intellectual property law

It’s not surprising to hear talk of flowers in February, but it is unusual when that discussion is in a Federal Circuit opinion.  This month the Federal Circuit decided a case involving whether the display of a flowering plant constitutes an invalidating prior public use.Continue Reading Does Displaying a Flowering Plant Preclude Patenting It?

Google, which operates the world’s most popular search engine, recently defeated an antitrust claim brought by an online supplier of stock images in the case Dreamstime.com, LLC v. Google, LLC, decided on December 6, 2022, by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Dreamstime Opinion helps illustrate some difficulties in defining the relevant market to allege anticompetitive injury to support an antitrust claim.
Continue Reading Google Escapes Antitrust Challenge from Stock Photo Site After Changes to Its Search Engine Algorithm

A jury in the District Court for the Southern District of Illinois in the case of Alexander v. Take-Two Interactive Software found that the depiction of tattoos on wrestler Randy Orton in a video game published by Take Two Interactive infringed the tattoo artist’s copyright in the tattoos. In this author’s personal opinion, the District Court got it all wrong.
Continue Reading Tattoo Artist Copyright Win Will Create Uncertainty Over Celebrities with Tattoos

Last month, HBO released its new drama series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty – based on the book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman. To say that Jerry West, the former head coach and GM of the Los Angeles Lakers dislikes the way he is portrayed in the HBO series Winning Time is an understatement. West calls his portrayal “false and defamatory” and he has publicly called for a retraction and an apology.  In a letter to HBO, West’s lawyer claims that Winning Time falsely and cruelly portrays West as an out-of-control, intoxicated, rage-aholic. West’s lawyer claims that the producers have committed the tort of false light invasion of privacy by creating a false impression about Mr. West that is highly offensive and injurious to his reputation and have also defamed Mr. West by attributing acts of rage to him that he never committed.
Continue Reading Is Jerry West’s Potential Lawsuit Against HBO Over His Portrayal in the Lakers Docudrama “Winning Time” a Jump Ball?