General IP News

Here. With Mark Lemley, Jessica Litman, Lydia Loren, Pam Samuelson, and Erik Stallman. http://tushnet.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss ... Read More

Vitamins Online, Inc. v. HeartWise, Inc., No. 13-CV-982 (D. Utah Sept. 24, 2019) Supplement industry behavior is wild.  Vitamins Online sells dietary supplements online, including on Amazon, using the name NutriGold. HeartWise, aka NatureWise, competes with NutriGold, including on Amazon, with products that contain an extract of garcinia cambogia and green ... Read More

·        The cultivation and use of the cannabis plant is ancient. Apart from the market for hemp, dealing in cannabis is still largely an illicit activity. It is only over the last decade that the cannabis market is becoming accessible. ·         A number of countries are ... Read More

ThermoLife Int’l LLC v. Vital Pharms. Inc., No. 19-cv-61380-BLOOM/Valle, 2019 WL 4954622 (S.D. Fla. Oct. 8, 2019)ThermoLife licenses/sells a patented creatine nitrate used in dietary supplements, which is allegedly included in many top-selling dietary supplements. VPX allegedly attacked ThermoLife’s creatine nitrate in its own advertising, including with false and misleading ... Read More

Lord Justice Arnold (as he now is) has handed down his customarily chunky judgment in the latest stage of "Purple Inhaler Wars" [ideas for a better name on a postcard, please] in Glaxo Wellcome UK Limited and Anor v Sandoz Limited and Ors [2019] EWHC 2545.This GuestKat finds the final result [spoiler ... Read More

Digital Copyright, Law and Practice by Simon Stokes offers a readable introduction to digital copyright and related areas such as moral rights, database rights and competition law. Simon Stokes is a partner at Blake Morgan and leads the firm’s technology practice in London, he specialises in information technology law, including outsourcing, cloud ... Read More

Do you have TikTok on your phone? Well, this Kat does – only, she has the Chinese version: Douyin (‘抖音’, which literally means ‘shaking sound’). Launched in September 2016, Douyin rapidly gained huge popularity. By December 2018, Douyin had 250 million average daily active users and 500 million monthly active users ... Read More

Keep your eyes wide open - more events are still to come!Intellectual property law elicits the organisation of so many interesting events and lectures that it is sometimes hard to keep up. So, here is a special Tuesday Thingies miscellany post, solely dedicated to events coming up soon!CREATe Symposium 2019 ... Read More

A divided Federal Circuit, in a precedential opinion, upheld a lower court’s finding that the claims of US Patent No. 7,774,911 ineligible for patenting under Section 101 because the claims are directed to a law of nature. The ‘911 patent claims relate to methods of manufacturing vehicle driveshaft assemblies. Deciding ... Read More

Hope this Never Too Late post is not too late. Here come all the posts contributed by the Kats two weeks ago. Copyright Eleonora Rosati reports the judgement in Google v CNIL, C-507/17, in which the CJEU rules that in 'right to be forgotten' cases, a search engine cannot be ordered to ... Read More

For the first 70 years since the establishment of the State of Israel, the registration and protection of designs in Israel was governed by laws inherited from the British Mandate. Some of these were obsolete. For example, only local novelty was required, although this has been interpreted by Commissioner Circular ... Read More

The oral exams for Patent Attorneys will be held on Sunday 8 December 2019 and on Thursday 12 December 2019. The written papers for electronic, computer related and mechanical inventions will be held on ... Read More

We previously wrote about California Senate Bill 206, the “Fair Pay to Play Act,” back in April, and now Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed that bill into law.[1] The law becomes effective on January 1, 2023. After numerous revisions to the bill since our last post, here is a quick ... Read More

Wright Medical Technology, Inc. v. Paragon 28, Inc., 2019 WL 4751807,  No. 18-cv-00691-PAB-STV (D. Colo. Sept. 30, 2019)Wright is a medical device developer, manufacturer, and distributor; its products include surgical plates and other instruments used to repair bones in the foot and ankle areas. Paragon, founded by three former high-level ... Read More

Jiaherb, Inc. v. MTC Indus., Inc., 2019 WL 4785784, Civil No. 18-15532 (KSH) (CLW) (D.N.J. Sept. 30, 2019)Brief but very clear statement: after Lexmark, business customers can’t bring Lanham Act claims. Jiaherb makes herbal extracts and other natural products, including saw palmetto oil and powder. MTC is a nutritional ingredient ... Read More

Life After Hate, Inc. v. Free Radicals Project, Inc., 2019 WL 4825072, No. 18 C 6967 (N.D. Ill Sept. 30, 2019)“At a time when people—particularly young people—are being radicalized online with alarming frequency, nonprofit organizations like Life After Hate and Free Radicals Project provide critical outreach services to help individuals ... Read More

Ford Motor Co. v. InterMotive, Inc., No. 17-CV-11584-TGB, 2019 WL 4746811 (E.D. Mich. Sept. 30, 2019)Ford sued InterMotive for trademark infringement, false designation of origin, trademark dilution, cancelation of trademark registration, and declaratory judgment for using Ford’s trademarks in various InterMotive ads; defendants counterclaimed for a bunch of things including ... Read More

This Kat found it quite fascinating when she saw last week that Canada’s Supreme Court ruled on the question of whether the Government of Ontario, Canada owned copyright in a work created for someone else (home owners, developers and other private citizens who commission surveyors),  but used by a government ... Read More

Meghan Markle, Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Sussex is suing the Mail on Sunday and its parent company Associated Newspapers, after they published a private letter from Meghan to her father earlier this year.In a press release, the lawyers for The Duchess of Sussex said that they have taken ... Read More

As some readers may know by now, this Kat spends a large part of his time thinking about injunctions in patent law. It seems he is not alone: the issue is an increasingly hot topic in Europe. A particularly exciting development in this regard is the announcement by the German ... Read More

What do we make of a mark that has broad name recognition but struggles commercially? Stated otherwise, what is the relationship between trademark awareness and brand strength? Take the case of the Uber company: Is the "Uber' mark widely recognized? The answer is-- “yes”. Is "Uber" a strong brand? ... Read More

Eva Glawischnig-PiesczekHow far can the removal obligations of an online intermediary go without breaching the no general monitoring obligation in Article 15 of the E-commerce Directive? Can an intermediary be ordered to remove content worldwide? And what can be the personal (original user and other users) and material (identical and ... Read More

Nearly two months ago, this Kat excitedly reported that the US Senate Judiciary Committee had voted to report a small-claims copyright bill (the CASE Act) to the Senate without amendment. The bill stems from an extensive report by the US Copyright Office considering the establishment of a copyright small-claims as ... Read More

... And just like that, September is over! In this jumbo edition of Around the Blogs, we take a look at some interesting stories from the IP blogosphere at the end of last month.PatentsOh Canada! Patent law changes are coming to Canada on October 30th, and IPWatchdog reported on a ... Read More

Last week, it was reported that Liverpool Football Club's (LFC's) application to register LIVERPOOL as a UK trade mark was rejected by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO).Apparently, and logically, this was on the basis that Liverpool is more "geographically significant" as a city than other place names that have ... Read More

Subscribers to a videogame distribution platform should be able to resell their videogames, a French court of first instance has ruled [full decision in French here]. Katfriend Simon Geiregat (Ghent University), aka GerryKat, reports. Here's what he writes:Paris Court on digital exhaustion and videogamesby Simon GeiregatThe judgment of the Paris Court of ... Read More

The Peruvian Ministry of External Relations has issued a Press Release stating that Peru will appeal to the ruling of the Court of First Instance of Thailand against the registration of a Chilean association that intends to use the term Pisco.Press Release 010 - 19Given the news reports that advance ... Read More

The EPO has announced the issue of the Enlarged Board of Appeal's full reasoning in referral G 2/19. As previously noted on IPKat, the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) had previously released their decision in G 2/19 but had not published the decision (EPO press release). The referral originated from the Board of ... Read More

Our friends at KNect365 wish to let IPKat readers know that they are getting ready for yet another edition of their successful ‘International Copyright Law’ conference, which will be held in London on 3-4 December 2019.The agenda of this year’s edition features experts in different areas of copyright and from ... Read More

This is a cross-post written by my partner Anthony Fuga from Holland & Knight’s Section 101 Blog. I am cross-posting because Anthony’s post is about a Judge Durkin 101 opinion in FYF-JB, LLC v. Pet Factory, Inc., No. 19cv2608 (N.D. Ill.). I am also posting it because Anthony’s 101 analysis ... Read More