Intellectual Property

It's not uncommon for rights licensees in the entertainment industry to find themselves in a rights dispute when a licensor files for bankruptcy.

Only a small fraction of television news broadcasts are made available online. For a party to monitor and view all news coverage of an event, it would essentially have to watch and record all news broadcasts 24/7. That's exactly what media-monitoring service TVEyes did. There was no dispute that TVEyes had copied Fox News's content. Instead, the issue was whether TVEyes's service constituted fair use.

The First Circuit Widens the Controversy

In In re Tempnology, the First Circuit held that the debtor's rejection of a trademark license strips the nondebtor licensee of any right to continue to use the trademarks. In so doing, the court takes the same approach as the Fourth Circuit and rejects the approaches advocated by the Third and Seventh Circuits.

Exmark Manufacturing Company Inc. v. Briggs & Stratton Power Products Group, LLC

The rate of the reasonable royalty awarded to a successful patent plaintiff must be based on the facts of the case. A damages expert cannot merely pay lip service to the Georgia-Pacific factors and then “pluck” a royalty rate from thin air.

Trade secret protection applies only to confidential information. In almost all circumstances, broadcasting to the world the intricate details and applications of a trade secret extinguishes whatever “property right” an entertainment industry holder once possessed. What is a sufficient method of contractually notifying a software user of the trade secret status of certain information is a closer question.

Claim Preclusion Requires Analysis that Claims in Newly Asserted Patents are Patently Indistinct from Claims in Previously Adjudicated Patents
Claim Elements Taught by Prior Art for Purposes of Novelty and Obviousness are not Necessarily 'Well-Understood, Routine, and Conventional' Under §101

According to a recent case from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York involving live-event ticket sales, a purported holder of a trade secret cannot omit a confidentiality provision from its terms of use and then claim trade secret status afterward.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to consider whether a patentee may recover foreign lost profits resulting from infringement of a United States patent.