Crazy Horse was a legendary Native American chief of the Oglala Lakota tribe who lived during the second half of the 1800s. Unfortunately today, his name may be more familiar as a brand for various products, such as motorcycle gear, whiskey, rifles and strip clubs. In Russell Road Food & Beverage, LLC v. Spencer, et
6/25/16- At the 7th Annual VidCon in Anaheim, CA , Weintraub Tobin Shareholder Scott M. Hervey and Rian Bosak, Head of Network Operations Full Screen, presented “Fair Use and Youtube- A Creator’s Take” to a standing room only audience of digital media creators and industry professionals. Check out their presentation below:
In a high-profile case, a jury recently found that Google’s use of portions of Oracle’s Java software code was allowable under the fair use doctrine and thus did not constitute copyright infringement. Oracle sought as much as $9 billion in damages from Google for incorporating approximately 11,000 lines of Oracle’s Java software code into Google’s
On April 18, 2016, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Akamai Technologies, Inc. v. Limelight Networks, Inc., 797 F.3d 1020 (Fed. Cir., August 2015) (“Akamai IV”), cert. denied, 2016 U.S. LEXIS 2768. The Court declined Limelight’s petition for review of a $46 million jury verdict against Limelight for patent infringement. The jury had found
In Lexmark International, Inc. v. Impression Products,
Inc., No. 14-1617 (Fed. Cir. 2016), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided en banc that a U.S. patent owner’s “first sale” of items in a foreign country does not exhaust the patent owner’s right to sue for patent infringement when those items are later imported into the U.S. In contrast, the Supreme Court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 1351 (2013) came to a different conclusion under copyright law, finding that the “first sale,” or exhaustion, doctrine allows the owner of a copy of a copyrighted work, which was lawfully made in a foreign country, to import and sell that copy in the United States without further permission from the copyright owner. But, as the Federal Circuit recognized, patent law and copyright law are not always aligned.
The Lexmark dispute arose in conjunction with Lexmark’s toner cartridges for its printers. Lexmark offers its customers the choice of buying a “Regular Cartridge” at full price with no restrictions on its re-use/resale or a discounted cartridge, subject to a single-use/no-resale restriction. Lexmark sold some of the cartridges in the United States and some abroad. Some of the foreign-sold cartridges and all of the U.S.-sold cartridges at issue were sold subject to an express single-use/no-resale restriction.Continue Reading The Federal Circuit Finds Foreign Sales Do Not Exhaust Patent Rights
