Overhead Door Company of Kansas City v. OGD Equipment Company is a trademark infringement case that began in the Northern District of Georgia, and found itself in the Eleventh Circuit on appeal. D.H. Pace Company (“Pace”) licensed its OVERHEAD DOOR trademarks from the Overhead Door Corporation (ODC). ODC, as licensee, sued another similarly-named company, Overhead…
Copyright and trademark lawyers were closely watching a case involving the Phillie Phanatic baseball team mascot called The Phillies v. Harrison-Erickson Inc. Even though the case settled in mid-October, the decision addressed whether copyright registration in a team mascot and its costume could be terminated and renegotiated during the “termination” window provided in U.S. Copyright statute. …
Speedway Motors had a low bar to hurdle when it submitted three logos to the Copyright Office, at least according to its own filing in the District of Nebraska. In Speedway Motors, INC. v. Shira Perlmutter in her official capacity [as Register of Copyrights]…, the issue was the creativity — or lack thereof — of…
How can you tell if a client is talking too much about a lawsuit? Their lips are moving. For one tech company’s CEO, not learning this lesson proved legally fatal. To be fair, he was following in the footsteps of so many others who have inadvertently shot themselves in the foot by disseminating an emotional outburst…
Strike 3 v. John Doe is a copyright infringement case that began in 2018 in the District Court of the District of Columbia. It concerned infringement of Strike 3’s intellectual property taking place over the BitTorrent file-sharing network. Using geolocation technology, Strike 3 identified the IP addresses of the infringers and petitioned for a subpoena…
The Ninth Circuit recently ruled on a copyright matter called Corbello v. Valli. The case concerns the doo-wop act The Four Seasons, the musical Jersey Boys, and a brand-new legal concept called the “doctrine of asserted truths.” It’s an interesting case because it states something that’s pretty obvious — but it also clarified some things…
At the end of January, the Northern District of California waded into the dangerous and complicated waters of software copyright infringement in Oracle v. Hewlett Packard. The case concerned software patches, or updates, licensed by Oracle and installed by Hewlett Packard, sometimes through a support services company called Terix. Before this suit, Oracle and Terix knew…