Intellectual Property

Designs on cheerleaders’ uniforms were copyright protected because they could both (a) be perceived as two-dimensional artwork separate from the uniform itself, and (b) qualify as a protectable pictorial or graphic artworks in their own right or as applied on another medium.  Read More

While it is illegal to supply from the United States "all or a substantial portion" of the components of a patented invention for assembly or combination abroad, the export of a single component of the patented invention cannot constitute a "substantial portion" of the components and so cannot violate the statute; “substantial” is a quantitative test, not a qualitative one.  Read More

When a product sold to a consumer is a multi-component product and the defendant has infringed a design patent on only some of the product's many components, the damages may be calculated as the profit on those components, rather than the entire multi-component product sold to consumers.  Read More

In ruling on a motion for attorney fees under the Lanham Act, the district court is free to exercise its discretion in examining the totality of the circumstances to decide if the case is exceptional, including whether the suit or prelitigation conduct was frivolous, ill-motivated or objectively unreasonable.  Read More

Trademark assignments and trademark co-existence agreements are generally enforceable; here the assignee of a co-existence agreement had prior rights over the assignee under a later assignment of the trademark.  Read More

In this trademark infringement case, plaintiff raised trial issues of fact sufficient to overcome summary judgment by showing the defendant sold its competing vodka under labels that a reasonable consumer might find confusingly similar to plaintiff’s labels, both featuring puckered lips, colored to match the vodka’s flavoring. Read More

The ordinary presumption favoring judicial review of administrative actions is trumped by clear statutory language providing that a Patent Office determination to institute inter partes review of an already issued patent is not reviewable in court.  Read More

The Supreme Court rejects the Federal Circuit’s Seagate Technology test for when to award treble damages in patent infringement suits under 35 USC 284, as too rigid and incompatible with the statute, adopting instead a “all circumstances considered” standard reviewed on appeal only for abuse of discretion.  Read More

In exercising its discretion under 17 USC 505 to award fees to the prevailing party in a copyright infringement suit, a district court should give significant, but not necessarily controlling, weight to whether the losing party advanced a reasonable claim or defense Read More

Madonna's song Vogue, in which she used a 0.23 second horn segment from an earlier copyrighted song, did not infringe on the earlier song’s copyright; any copying—even if deliberate—was de minimis and an average audience would not recognize the appropriation.  Read More

Questions of fact prevented summary judgment on defense that plaintiff’s graphical method of presenting medical test results was functional and so not a protectable trade dress. Read More

A notifier who sends a take-down notice to a website owner can be held liable to the poster of the taken-down content, if the notifier sends a take-down notice without first making a good faith determination that the content's use of copyrighted material is not protected by the fair use doctrine.  Read More