Commercial Law

Here's a little secret about professional services marketing. It always comes down to selling the individual clients ' one by one. And it doesn't matter if your firm is the largest or the smallest. You can talk about strategies, image, niche marketing and branding. You can talk about articles, brochures, press releases and seminars. But it always comes down to selling the individual clients ' one by one.

In a recent presentation to the Maryland State Bar Association's Franchise Law Committee, Stephen Vaughan and David Worthen, shareholders with Gray Plant Mooty, discussed how to obtain an injunction that will prevent unlicensed trademark use by a terminated franchisee, as well as strategies for fending off arguments commonly raised by franchisees when confronted with a motion for an injunction.

What's at issue is control, obviously, and the great lengths to which some will go to maintain, it even as they benefit from the wide-open, free-flowing viral information torrent of the Internet. These copyright acquisitions are not primarily motivated by the desire to exploit the works and make money, but rather by the desire to stop the public circulation of texts and images the new owners do not like.

Remember U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart's famous line about hardcore pornography? Stewart said it was tough to define, "but I know it when I see it." The quip came to mind after a ruling last month by the U.S Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a trademark infringement case involving Internet advertising keywords. In essence, the Ninth Circuit concluded that there's no strict standard for determining infringement in the Internet age, so judges have to know it when they see it.

The use of new technology makes peoples' efforts to keep Internet behavior private more difficult, has given rise to renewed claims from consumers of unlawful intrusiveness by Internet data-collectors, and has revived the argument that such behavior unlawfully violates privacy expectations.

When the White House's intellectual-property enforcement coordinator, Victoria Espinel, submitted a wish list to Congress in March recommending 20 changes to federal intellectual property law largely aimed at ramping up criminal punishment for IP infringement, IP lawyers said the white paper recommendations would likely have only a tenuous effect, if any, on civil IP litigation or patent prosecution.

The Supreme Court of Michigan dismissed an eavesdropping claim by city officials who were taped backstage while demanding that a video they considered improper for young audience members not be played during a Detroit concert that featured rappers Dr. Dre, Eminem and Snoop Dogg.

Fourth-quarter 2010 estimated U.S. retailing rose 3.6% over the third quarter, the Census Bureau reports, as consumer confidence rose through the Christmas season on a wave of slightly rising employment.