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,…
With the pandemic completely altering the way we live, there are likely to be many parties to contracts turning to the “force majeure” provision of their contracts — or else, if they have no such provision, turning to similar, common law defenses. Force majeure is typically a provision that says if, by some major force, a party…
The recently decided Romag Fasteners v. Fossil Inc. is bound to be among the most important decisions involving trademark law damages to come out of the U.S. Supreme Court. For many years only some circuit courts of appeal, like the Second Circuit where this case originated, ruled that the plaintiff needed to demonstrate the defendant willfully infringed the plaintiff’s trademark…
A number of recent copyright cases have hinged on intangible aspects of the work in question. In most cases, the court relies on expert witnesses to provide their opinions about things like substantial similarity or copying. But not in this case. This practice was endorsed recently by the Ninth Circuit in Hall v. Swift, which we wrote about here,…
An intellectual property attorney in New Jersey performed an unlicensed concert this weekend — and that turned out to be the least of his worries. Complete with two guitars, an amp, and a microphone, the rock n’ roll barrister set himself up on his front porch for a series of Pink Floyd covers. He supposedly…
With the COVID-19 pandemic, serial litigants who sue for the sake of fast settlement regardless of the merits (sometimes known as trolls) are locked out of their offices as well. But without leaving the comfort of their homes, they can still e-file claims against website owners for failing to have or abide by a privacy…