Litigation

California DMV regulations excluding plaintiffs' personalized plates were like the PTO trademark registration restrictions of SLANTS and FUCT — restrictions struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court for violating the First Amendment.

The legal implications of branding generally arise initially for companies during the process of selecting a company name and any initial product or service names. For drug development companies, however, careful consideration should also be paid to the implications of branding a clinical trial.

PTAB to Follow Nautilus Standard of Definiteness

Part Two of a two-part article While the livestreaming of music performances is not an entirely new phenomenon, the COVID crisis has transformed the live performance landscape, compelling artists from around the world to reach their fanbase by producing "quarantine streams," in which they livestream their sets on social media platforms. Unsurprisingly many questions have arisen.

In Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P. v. ComicMix LLC, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit held in December that ComicMix's illustrated book combining elements of several Dr. Seuss children's books with characters, themes and other features of the popular sci-fi series Star Trek was not a fair use of the Seuss material from which it had admittedly been "slavishly" copied.

The court's decision means that in the Ninth Circuit commercial mash-ups will have to do more than place new characters in old settings to qualify for fair use.

The New Jersey Supreme Court disbarred lawyer Gary Mason after finding he knowingly misappropriated $690,000 that investors paid to support the work of a fledgling filmmaker.

Fort Lauderdale copyright attorneys Matthew Nelles and Adriana Kostencki of Nelles Kostencki were in a Los Angeles airport in February 2019, when movie director, producer and actor Spike Lee called the day after winning an Oscar for his historical crime drama BlacKkKlansman. But the call wasn't about the win.