If this March seems a little different than those in years past, well, that’s mostly the pandemic we’re hopefully nearing the end of. But it’s also different in that this year’s edition of the NCAA’s college basketball tournament is to be experienced largely alone, shorn of the communal experience that has made it the institution that it is. The tournament is both big business for the NCAA and something of a drain on business for others, costing companies billions in lost productivity over the course of the month. And on the former point, the NCAA is vigilant in protecting that business against even the notion that someone else might make a buck without their say-so.
Continue reading “NCAA Goes After Urologists In Trademark Case”
It’s probably too much to hope that those companies that have adopted trademark bullying as a course of action to change their stripes and take a more measured approach, but it is nevertheless disappointing and disheartening to see every new instance wherein they take aim at an invariably small business over some imaginary offense. For the bullying company that case is but one mark on a ledger or one chapter in an ongoing story, but for those small businesses these lawsuits can be hugely damaging, if not an existential threat.
Many lawsuits, by their nature, come to resemble a back-and-forth or tit-for-tat or whichever colloquialism you may prefer; few are willing to sit idly by and let a case be brought and then built against them without taking some recourse, particularly given that many suits result from an inability to resolve the matter at hand without the intervention of the courts. Thus lawsuits breed countersuits, business becomes personal and disputes turn into feuds that can potentially run for years. 
Any remaining pretense the NCAA may have tried to maintain about their supposedly fair and equitable treatment when it comes to men’s and women’s athletics went out the window in the early days of this year’s tournament, when it was revealed that the men’s teams were granted a full array of workout equipment and the women’s teams…well, 
For those fortunate enough to go to college (or unfortunate, depending on your reaction to that first student loan bill) picking the institution to attend is a big and thrilling step in your journey into adulthood. For many it’s the first time they’ll be living independently of their parents, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of miles away from home. And a big part of choosing a school is the campus tour: your opportunity to get a feel for the feel, the environs of your potential home for the next four(ish) years. 
If you’re not up on shoe culture, stories about old and new kicks going for occasionally eye-watering prices can boggle the mind. Regardless of how you feel about it, though, there is a lot of money in the buying and selling of collectible shoes, and notably, a lot of that money is made on secondary markets. Given that shoe companies are doing alright as it is, they’re probably ok (for now) getting only a portion of that market as opposed to the whole thing. But someone striking out on their own and using their trademarks? That’s clearly going to be a big no-no.
I’m typically loath to revisit stories too many times, but occasionally you have to see something out to its end, particularly if its end is particularly ignominious. 
Cast your mind, if you will, back to 2010; do you recall what you were doing? Who you were, and how different your life was then to how it is now? A decade is a long time in the course of human life, and it’s a long time for a court case to wend its way up to the Supreme Court for a definitive declaration on the matter at hand. 
Multiple things can be true at once; we can agree on the notion that patent trolls are bad, and that they and others who abuse the currently broken system of adjudicating IP law are doing considerable harm, and also concede that, in the case of some of the companies targeted by these entities, the eventual judgment (should there be one) isn’t enough to really cause them lost sleep. That’s not to say that something shouldn’t be done to curtail patent trolls and their practices, just that their actions serve to slow down some of these megacorporations not one bit. 
Much of the narrative about IP lawsuits carters around the separate and seemingly unequal systems of justice that exist depending on net worth. Bigger businesses with more resources can afford better lawyers for longer, and in many cases indefinitely, as in-house legal teams are a thing for those select corporations. Small businesses can struggle to put together a defense, and can only maintain it for as long as the money holds out, and so are less likely to get the outcome to which they are justified. IP lawsuits are a cost of doing business for some, and an existential threat for others.