By Mark McKenna Guest blogger Brett Frischmann has a really good post over at madisonian.net. He argues that at least some of the problems New Orleans has experienced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are consequences of shortsightedness. I’ve been…
By Eric Goldman Back in May, I blogged about Marquette being the first participant in the Business Software Association’s “Define the Line” campaign against on-campus copyright infringement. The details were sketchy, but the Marquette Tribune student paper ran an article…
By Mark McKenna The 6th Circuit today released an interesting decision restricting the application of initial interest and post sale confusion doctrines, at least in the context of product configuration. Gibson Guitar Corp. has manufactured its Les Paul line of…
By Mark McKenna William Patry has an interesting post over at his blog about how courts go about determining substantial similarity in copyright infringement actions. The post resonated with me for a couple of reasons. First, I always have great…
By Eric Goldman Michael Madison gives an interesting account of his experiences drafting local court rules for patent cases. While the idea of creating some incentives for parties to engage in forum-shopping may sound good in theory, I wonder how…
By Eric Goldman Reuters reports that GEICO and Google have settled their lawsuit. This development isn’t particularly surprising given that the judge practically ordered them to settle. The terms of the settlement are confidential, so we can only speculate what…
By Eric Goldman From Kevin Poulson’s Wired story: An entrepreneur registers 800-RED-CROS[S]. He claims to have done so because it has the same number as 800-RED-ARMS, and he was running a business by that name at the time. When he…
By Mark McKenna In another example of trademark enforcement on steroids, we have Monsanto’s recent demand that the author of the Bitter Greens Journal blog stop using Roundup Ready as the header for a series of blog posts. See Overlawyered…
By Mark McKenna In the name of not being left out of the interesting discussion about Snoop Dogg’s trademark lawsuit against Gary Barbera (not to be confused with Hannah Barbara, of Flintstones fame), I thought I would put in my…
By John Ottaviani Eric and I have been debating the claims in the 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg cases, and whether there can be trademark like protection for “speech patterns.” Not surprisingly, as one who likes “non-traditional” trademarks, I am…