Not Quite a Marathon
Keith Levinsky The dispute over “Marathon Monday” trademark began in 2011 when Velocity LLC applied to register the trademark in connection with sweatshirts, hats, and other clothing. Velocity, a clothing company from Everett, Massachusetts, produced clothing for the BAA from 2009 to 2010. The company asked the BAA about becoming the official licensee of the Boston Marathon trademark, but the BAA refused since it already had an exclusive agreement with Adidas. Adidas is the Official Footwear and Apparel Supplier of the Boston Marathon and provides apparel to Marathon volunteers, race officials, and runners. Read Full Text Here
Defenseless in the Zombie Infested Internet: Why Audio-Visual Works Demand Exemption Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Eric Maher In the aftermath of Napster and Pirate Bay’s shameless disregard for copyrights, DRM strategies are necessary to protect the incentives that encourage artists and programmers to create and publicly display their works. Yet the security risks associated with DRM levy a high cost on the public, on whose patronage the content creators depend. By restricting research and investigation into security risks in popular public technologies, U.S. copyright law, particularly under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), removed necessary safeguards for the public. The large influx of new consumer electronics demands exemption from the anti-circumvention...
Intellectual Property Indemnity Clauses
Thomas Hemnes, M.S. The practices associated with intellectual property indemnity can be traced in part to Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code. At the dawn of the computer age, practitioners searched for legal models that they could use for transactions in intangible rights and products such as computer software. Although computer software did not fit easily into the “sale of goods” paradigm, analogies to the familiar rules governing sales of goods were inevitable. Lurking in the lower reaches of Article 2 of the UCC, one finds an implied warranty of non-infringement in Section 2-312(2): Unless otherwise agreed, a seller...
Keep an I on the Sky: E-Discovery Risks Forecasted for Apple’s iCloud
Daniel Carmeli Some things have not changed since the fire of March 14, 1873. The competing interests of clients seeking convenient storage on one side against providers seeking protection from liability on the other continue to pervade the legal landscape. Naturally, some things have changed, such as the items being stored, the nature of the storage facilities, the associated risks, and the rules governing preservation obligations. Physical property has been replaced with electronically stored information (“ESI”) and warehouses now take the form of remote data servers. And in addition to longstanding conventional risks, such as accidental fire, companies now face...
Dosage Patenting in Personalized Medicine
Jerry I-H Hsiao, PhD; Wei-Lin Wang, JSD Inventions for dosage regimens often arise after the pharmaceutical product has been dosed in patients and more information is known about the in vivo and pharmacokinetic properties of the medical agent. However, securing patent protection for this type of invention has been difficult because dosage inventions are considered to be simple medical methods whose protection is believed to limit doctors’ choices in clinical practice. Moreover, novel dosage inventions are also considered to involve a process that does not enjoy the same scope of patent protection as new chemical entities despite their superior therapeutic...
Digital Copyright, “Fair Access” and the Problem of DRM Misuse
Nicolo Zingales The advent of the digital age and the wide diffusion of copyrighted works over the Internet have brought about a drastic challenge to the pre-existing rules and legal standards governing the exchange of information. This article points out one of the ways the development of these new technologies has altered the boundaries of copyright, specifically by enabling copyright holders to strategically expand the scope of protection through the strategic use of Digital Rights Management (hereinafter, DRM). After a brief overview of these technologies and their contribution to the development of online markets for copyrighted works, the article discusses...
Geographical Indications: Which Way Should ASEAN Go?
Malobika Banerji “Geographical Indications‟ (hereafter GIs) under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (hereafter TRIPS) has been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate across the world in the last decade. The TRIPS is the first multilateral text providing for a comprehensive protection of GIs. It provides for (a) a base-level protection for geographic indications related to all products; (b) an additional protection for wines and spirits; and (c) an extra-additional protection only for wines. The “extra-additional‟ protection accorded to wines has generated significant controversy and discussion. The TRIPS mandates the need to accord protection for each GI for wines...
Do Business Method Patents Encourage Innovation?
Rajnish Kumar Rai; Srinath Jagannathan Although the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”) had issued business method patents (“BMPs”) prior to 1999, the decisions of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“Federal Circuit”) in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc. in 1998 and AT&T Corp. v. Excel Communications, Inc. in 1999 led to a significant increase in the number of BMP applications filed with and granted by the PTO. Although grants of such patents have considerably stabilized in recent years, many policy issues raised by financial, electronic commerce and software...
Avoid the Rainy Day: Survey of U.S. Cloud Computing Caselaw
Fernando M. Pinguelo; Bradford W. Muller Cloud computing, a computer networking model that gives users on-demand access to shared software applications and data storage, is becoming increasingly popular among businesses and individuals. For example, if you use Google’s Gmail for your email and calendaring, or Snapfish for your online photo sharing and storage; or if your business remotely stores data with a third-party server provider like Salesforce, or uses Windows Azure to create and host web applications and services, you are already “floating in a cloud.” To provide guidance to those companies working within a cloud – or those considering...
Digital Sampling of Music and Copyrights: Is It Infringement, Fair Use, or Should We Just Flip a Coin?
Christopher C. Collie; Eric D. Gorman D.J. Girl Talk is one of the budding artists in the music industry today, and his instrument is a laptop. D.J. Girl Talk (hereinafter also referred to as “Girl Talk”), whose real name is Gregg Gillis, “samples,” or uses short clips, from other artists’ songs to create popular dance music. Girl Talk’s songs combine old, contemporary, and downright odd genres of music. Within these different genres, he samples from artists such as Clipse, Kelly Clarkson, and Hot Chip. At his live concerts, D.J. Girl Talk leads massive crowds who dance non-stop to his songs....