It has been a welcome development in the art of cease-and-desist and demand-letter writing lately: Rather than a stern warning with paragraphs of statutory citations and threats of “treble” and punitive damages to the moon, companies have had their counsel user...
The Thick and Thin of Copyright Protection Copyright lawyers love tell you that copyright law is all about encouraging creativity because that makes it seem that we’re performing some sort of socially useful activity. We love to point to paintings, novels, movies and...
A PEDAL TAVERN by Any Other Name Would Still Be as Annoying On my way back to Nashville (from Los Angeles) last week, I found myself in the back of the plane with not one, but two bachelorette parties. It wasn’t quite noon (Pacific time), but several of the members...
The Lanham Act had some language struck out of it by the Supreme Court today. In the trademark world, this qualifies as Big News. A superbrief history: The Slants are a band out of California made up entirely of Asian Americans. Simon Tam, the lead singer, filed an...
Trademark Registrations Are Important, but Not the Way Many Markholders Think In my high school “health and guidance” class, I was taught that you can’t sober up a drunk with coffee. All you get, I was told, was a wide-awake drunk. Although now stimulated, the guy’s...
It’s Derby time! I don’t live in Louisville, but I used to spend a lot of time there for work, and when I was in college at Vanderbilt University, the Kentucky Derby would always be the Saturday right after finals ended and was only a two hour drive up I-65. As poor...
