Just when the world thought that we had moved past the peanut butter wars, another skirmish flared up in the Northern District of Ohio, East Division. In J.M. Smucker Company v. Hormel Food Corporation, the makers of JIF and SKIPPY peanut butter, respectively, jousted over trade dress. Smucker maintained that Hormel’s filing of a trademark…
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently published a paper called Trademarks and Patents in China: The impact of non-market factors on filing trends and IP systems. It’s an interesting read that examines not only the deluge of applications within China, but also the USPTO’s flood of applications from China: There were 5,200…
Dictum is defined as a judge’s incidental expression of opinion, not essential to the decision, and not establishing precedent. In Eric Fishon et al. v. Peloton Interactive, there is quite a lot of dictum surrounding a motion to dismiss. The case started as an intellectual property matter between Peloton and the National Music Publishers Association…
Some things in life are just unusual, and being a landlord is often the gateway to witnessing a lot of that. A surprising source of compensation for a trashed house might be damages for copyright infringement. Basset v. Jensen et al is a case in which the plaintiff, Leah Bassett, rented her custom-decorated residence to…
Dude, they’re just not into you. I’m talking about entrepreneur Neil Parsont’s unrequited love for Florida Atlantic University (FAU) that culminated in Florida Atlantic University v. Neil Parsont in the Southern District of Florida. The case centers around computer hacking, but Parsont’s MacBeth-like covering up of his deeds teaches us a broader lesson as practitioners. Neil Parsont…
USPTO v. Booking.com is an appeal from the USPTO and TTAB’s rejecting registration of the mark BOOKING.COM. As many readers may know — and therein lies the reason for the decision discussed here — Booking.com is an online service that, not surprisingly, facilitates making reservations for flights and hotel rooms. The applicant submitted BOOKING.COM to the…
Lucky Brand Dungarees, Inc., et al. v. Marcel Fashions Group, Inc. is a Supreme Court case centering on the idea of defense preclusion — or, more accurately, avoiding the issue of defense preclusion. In this case, the appellant wanted to argue that Marcel Fashions Group (Marcel) could not raise a defense that it could have raised in one of two…
According to Wikipedia, an implicit bias or implicit stereotype is “the unconscious attribution of particular qualities to a member of a certain social group.” Legislation is often written to allow for a substantial degree of judicial discretion — and in these areas of judicial discretion an outside observer might expect to find biases. We’re only human; none of us…
With success come lawsuits. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has seen his share and, as Charles v. Seinfeld illustrates, is getting pretty good at them. In 2011, plaintiff Christian Charles worked on the pilot episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. He would later go on to claim authorship of it, which was disputed by Jerry Seinfeld. According to Seinfeld,…