Author Archives: Jean Niehues

If there is a theme to be found in this week’s blogs, it’s that sometimes less is more when it comes to enforcing your copyright. Disney going after what is a rounding error for them from an elementary school is an extreme example, to be sure, but there are other instances of companies taking aContinue reading “The Sleeper Has Awoken: Dune Takes Aggressive Copyright Approach to Logo Leaks”

Big companies don’t get big by letting others trample on their intellectual property, nor do they stay big by getting themselves become complacent in that regard once they’ve climbed to the top of the pile. Big revenue means a big legal department, eager to pursue every possible instance of infringement and justify their considerable billableContinue reading “Disney Backtracks in Lion King Copyright Case Against Elementary School”

A big part of IP law is the ability for companies to protect their ideas and their brand — the main part, really. And it’s important and necessary for such protections to exist, to prevent things like theft and infringement from becoming rampant problems with little or no means or seeking justice and recompense. ButContinue reading “NFL Goes After Fan Shop With Parody Merch With Trademark Claim”

Social media doesn’t have the best history when it comes to copyright to this point in its history. The poor record makes a kind of sense: it’s hard to govern a platform with tens of millions of users, provided that we believe they even want to regulate behavior, and tech companies in general have struggledContinue reading “Instagram Targets Github API copyright”

“Use it or lose it” isn’t a principle we generally associate with ownership — we all have closets filled with unused stuff that nevertheless remains ours for years — but it is one of the hallmarks of trademark law. Whatever your opinion of our current IP laws, it’s almost unquestionably a good thing that individualsContinue reading “Reminder: Use Your Trademarks or Risk Losing Them”

I’ve written before about the problems with both the aggressive assertion of copyright and the inability of online platforms to discern legitimate claims from the misuse of reporting tools on offer, with YouTube as the convergence point of these dual phenomena. Invariably the response from these platforms is that their user base is too largeContinue reading “YouTube’s Copyright Reporting Problems Continue Apace”

We don’t often talk about trade secrets in this space, because they are by definition secretive and unreported. It’s easy to understand and follow stories about trademarks or patents because we can identify what’s been infringed upon and how it relates to the products we know and consume. Trade secrets, on the other hand, haveContinue reading “Former Coca-Cola Employee Absconds With Trade Secrets”

There’s much made of the importance of copyright for creators, and for good reason: without any sort of legal protection or ownership rights, the act of creation itself would be meaningless, with the ultimate profit and benefit for a work ultimately going to whomever has the resources to both exploit it and muscle out theContinue reading “Is Copyright Killing Music?”

Wearable tech has been a fairly recent trend, unless you want to count the calculator watch. And preeminent in that trend has been Fitbit, which offers devices that monitor your activity and your health, should you actually want to know about such things. To those of us less technically-inclined, it seems like magic that aContinue reading “Fitbit Facing Investgation Into Patent Infringement From USITC”

It’s easy to wonder, given how relatively easy it is to search the respective databases containing registered trademarks, why anyone would thus infringe upon those marks given that they could or should know the error of their ways. One view is that it’s a simple oversight on the part of the offender, an honest mistake,Continue reading “SCOTUS Hearing Case on Trademark Profits and Willful Intent”