Courts do not yet have a firm grasp of what a trademark for a literary character would mean. The current rules are intellectually dishonest and do not make sense. Literary characters should be eligible to serve as a trademark as soon as a book is published, without the need to “acquire” secondary meaning. The number of literary characters protected by trademark law would be initially increased following the adoption of this principle, with the field soon tapering off. The real effect of an immediate trademark status for literary characters would be to extend protections to valuable characters from their inception and allow courts to focus on the correct application of trademark law.

This paper explores whether users’ financial information stored in the cloud by Mint.com (“Mint”) has Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

What is so important about the changes to the reexamination proceedings in the American Invents Act? It’s about cost, time, and winning the high stakes game of patent litigation. Clients’ goals will remain the same but the law is changing. A new path to the clients’  desires will emerge. For a patent litigator, mastering the new America Invents Act is the key to staying on that path, while providing the best results for the client.

Substantial changes to the patent system’s reexamination proceedings include replacing the Inter Partes Reexamination with Inter Partes Review, and creating an entirely new proceeding called Post Grant Review. Being unaware of these changes could cost a patent litigator’s client a substantial amount of money, time, and the upper hand in winning the high stakes litigation. In some cases, it could even cost a client the validity of their patent claims.

Keyword advertising on the Internet poses new challenges for courts. To date, there is no uniform method of analyzing whether trademark infringement exists in these cases. Although both U.S. and foreign courts have applied versions of likelihood of confusion tests in this context, all of the decisions fall short of actually protecting what is at stake when trademarks are sold as keywords on the Internet. The damage to trademarks in this context is not necessarily that consumers will confuse one product with another – rather the damage is to the goodwill and value associated with a trademark that another advertiser purchases in order to garner recognition for the advertiser’s own mark. In order to protect the goodwill of trademarks on the Internet, courts must abandon any analysis that calls consumer confusion into question because confusion is nearly impossible to show in these cases and it is not the type of trademark damage at issue. This eliminates both the initial interest confusion doctrine and likelihood of confusion tests. What we are left with is dilution – which was designed precisely to protect the goodwill of trademarks. However in order for dilution to apply in this context, it must be slightly modified and extended.

A Flava user uploaded a video from the Flava website to a host server which was subsequently bookmarked by a myVidster patron. This bookmark automatically led to the creation of a webpage on the myVidster website with the video’s embedded code from the host server. The webpage featured a thumbnail of the bookmarked video that connects anyone who visits the myVidster website to the host server to watch the Flava video. Consequently, Flava brought an action against myVidster alleging contributory copyright infringement. 

Plaintiff-Appellee K-TEC, Inc. (“K-TEC”) owns two U.S. patents, 6,979,117 (‘117 patent) and 7,281,842 (‘842 patent), for the construction of their commercial blenders. The construction protected by these patents consist of “four side walls,” which may form right angles, and a “fifth truncated wall” that could be planar or curved. The purpose of this particular construction is to decrease cavitation and increase efficiency by creating a vortex that moves from the center of the axis to the truncated wall.

Gucci America, Inc. (“Gucci”) claimed Guess?, Inc. (“Guess”) attempted to “Gucci-fy” their product line by infringing four of Gucci’s trademarks and one trade dress on over one thousand stock keeping units. Gucci alleged that Guess and its licensees intentionally copied the famous Green-Red-Green (“GRG”) Stripe appearing on many Gucci accessories, Gucci’s Repeating GG Pattern set at the corners of the Diamond Motif Trade Dress, the Stylized G often used on the interior of Gucci handbags and the Script Gucci modeled after the signature of founder Guccio Gucci.

Defendant-Appellees are Electronic Arts, Inc., Harmonix Music Systems, Inc., Viacom Inc., and Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC (collectively “Appellees”). Plaintiff-Appellant 1^st Media LLC (“1^st Media”) is the assignee of patent No. 5,464,946 (the “946 patent”). The ‘946 patent is for a “System and Apparatus for Interactive Multimedia Entertainment” and includes “an entertainment system for use in purchasing and sorting songs, videos, and multimedia karaoke information.”

Defendant-Appellee Jammie Thomas-Rasset is a Minnesota woman found liable in district court for illegally distributing copyrighted music over the Internet. Plaintiff-Appellants are Capitol Records, Inc., Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. Records, and UMG Recordings, Inc. (the “Record Companies”). The Recording Companies own huge catalogs of music, including the rights to 24 songs Thomas-Rasset was found to have distributed.

Plaintiffs, Tetris Holding, LLC and Tetris Company, LLC, (collectively, “Tetris Holding”) brought five claims against defendants, Xio Interactive, Inc. (“Xio”), surrounding their famous puzzle block electronic video game, Tetris. The court addressed only two out of five claims brought forward: 1) Xio’s infringement of Tetris Holding’s copyright protection of Tetris and 2) Xio’s infringement of Tetris Holding’s trade dress protection.