The Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) was passed in 1990; but, to date, only around 15 artists have brought cases in attempts to enforce the rights it protects. That’s why it was notable when a jury ruled against the developer of 5 Pointz, a case we blogged about previously. Recently, another plaintiff suing under VARA was not…
In a recent trademark dispute over trade dress and color, the Western District of Kentucky found that a medium-sized agricultural equipment company violated John Deere and Company’s exclusive right to use yellow and green on farm machinery. This is going farther afield (pun intended) than what we normally see in New York, but it’s an interesting…
The United States Court of International Trade was recently the setting for an action brought by a company that wished to remain anonymous. The plaintiff, referred to as XYZ Corporation, had been importing DURACELL batteries into the United States for 27 years. When goods that are genuine products of a trademark owner like DURACELL –…
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has just rendered a decision regarding the classic Abbott and Costello bit, “Who’s on First?” (Full disclosure: I memorized the routine when I was a kid. My sons call me a nerd. They’re right.) The case involves the one-minute use of “Who’s on First” in a play entitled Hand to…
The court rendered a decision in a copyright dispute I wrote about earlier this year between playwright Matthew Lombardo and the estate of beloved children’s author Theodore Seuss Geisel (a/k/a “Dr. Seuss”). The issue was whether Lombardo had infringed on the Seuss copyright with his derivative play Who’s Holiday — or whether the play constituted fair use. As I wrote…
Recently the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit made news when it granted appellate review of what rights a monkey has to his intellectual property. The case — Naruto, a crested macaque, by and through his next friends, People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA], Inc. v. David John Slater, et al. — settled…
In this post, names and circumstances have been changed to obscure the guilty. Let’s say that my client makes plain sweatshirts, and on the back of some of these blank sweatshirts, someone else had printed Alamo-related text and imagery and was selling them. They were doing this on behalf of a local community baseball team…
In late August, the 9th Circuit in California delivered a blow to a legal argument that was questionable to begin with, and was doomed by the defendant’s eagerness to share it. In Disney v. VidAngel, the culture war served as the background of a battle between content goliaths — Disney, LucasFilm, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Brothers…
They said it couldn’t be done, but Kaufman & Kahn recently not only won summary judgment against a prolific cyber-squatter, but also won an award of statutory damages and attorney’s fees. Gregory Ricks, a renowned cyber-squatter, had registered the domain name justbulbs.com, and he’d done that because, frankly, my client named JUST BULBS had failed…
In May of 2016, a Facebook Live user named Kali Kanongataa offered the world something uplifting, graphic and intimate: the birth of his son for all the world to see. According to Kanongataa, he had originally attempted to share the live broadcast only with his Facebook connections, but mistakenly broadcast to all of Facebook — which includes every…