Intellectual Property

Join Board of Editors member Kyle-Beth Hilfer, Editor-in-Chief Howard Shire, Aaron Krowne and Wenew GC Christine Lawton for Counseling the NFT Client: A Practical Guide to Legal and Business Issues.

Many trademark practitioners have noted the USPTO's recent penchant for issuing refusals to register trademarks on the ground of failure to function as a trademark. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board picked a colorful case to set precedent and provide some initial guidance on how it will evaluate failure-to-function refusals going forward.

Part Two of a Three-Part Series Part One of this article discussed the passing of the Economic Espionage Act to combat the growing concerns surrounding trade secret theft and the criminal components of trade secret theft. Part Two covers considerations in favor of approaching federal authorities on trade secrets theft.

Federal Circuit: No Patent Term Adjustments When Claims Change Federal Circuit: Proceeding Need Not Be Terminated Upon Request

Part One of a Three-Part Series When the international theft of U.S. trade secrets escalated and became a higher priority for domestic entities, trade secrets owners faced difficult challenges in collecting evidence, pursuing civil actions against overseas actors, and successfully obtaining worthwhile and meaningful relief from civil actions alone. These challenges ultimately resulted in increased referrals, investigations, and prosecutions of trade secrets theft under the EEA by federal authorities.

By feeding machine-learning models hundreds of copyrighted pictures to train them to identify and "read" certain concepts, companies could face violating copyright laws.

Practitioners and non-practitioners that are associated with the examination of patents and patent applications should be vigilant about information that may be material to patentability to avoid having an issued patent be deemed unenforceable.

In the October 2022 Term, the Supreme Court is set to decide whether courts assessing transformativeness under the first fair-use factor of the Copyright Act may consider "the meaning of the accused work where it 'recognizably deriv[es] from' its source material." The case may profoundly affect the fair use analysis, and in turn, the scope of copyright protection for many works.