The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit this week summarily affirmed a dismissal, from two years ago, of trademark claims brought by flooring company VIRAG, S.R.L. (“Virag”) against Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC (“Sony”).  In a three-page unpublished opinion, the appeals court held that Sony’s use of the “VIRAG” trademark as set dressing

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled this month that Google’s trademark has not lapsed into the public domain by becoming generic even though today’s digital vernacular uses “google” as a verb synonymous with searching the Internet.  As a general rule, generic terms used as trademarks are not protectable

In 2014, the United States Supreme Court, in American Broadcasting Companies v. Aereo, Inc., held that unlicensed re-broadcasts of copyrighted content over the Internet constituted public performances of copyrighted works in violation of content owners’ exclusive rights under the Copyright Act; as part of its discussion, the Court analogized services like Aereo’s to “cable services.”  Emboldened

In Stevens v. CoreLogic, Inc., the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California examined § 1202 of the Copyright Act, a part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protecting the integrity of copyright management information (“CMI”), and  held that unintentional removal of metadata embedded in a photograph does not violate the statute.

Yesterday President Obama signed the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (“DTSA”), the culmination of several years of bipartisan efforts to federalize trade secret protection, placing it alongside the federal copyright, trademark, and patent statutes.  The DTSA – an extension of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 – should be significant, generally, to businesses concerned

Yesterday, CDAS submitted an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the respondent in the case captioned Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons (“Kirtsaeng II”), which will examine the proper standard for fee awards under the Copyright Act. The brief, filed on behalf of the Copyright Alliance, argues that when determining whether

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York this month, a group of tattoo artists (through a licensing entity) sued the developer, publisher, and marketer of the immensely popular NBA 2K16 video game over digital depictions of tattoos the artists had inked on the real-life basketball players

In May we reported that a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had affirmed the USPTO’s denial of a registration for the trademark “THE SLANTS” to refer to an all-Asian-American rock band, but had, in a prescient “additional views” opinion, prompted en banc reconsideration.  A majority of the full Federal

On Tuesday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that public-figure plaintiffs in defamation cases must set forth plausible allegations, at the pleadings stage, that media defendants acted with actual malice.  Heralded as a victory for the media industry and First Amendment rights, the court in Biro v. Condé Nast, et al.