Round 1: Creator of Joustin’ Beaver app KO’d by Justin Bieber
We previously posted about the Joustin’ Beaver v Justin Bieber case here.
Way more than an everyday interest in IP
We previously posted about the Joustin’ Beaver v Justin Bieber case here.
While effective patent law protects the financial returns on investment in R&D, thereby encouraging more people to invent new things, ineffective patent law can create roadblocks to innovation as patent owners exclude competitors from using and developing their inventions.
Back in the day, a legal dispute was unlikely to make it to the public domain unless it was sufficiently newsworthy. Unless a media release was sent to the media, or a reporter had a keen eye on a case, litigation tended to be kept between the parties to the dispute. However, in this age of social media, parties to a proceeding have the power to bring it to the attention of the public with only a few key strokes. But is it a wise move to do so? Or is it too much of a reputational risk?
It appears that Toyota may have got the jump on Jetstar by filing a series of trade mark applications to protect its well-known “Oh, what a feeling!” jump which has been used by the car maker since the 1980s to promote its vehicles. Jetstar – which, since launching in the early 2000s, has also used star-jumping actors to promote their airline – looks set to challenge Toyota’s right to protect its jump.
Last month, yoga-gear guru Lululemon Athletica Inc filed a lawsuit in the US Federal Court in Delaware against PVH Corp’s Calvin Klein brand and G-III Apparel Group alleging infringement of three “design patents” (the US term for registered designs) relating to the design of its famous yoga pants. Lululemon’s design patents relate to the v-shaped waistband which features on its flagship product. read more…
According to Bit Torrent Inc, a milestone 150 million active users was reached by Bit Torrent in January this year. Wikipedia says this makes Bit Torrent more used than YouTube and Facebook combined. With such a large amount of internet traffic (consisting of both legal and illegal activity), you might be unsurprised that copyright enforcement agencies have a keen interest in keeping their eyes on users’ IP addresses for potential breaches. What we haven’t heard much about is the way in which enforcement agencies conduct such monitoring.
The Swiss drug company Novartis has been involved in a long-running battle (since 2006) for an Indian patent for imatinib mesylate which is the leukaemia drug known as Glivec (Gleevec in the US). Glivec has shown success in turning deadly chronic myelogenous leukaemia into a manageable chronic disease for patients. Novartis developed a predecessor compound read more…
More than a year after Kim Kardashian sued Old Navy LLC for its use of a look-alike in in its “Super C-U-T-E” campaign (see our earlier post here), reports suggest Kanye’s leading lady has settled with the brand for the old celebrity favourite – an ‘undis read more…
Everything’s coming up roses for UK boy band One Direction, this week settling a trade mark dispute with US boy band (also called One Direction) over the use of the name. We previously posted about this dispute here and here. The UK teen heart-throbs are free to continue using the name, whilst the US band will now go by the name “Uncharted Shores”.