Intellectual Property

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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (the “USPTO”) explains that

“A trademark is a brand name. A trademark or service mark includes any word, name, symbol, device, or any combination, used or intended to be used to identify and distinguish the goods/services of one seller or provider from those of others, and to indicate the source of the goods/services.”
–https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-getting-started/trademark-basics.Continue Reading Rule Change Requires U.S. Counsel for Foreign-Domiciled Trademark Applicants

A few years ago, when the concessionaire for Yosemite National Park (the “Park”), Delaware North, was informed that the Park planned to consider other concessionaires, such as Aramark, Delaware North responded in shocking fashion. Delaware North responded that if it was going to be replaced as the concessionaire, it intended to take the Park’s intellectual property (the “IP”), such as the Ahwahnee Hotel and Curry Village, with it unless it was paid $51 million for the IP. Although the Park disputed Delaware’s claim to the IP, it changed the names of certain venues such as the Ahwahnee Hotel, Curry Village, Badger Pass Skin Run, and the Wawona Hotel. The sites were renamed the Majestic Yosemite Hotel, Half Dome Village, Yosemite Ski and Snowboard Area, and Big Trees Lodge.
Continue Reading Goodbye Majestic Yosemite Hotel, Welcome Back Ahwahnee Hotel

California case law over the last few years is replete with instances where a new and/or small business has one of their employees take responsibility for various IT activities such as setting up the company website and/or email domains.  Disputes arise when that employee leaves for other employment and refuses to give the former employer access to the business domain and/or emails.  This is what happened in the recent case, Pneuma International, Inc. v. Cho, which made its way to the California First Appellate District.   The Court was required to analyze an old, but largely forgotten, theory of tort liability, trespass to chattels, in connection with a defendant’s “control” over his former employer’s website domain.
Continue Reading Web Domains and The Forgotten Tort of Trespass to Chattels

To be patentable, an invention must satisfy two key requirements, as determined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO).  First, the invention must be novel.  This means that the same invention cannot have been disclosed in a single prior art reference.  The prior art is all of the publicly available information that existed before the date the patent application was filed.  Second, the invention must not have been obvious to a (hypothetical) person skilled in the art (the field of the invention) based on the prior art.
Continue Reading When is an Invention Obvious?

Normally, a copyright registration certificate constitutes “prima facie evidence of the validity of a copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate.”  17 U.S.C. §410(c).  But what happens if that certificate contains knowingly inaccurate information? The purported copyright owner could face not only invalidation of the copyright, but the inability to pursue copyright infringement…