Ron Coleman on the law affecting brands, the Internet & free speech
Brandweek: Ersatz goods selling on Canal Street isn’t exactly news in New York, even though Mayor Mike Bloomberg staged an impressive photo op amid a mountain range of purses. But the size and stealth of the raid on what cops called “Counterfeit Triangle” seemed to verify a change that many in the brand community have sensed for some time. Counterfeiting is no longer a localized nuisance akin to Three-Card Monte games. Thanks largely to the…
It hurts when the fake Chinese electronics sell better than the originals. No, I mean sometimes it really hurts. Originally posted 2011-11-28 14:33:17. Republished by Blog Post Promoter Read more
Our [ahem, adjunct] law professor days are behind us, it appears, but we’ll be giving a presentation at the Intellectual Property Law Society at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law tomorrow on the topic of how intellectual property law is being used and abused in the service of anticompetitive practices. Asked to focus on a specific industry, we threw darts at a copy of the Wall Street Journal and, wouldn’t you know it, we... Read more
That’s it. That’s the post. Read more
The New York Law Journal reports that my old friend Southern District Judge Denise Cote has turned down Fox Entertainment Group’s attempt to recoup almost $280,000 in attorney’s fees (pursuant to the copyright statute) it spent staving off a copyright suit that Fox had demonstrated was frivolous (it involved an allegation that a Fox TV program was a “ripoff” of another program). Judge Cote has an interesting take on the issue: Although both sides agreed... Read more
Tonight, at the New York Young Republican Club — Allum Bokhari. And me! Click the pic to get your tick! (Or click here.) If you can’t make it, there’s this — which is not related (we aren’t doing an interview or speaking at the same time), but … still: Read more
"Cops? Robbers? Stealing? I don't know much about trademarks, but I know about those things. Judgment for plaintiff." Read more
Searchengineland: Eric Goldman reports that a US District Judge in Florida ordered an advertiser using a trademark term to use the negative keyword option, to ensure that they would no longer bid on that term in the future. The judge ordered the defendant to stop using the word “ORION” in their search ad campaigns, by adding that keyword to the negative keyword filter in AdWords. Here are the exact words of the court order, found... Read more
LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®’s “blogroll” policy has not really changed, even though LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® is bigger and better than ever, but it may be useful to clarify it, because I do get inquiries, and there have been some refinements. Namely, ones that I just made up. And this blog is now “big” enough in our micro-sub-niche that it is reasonable to assume that some people might care to know what the rules are considering that,... Read more
At least for MySpace.com, which has lost a key domain name battle in England over the domain myspace.co.uk. According to Bell Denning, solicitors for the respondent: Both the first and the appeal decisions held that the vast majority of MySpace’s claims had no merit – not least because the UK ISP had legitimately registered the name some 6 years before the social networking site had been formed and the Stockport based ISP had been using... Read more
Joy McCann, blogging on Dean’s World, comments on a Slate article suggesting that bloggers are the Euro-American version of rappers. In your bottle-full-o-bub’ dreams, Joy! Originally posted 2005-03-23 10:51:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter Read more
First posted August 7, 2011. The Android talk, that is. Tech News World asked me a couple of days ago about whether it wasn’t pretty unusual to see parties to litigation — in this case, the Android patent litigation — going so public with their positions. Here’s what I said: [T]here was some surprise within the industry that the head of very high-profile legal team took to the Internet to openly criticize his opponents. But keeping... Read more
Jews for Jesus, the sleazy, misleading missionaries who crawl over Manhattan each summer, had to back off from their use of the MTA’s world-famous symbols. No they didn’t! Okay, I’m not surprised that they’re not interested in my opinion. But that would have been a fun fight. Serves ’em right, though. We reap what we sow, you know? Originally posted 2006-07-17 19:11:58. Republished by Blog Post Promoter Read more
It’s been a long while since I did a roundup of recent topical tweets here. That is not by any stretch of the imagination a good reason to do one now, of course. All the same, here we go, in the order I tweeted or RT’d them. Read more