News/Events/Blogs

In this week’s episode of the Briefing by the IP Law Blog, Scott Hervey and Josh Escovedo discuss recent news stories reporting that police officers played copyrighted music during filmed encounters, ostensibly to keep the videos from being uploaded to the Internet. Scott and Josh discuss how copyright law, the DMCA, and fair use apply to this tactic.

Listen to the podcast of this episode on your favorite podcast platform or online here.

In this bonus episode of the Briefing by the IP Law Blog, Scott Hervey and Josh Escovedo discuss the stringent trademark enforcement protection for Olympic symbols, words, and phrases as well as recent lawsuits that have reinforced that protection.

Lawsuits discussed:
San Francisco Arts & Athletics, Inc. v United States Olympic Committee
USOPC v Puma

Watch the video of this episode on YouTube,

In December 2019, Scott Hervey wrote about the copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Taylor Swift by the writers of the song “Playas Gon’ Play.”  The song was released by the girl group 3LW in 2001 and included the lyrics “Playa, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate.”  In 2014, Taylor Swift released “Shake It Off,” which included the lyrics “Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play,

This week on The Briefing by the IP Law Blog, Scott Hervey and Josh Escovedo discuss the copyright lawsuit over a Black Mirror episode starring Miley Cyrus, the plot of which filmmaker Geoffrey Blair Hajim said was lifted from his film “Strange Frame: Love and Sax.”

View the episode on the Weintraub Tobin YouTube channel, here.

Listen to the podcast,

Over the past few weeks, there have been a number of news articles and stories about police officers playing popular music during a citizen/officer interaction that is being filmed by the citizen.  For example, Vice reported on a Beverly Hills police officer breaking out his phone and playing over a minute of Sublime’s “Santeria” when the officer discovered that his interaction with a well-known LA-area activist was being live-streamed by the citizen via Instagram. 

In recent years, the Supreme Court has decided a number of cases, including Bilski v. Kappos, Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad, and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l, which involve the limits on patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101.   For example, in Alice, the court stated “[t]he ‘abstract ideas’ category embodies the longstanding rule that an idea of itself is not patentable.” The Supreme Court further recognized that “laws of nature,

In this week’s episode of The Briefing by The IP Law Blog, attorneys Scott Hervey and Josh Escovedo discuss the trademark litigation between Nike and a custom shoe maker, MSCHF (pronounced “Mischief”). In Nike Inc. v MSCHF Product Studio, Inc., Nike sued MSCHF over unauthorized versions of the Nike Air Max 97 featuring satanic imagery. The shoes were tied into marketing by Rapper Lil Nas X, and all 666 pairs created by MSCHF were sold.

Loud parties, surveillance cameras, and a neighbor dispute? The Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District in California was recently faced with these issues in a case involving claims that one neighbor’s use of surveillance cameras violated the other neighbor’s right to privacy. The fact that one of the defendants was comedian, Kathy Griffin, only added to the case’s interest. In the end, the Court sided with Ms. Griffin and her boyfriend in the case: Mezger v.

In this week’s episode, Josh Escovedo and Scott Hervey discuss an update to the litigation over Andy Warhol’s series of portraits of the artist Prince (Andy Warhol Foundation v Goldsmith). They provide a recap of last week’s episode, which covers the Second Circuit decision in favor of Goldsmith, the photographer whose image Warhol used to create the Prince Portraits, and the holding that Warhol’s renditions were not transformative enough to be fair use.

Patents protect inventions.  However, patents protect only certain inventions.  In order to be patentable, an invention must fall within one of four categories of patent-eligible subject matter: articles of manufacture, machines, processes, and compositions of matter. 35 U.S.C. §101.  There are some things that are not patentable (i.e. are patent-ineligible subject matter): laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.

In 2014, in Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank International,