This is the story of cannabis fertilizer producer infringing on the trademark of the senior user. In Athena Incorporated v. Advanced Nutrients, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington (Seattle), Athena sought a preliminary injunction against trademark infringement by Advanced Nutrients for using not just the name, but the logo…
Concord Music Group et al. v. Anthropic PBC was a case in the Northern District of California involving another artificial intelligence company defending itself against hypothetical infringement. Anthropic is a technology company whose main product is an artificial intelligence called Claude. Anthropic trains Claude by creating a training corpus, which consists of large amounts of…
BBK Tobacco and Foods v. Central Coast Agricultural Inc. was a case in the District of Arizona set in the now-familiar landscape of cannabis-related IP disputes. BBK manufactures smoke-related products such as rolling papers bearing the trademark RAW, and Central Coast Agricultural, Inc. (CCA) markets and sells cannabis products — and attempted to register the…
Westmont Living, Inc. v. Retirement Unlimited, Inc. is a trademark infringement case that originated in the Eastern District of Virginia and was appealed to the Fourth Circuit. At issue were competing motions to dismiss. A senior-living company called Westmont Living had the registered trademark WESTMONT LIVING, which they claimed Retirement Unlimited (RUI) infringed with its…
Teradyne v. Ace Test Systems Inc. was a case that began in the Central District of California, but made its way up to the Ninth Circuit for a fair use analysis. With an eye toward the Supreme Court case of Google v. Oracle, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal of the plaintiff’s claim…
OpenAI v. Open Artificial Intelligence Inc. is a case currently in the Northern District of California that pits an AI David versus an AI Goliath — but in a classic reverse trademark confusion case. OpenAI is the owner of the popular ChatGPT service, and Open Artificial Intelligence, Inc. (OAI) is a company that sprung up…
Richardson vs. Kharbouch, brought in the Northern District of Illinois, was an infringement case that illustrated the dangers of doing copyright work on a shoestring. The plaintiff, Eddie Lee Richardson, also known as Hotwire the Producer, sued Karim Kharbouch, also known as French Montana. According to plaintiff/Richardson/Hotwire, he came up with a song when he was just…
The Larson v. Perry saga essentially ended with the judge’s denying summary judgment to both sides; essentially, “a pox on both your houses.” The background of this case was famously retold in The New York Times Magazine’s “Who is the Bad Art Friend?” I also wrote about it in “Bad Friends, Inspirations, and Betrayals” in…
Lane Coder Photography v. Hearst Corporation is a copyright case from the Southern District of New York …which lost all its steam shortly after it began. The case was brought by a photographer who was hired to take real estate pictures of the Connecticut home of Paul Simon and Edie Brickell. The purpose was to…
*Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 In mid-May, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Andy Warhol Foundation For The Visual Arts, INC. v. Lynn Goldsmith, et al. The Court affirmed a Second Circuit decision, which had reversed a district court decision. For those unfamiliar with the background of this case, we wrote about it…