Intellectual Property

Trademark law was developed to help protect a seller’s “brand” in connection with the marketing and labeling of products for sale to avoid “consumer confusion.” One rarely litigated aspect of trademark law is that the use of the trademark must be for a lawful purpose. The Ninth Circuit recently tackled this issue in AK Futures LLC v. Boyd Street Distro, LLC (decided May 19, 2022), a case that involved e-cigarette and vaping products derived from cannabis.

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A design patent protects a new, original, ornamental design for an article of manufacture. 35 USC section 171. “Ornamental” means that the design is purely decorative; the patentability is based on its visual aspects. Those aspects are the shape or configuration of an article (like the shape of a bottle or a vase), the surface ornamentation on the article (like a painting on the bottle or vase), or a combination of both. The design must be a design for a specific article; it cannot exist independently of the article. The must be visible during normal use of the article; it cannot be concealed.

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In Munchkin, Inc. v. Tomy International, Inc., 1-18-cv-06337 (NDIL May. 24, 2022) the Court considered the permissible extent of attorney participation in the preparation of an expert report. The Court did so in response to plaintiff’s motion to exclude the testimony of defendant’s technical expert for failing to prepare his own report. Specifically, plaintiff Munchkin sought to exclude the opinion of defendant TOMY’s technical expert, Jesse Darley, who offered opinions regarding non-infringement.

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Last week, Senator Josh Hawley proposed a new copyright bill in the Senate that would have the effect of eviscerating existing copyrights for certain parties. The bill is known as the Copyright Clause Restoration Act. The bill would only affect entities with market caps exceeding $150 billion, which for practical purposes demonstrates that it is unambiguously intended to punish the Walt Disney Company for Disney’s recent stance against the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida. As if the legislation itself didn’t make its vindictive intent clear, Senator Hawley’s office released a statement saying that, “Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists.” This isn’t just absurd, but its patently false. Disney doesn’t receive special copyright protections. Those protections exist for all copyright holders that choose to take full advantage of the Copyright Act. After reviewing the legislation, it’s clear that this is nothing more than the Senator pandering to his base, and not a serious attempt to reform copyright law.

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A recent case filed by famous choreographer Kyle Hanagami is set to test the boundaries of copyright law in video games and on social media.

Mr. Hanagami is a popular choreographer with a large YouTube presence.  He won the 2020 iHeart Music Award for Favorite Music Video Choreography for BlackPink’s “Kill This Love” and holds the title for YouTube’s most viewed choreography video of all time. Crucially, he also holds the copyright to the dance to the Charlie Puth song “How Long.”

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Last month, HBO released its new drama series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty – based on the book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman. To say that Jerry West, the former head coach and GM of the Los Angeles Lakers dislikes the way he is portrayed in the HBO series Winning Time is an understatement. West calls his portrayal “false and defamatory” and he has publicly called for a retraction and an apology.  In a letter to HBO, West’s lawyer claims that Winning Time falsely and cruelly portrays West as an out-of-control, intoxicated, rage-aholic. West’s lawyer claims that the producers have committed the tort of false light invasion of privacy by creating a false impression about Mr. West that is highly offensive and injurious to his reputation and have also defamed Mr. West by attributing acts of rage to him that he never committed.

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The recent opportunities for remote work and learning have provided improvements in lifestyle for a number of employees and students. Many of those able to work or study from home have benefited from more flexible schedules, reduction in time and money spent on commuting, reduction in work- and school-related stress, and more family time. But those benefits have come with some new challenges. For example, professors and teachers have confronted the challenge of how to prevent students from cheating on exams. When standard approaches failed, a business professor recently turned to copyright law, hoping for a solution.

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Over two and a half years ago, this column analyzed a Ninth Circuit case titled HiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corporation, in which the Court agreed with a lower court that had issued a preliminary injunction against LinkedIn from taking certain technical measures to prevent HiQ, a data analytics company, from “scraping” information from publicly available profiles on LinkedIn’s site. The Ninth Circuit concluded then that HiQ was not violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) because its activities were directed at publicly available information and therefore, it was not accessing LinkedIn’s computer systems either without authorization or in excess of such authorization as required to establish liability under the CFAA.

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Not everything is patentable. First, only inventions are patentable. Second, only certain inventions are patentable. Four types of inventions are patentable: articles of manufacture, machines, processes, and compositions of matter. 35 U.S.C. §101. These four types of inventions are referred to as patent-eligible subject matter. Some things, referred to as patent-ineligible subject matter, are not patentable: laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.

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