See the story about the self-infringing shirts and the shirts themselves.

Don’t let this happen to you.  This Northern District of New York case doesn’t really represent new law but it illustrates that “Creeping Equities” is still a common problem which can befall a strong mark in a narrow field.  Plainitff had used TYCOS on sphygmomanometers and stethoscopes since 1909.  Defendant, one of the world’s larger…

Ben Edelman (a Harvard senior!!) has released another behaviorial report, this time on .name, available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/name-restrictions/.  He came up with 6000 names that violated the eligibility rules, such as, well, harvard.university.name and allergy.tylenolallergysinus.name.  GNR, the .name registry, receives approximately $11 for each registration, valid or not. 

The State of the Domain Name report…

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/soccer/world/2002/world_cup/news/2002/05/31/marcotti_one/

You can guess from the caption that it’s about trademarks.   A Ninth Circuit case to cite when attempting to overcome a geographically misdescriptive objection: JAPAN TELECOM may not necessarily refer to Japan, but to the business’ Japanese-speaking customers.   

I have been asked this several times in my career: can the word TRADEMARK serve as a trademark?  Well, someone thinks so.

The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued an interesting decision, Bird v. Parsons.  The Court exercised personal jurisdiction over defendant Dotster, an ICANN-accredited registrar, based on the assumption that because Dotser sold 233,000 domain names in the U.S., 1/50 of those (4,666) were likely sold in Ohio, so Dotster had minimum contacts with Ohio. …

Read this article from Brandchannel’s site on the accepted practice of ambush marketing.  Is purchasing a competitor’s name as a search term on a pay-for-performance search engine (such as overture.com) different (legally, as opposed to ethically)?