As we wrote in April 2023, the Supreme Court recently heard a case involving Jack Daniel’s and a poop-themed dog toy made by VIP Products. On June 8th, the Court held unanimously in favor of Jack Daniel’s. Unlike the approach of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court rejected the applicability of the […]

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s “Booking.com” decision, the US Trademark Office continues to grapple with the protectability of domain names as registered trademarks.  Earlier this year, the Supreme Court held that under certain circumstances a domain name containing a generic word may be a protectible trademark, rejecting the per se rule that had […]

Our blog entry earlier this year discussed the “Booking.com” decision, in which the US Supreme Court struck down the per se rule that a generic mark followed by .com was not registrable under any circumstances.  That blog entry cautioned that the news may not be as good as may first appear. Recent interpretation of the Booking.com […]

A common issue among musical artists and others involved in the recording process is identifying who owns the copyright in a sound recording that is the result of contributions from many individuals, including headline artists, instrumentalists, background singers, producers, recording engineers, and others.  Typically, such issues will be governed by contracts signed by the participants […]

For many years, the Trademark Office has refused registration to marks consisting of a generic word combined with a top-level domain, such as “.com,” on the grounds that the combination of two generic elements cannot create a protectable mark.  The rationale for this nearly per se rule was that such marks could not be protected […]

The availability of attorneys’ fees for prevailing parties in copyright cases has been a hot issue for several years, and I have commented on recent developments on several occasions. This week, the Seventh Circuit issued an opinion making clear that the applicable analysis remains grounded in a fact-intensive, case-by-case approach.  Timothy B. O’Brien LLC v. Knott, […]

Accelerating a recent trend, the Ninth Circuit has held that misstatements in a copyright application may invalidate a resulting registration and jeopardize an infringement verdict based on the registration.  

When does the law belong to the People, and when does it constitute private property?  If the law is not subject to copyright protection and is free for all to copy and use, why is that, and how wide is the scope of that doctrine?

A federal judge in California has dismissed a class action lawsuit against Universal Music Group arising from a 2008 fire that destroyed an undetermined number of master recordings from artists including Tom Petty, 2Pac, Nirvana, and others.  Most of the other artists who were originally part of the suit, including Soundgarden, Steve Earle, Tupac Shakur, […]

In a highly anticipated decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, reversed a prior panel opinion (Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin, 905 F.3d 1116 (9th Cir. 2018)) that had held that a new trial was required in a high-profile copyright case involving “Stairway to Heaven,” one of the most […]