Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2005 Passes House Judiciary Committee
The Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2005 (HR 683) has passed the House Judiciary Committee on March 9. A number of amendments were made to the bill, but the bill still remains very favorable to trademark owners. The bill still…
Copy of Marvel v. NCSoft Ruling
CE Petit has posted a copy of the court’s March 9 opinion in Marvel Enterprises v. NCSoft Corporation (CV 04-9253-RGK). The opinion is rather unremarkable—mostly it deals with motions to dismiss, so the standard for upholding the pleadings is pretty…
Ruling in Marvel v. NCSoft
NCSoft has won some favorable rulings in its lawsuit with Marvel. Marvel sued NCSoft because users could use NCSoft’s software in its City of Heroes MMORPG to generate characters that looked like Marvel characters. From the news/press reports, it appears…
Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2005
The Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2005 (HR 683) was introduced February 9, with a hearing of the House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property on February 16. The law appears to be a…
Ninth Circuit En Banc ruling in Gator.com v. LL Bean
Gator.com v. LL Bean, 2005 WL 351228 (9th Cir. Feb. 15, 2005). In 2001, LL Bean sent a C&D to Gator (now Claria). Gator responded by suing for a declaratory judgment. The district court dismissed Gator’s lawsuit for lack of…
Paul Boutin on Typo Traffic
Paul Boutin discusses the problem of searchers making typos when typing domain names into the address bar. He runs through the typical litany of gripes about product efforts to solve this problem—Microsoft’s “blatant ploy” to promote MSN search when IE…
Ben Edelman’s Response to My Post on Utah’s Spyware Law
I got an email from Ben Edelman in response to my earlier posting on Utah’s anti-spyware law. If you don’t know Ben, you should. Ben has done some first-rate empirical research on the Internet, and I cited several of his…
More on Utah Spyware Law Amendments
I finally had a chance to look at the proposed amendments to the Utah Spyware Control Act. They are much worse than I imagined! The law talks about spyware but instead makes adware illegal in Utah–regardless of how the software…
Coca-Cola v. Purdy Permanent Injunction
The court issued a permanent injunction in the long-running Coca-Cola v. Purdy case. If you’re not familiar with Purdy, he is an anti-abortion activist. He targeted various publishers that he believed were pro-choice, plus a number of other companies that…
“They Don’t Own the Jews”
Does a “Jewish Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” infringe the “trademark” owned by the Cleveland “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”? Given the large number of “Hall of Fames” in the world, one might think there would be better…