Articles Posted in Trademark and Copyright Litigation

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Value stores like Meijer and T.J. Maxx, which have built a reputation for providing discounted items, allegedly don’t always use the best business practices for attaining those items. Many of them are sourced from outside the U.S., where labor is cheap, and allegedly sometimes they resort to knockoffs, which are usually cheaper versions of a patented and/or well-known design.

When Design Ideas, a design firm based in Springfield, IL, refused to lower its price on its Sparrow Clips, the retailers threatened to purchase the clips from another vendor. Design Ideas pointed out that it owned the Sparrow Clips’s exclusive copyright, which it had purchased from Pititas Waiwiriya, the Thai designer who allegedly invented the clothespins that come in multiple colors and are topped with the outline of a small bird.

After Design Ideas refused to lower their price, Meijer allegedly started buying “Canary Clips,” a knockoff produced by a company called Whitmor. Whitmor is another vendor that provides products to large retailers across the country, including T.J. Maxx and Meijer.

After someone who worked for Design Ideas allegedly saw the knockoffs being sold at a T.J. Maxx and a Meijer in Springfield, Design Ideas responded by filing a copyright lawsuit against its former customers.

In the claim they filed, Design Ideas included an email that allegedly showed Whitmor asking a Chinese manufacturer how much it would cost them to produce a knockoff of the Sparrow Clips. In that same email, Whitmor also allegedly asked the knockoff manufacturer to research the original mold and discover whether or not it was protected by a patent. Whitmor denies having ever sent such an email. Continue reading ›

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Most people who are active on the internet are accustomed to seeing many different memes on a daily basis. People take famous photos or freeze frames from movies, attach their own funny and/or enlightening quotes to them and post them on the internet. Some of these memes go viral and get seen by millions of people, but few people ever stop to think about who owns these memes.

In the United States, memes are most often generated and distributed without much, if any, thought to copyright issues, but it’s a slightly different story in Germany. Recently Get Digital, a German company, received a notification that it owed Getty Images licensing fees for a penguin meme that appeared on one of its blogs.

Getty Images owns the rights to National Geographic‘s photos and the meme on Get Digital’s blog allegedly originated from a photo taken by a National Geographic staff photographer. Get Digital claims the amount Getty Images demanded was double what would be considered a normal licensing fee, but the company paid up anyway. It wasn’t until Getty Images allegedly required confidentiality regarding the transaction that Get Digital decided it had had enough. Continue reading ›

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Trademarks can be trickier than a lot of people realize. Although it would be wonderful to simply tell the government you’re trademarking something and rest assured that it will be protected from that point on, the realities of applying for and protecting one’s trademark status are much more blurry.

This continues to be even increasingly the case as our markets become more and more globalized. Although a complaint for an alleged trademark violation would normally have to prove the defendant was infringing on the plaintiff’s market, defining the line between markets has gotten increasingly difficult with both the advent of the Internet and advances in technology that make travel easier and less painful.

A U.S. district court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Trader Joe’s for alleged patent infringement, but Trader Joe’s appealed that decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the appellate court decided to revive the grocery store’s claims. Continue reading ›

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Mortgage loan servicer Quicken Loans Inc. ran afoul of the National Labor Relations Act when it adopted a policy prohibiting its mortgage bankers from using or disclosing personnel information or publicly criticizing the company. That was the ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Quicken Loans Inc. v. NLRB, No. 14-1231 (D.C. Cir. 2016), after the National Labor Relations Board had determined that Quicken’s rules unreasonably burdened its employees’ ability to discuss legitimate employment matters, protest employer practices, and organize.

Quicken mortgage bankers were required to sign “proprietary/confidential information” and “non-disparagement” rules. Confidential information included personnel files, rosters, and handbooks. Bankers had to agree not to “publicly criticize, ridicule, disparage, or defame” the company or its management, orally or in writing, including on websites, blogs, or emails.

Lydia G. was a mortgage banker in Quicken’s Scottsdale, Arizona office. After she took a job with one of Quicken’s competitors, Quicken sued her for violating her employment agreement. Lydia filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB alleging that Quicken’s confidentiality and non-disparagement rules interfered with its employees’ rights under the NLRA.

Section 7 of the NLRA protects employees’ rights to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment, criticize or complain about their employer or work conditions, and enlist others in addressing employment matters. Employers that restrict the rights guaranteed by Section 7 commit an unfair labor practice.

Whether workplace rules run afoul of Section 7 turns on whether they “would reasonably tend to chill employees in the exercise of their statutory rights,” either facially, in effect, or in application (Lafayette Park Hotel, 326 NLRB 824 (1998)). Continue reading ›

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Many of us have heard of art historians debating whether a new-found painting was created by a certain artist, but it’s much more rare to hear of such a debate over a painting allegedly created by an artist who’s still living. Even more rare is the owner of a painting suing the artist he claims painted it, but that’s exactly what Robert Fletcher, a 62-year-old retired corrections officer, is doing.

Fletcher was working in a correctional facility in Thunder Bay, Ontario in 1975 when he met a young man named Peter Doige who was from Scotland and was taking classes at a local college. Doige was brought to the prison farm Fletcher worked at on an LSD charge, and Fletcher says he saw Doige creating a painting of a rocky desert scene using acrylic and canvas and offered to buy it from him. Continue reading ›

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It’s common to hear artists talk about their work as being an homage to the work of another artist they admire or someone they once worked with, but sometimes the line between being influenced by an artist and stealing from that artist can get pretty blurry.

Randy Wolfe was a songwriter and member of the rock band Spirit. He wrote the band’s song “Taurus,” the opening chords of which sounded remarkably similar to the opening of the Led Zeppelin’s legendary song, “Stairway to Heaven.” Led Zeppelin and Spirit played some shows when they were touring together, which allegedly gave Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, who wrote the seminal “Stairway to Heaven,” access to the Spirit’s song, “Taurus,” which was released three years before “Stairway to Heaven.”

Wolfe had complained on multiple occasions about the similarities between his song and “Stairway to Heaven,” saying he felt ripped off, but he never filed a copyright lawsuit against Led Zeppelin. When Wolfe died in an accident in 1997, Michael Skidmore became the trustee of Wolfe’s songs. Skidmore initially thought suing Led Zeppelin would be like David taking on Goliath, so he didn’t pursue the matter until Francis Malofiy, an American attorney, convinced Skidmore he had a case. Continue reading ›

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Some people claim that nothing is unique. That everything we come up with has already been done by many others and will be done again. But there’s a difference between great minds think alike and someone repeating something they’ve seen someone else do.

Copyright law exists to protect creative ventures and intellectual property. That can get tricky when it becomes difficult to draw the line between the things that constitute infringement and the things that are considered public domain. For example, an entire work, such as a song, article, or book, is eligible for copyright, but short phrases and individual words are not.

Writing software code is not much different from writing anything else. On the one hand, it requires a certain amount of creativity and, although two people may write code that does essentially the same thing, they will not write it in exactly the same way. On the other hand, there are only so many ways they can tell a computer how to do something. If some of those ways are protected by copyrights, it severely limits the options coders have for trying to do the same or similar things.

This debate is at the heart of a lawsuit Oracle Corporation filed against Google for allegedly stealing code written by Java and using it in Google’s Android. In its complaint, Oracle alleges purchasing Java was the most significant and lucrative purchase it has made, and that everything produced by that company should therefore be protected as Oracle’s property. Because Google has made an estimated $21 billion in profit from Android since it launched in 2007, Oracle is claiming $9 billion of that money. Continue reading ›

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Sports teams often make more money from the merchandise and apparel they sell, stamped with the team name and logo, than they do tickets to games. As a result, it makes sense that they have a vested interest in protecting the right to put their name and logo on clothing and merchandise, but a patent on the name of a state seems to many people to be a step too far.

The University of Kentucky, home to the basketball team, the Wildcats, is claiming that it purchased the patent for putting “Kentucky” on any clothing back in 1997. So when Colin Fultz filed for a trademark of his business’s name, “Kentucky Mist Moonshine,” he received a cease and desist letter from the University of Kentucky. The University says it does not object to the name of the whiskey, only to the word “Kentucky” being put on promotional hats, T-shirts, etc.

Fultz’s business is a distillery that makes and sells fruit-infused whiskey and he has had to fight for his business since it was still just a concept. His hometown of Whitesburg was a dry town up until 2007, so when Fultz started taking the first steps to getting his business up and running a few years ago, the City Council needed some convincing that the town was ready, not just for alcohol, but for a distillery. Fultz thought the biggest hurdle was over when the City Council just barely voted to let him have his distillery, but that was just the beginning.

The athletic official for the University of Kentucky, Mr. Schlafer, said they intended for the letter to open up negotiations between Fultz and the University. He insists the local college, which makes about $123 million every year from the athletic department, has a right to protect the Wildcat brand. Continue reading ›

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It’s a story that never gets old: the small-town attorney goes after the massive corporation. Only in this case, the massive corporation is the famous rock band Led Zeppelin. And the fight is over one of the most iconic songs of all time: Stairway to Heaven.

According to the recent lawsuit, filed in 2014 in Los Angeles, California, the writers of the famous song, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, allegedly missappropriated the iconic opening arpeggio from a song called Taurus, by a much more obscure band called Spirit.

According to the lawsuit, Taurus was released in 1968. Towards the end of that same year, Led Zeppelin was just starting to make a name for itself. They played with Spirit in their first U.S. concert in Denver, Colorado, although it’s not clear whether Spirit played Taurus that night. Either way, Stairway to Heaven was released three years later and Randy Wolfe’s name was nowhere to be found in the credits.

Wolfe, who went by the stage name Randy California, was a guitarist and the writer of Taurus. He died in 1997, but before his death, he had said in interviews that he felt cheated because he had never been given credit for Led Zeppelin’s famous song. When Wolfe died, his song rights went into a trust that is currently overseen Mick Skidmore, a former fellow music writer.

Skidmore agreed with the claim that Wolfe should have been given credit for Stairway to Heaven, and a cut of the massive royalties to go along with it, but he felt the case was hopeless. He was discouraged from going up against Led Zeppelin, which has acquired a massive fortune, and continues to do so through royalties for their songs. Skidmore said he just doesn’t have the resources to take them on in court. Continue reading ›

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Paramount Pictures holds the copyright to Klingon, spoken by some characters in “Star Trek.” A group called the Language Creation Society says that’s not right. The Hollywood Reporter says the group sued saying Klingon is a real language, Paramount can’t copyright it any more than it could English or Chinese. Paramount has been forced to defend itself by arguing that Klingon is fake and therefore in reality useless. Continue reading ›

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