Intellectual Property

The murkiness around patent eligibility is one reason innovators have been turning more toward trade secret law to protect their inventions.

Internet site legal identity theft is becoming increasingly more sophisticated and common. If successful, a third party can use the theft of a legal identity to secure confidential information, harm marketing brand value, diminish good will and steal customers. Internet sites may employ legal, business, and technological means to protect their legal identities.

How can one launching a new trademark mitigate the risk of rejection or infringement on the basis of likelihood of confusion with an existing mark? The primary strategy is trademark searching.

Evolusion Concepts, Inc. v. HOC Events, Inc. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. v. Accord Healthcare, Inc.

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) has finally filled a gap left by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the standard for finding deceptive intent when trying to prove fraud on the USPTO.

Major crisis events, such as political uprisings or financial downturns, are typically followed by an increase in fraud in the business sector and heightened risk to corporate IP and other sensitive information. Anecdotally, this seems to be proving out again in the recent and ongoing fallout from the pandemic. Even before this Great Resignation movement, corporations across the globe were reporting increases in suspicious activity, data leakage, IP theft and other data risks stemming from departing employees and remote workers.

The Ninth Circuit ruling in Flo & Eddie may turn out to be last stop on the long and winding road the owners of pre-1972 recordings have traveled in their efforts to obtain compensation for public performances through platforms like Sirius.

Patent marking is an important step in the patent lifecycle as it is generally required to seek damages from infringers prior to the date the suit is filed. While virtual marking has somewhat reduced the overhead of marking, it suffers from the same problems all Internet-based evidence runs into in court: websites are ephemeral and have intermittent accessibility, as well as poor public logging of when information existed where, and for how long. NFTs on a digital blockchain could potentially overcome these hurdles, while still providing the benefits of virtual marking via websites.