and nothing was done to improve the situation, so we…
I was a big Batman fan when I was a kid. That’s one of the reasons Kaufman v. Warner Brothers caught my attention (the other sharing the correct spelling of the plaintiff’s surname — no relation!). This was a case that did not go well for the plaintiff — and frankly was a bit of a stretch…
Bright Ideas, the New York Bar Association’s I.P. Journal, published an article that Mark Kaufman wrote. It provides a detailed discussion of one of our previous blog articles, Metadata? The Devil (and the Credit) Is in the Details. Be warned, this version for the Bar Association is a bit more lawyerly, so it might be exuberantly…
A case originating in the Southern District of Florida called Allied Lonestar v. Lonestar Distillery recently found itself before the Fifth Circuit. The dispute was over the alleged trademark abandonment of Allied’s Cowboy Little Barrel Whiskey, and whether Lonestar subsidiary Garrison Brothers infringed by selling its Cowboy Bourbon. The evidence Allied presented as proof (pun unintended) of using the mark…
In Frederick L. Allen; Nautilus Productions, LLC v. Roy A. Cooper, III, Governor of North Carolina, the shipwreck of the infamous pirate ship Queen Anne’s Revenge failed to deliver intellectual property riches its explorers had expected. The Queen Anne’s Revenge famously was run aground off the coast of North Carolina in 1717 — some say intentionally — by Edward…
Stevens v. CoreLogic is a copyright case recently decided in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In the case, several real estate photographers allege that CoreLogic, which provides a service to real estate brokers by providing pictures of homes that are for sale, removed the metadata from their photographs which helped to identify each photographer and…