Ed Pennington and Bruce McDonald obtained a successful result in an action against anonymous counterfeiters engaged in a phishing attack against SGR client Bote LLC, a manufacturer of surfboards, kayaks and stand-up paddleboards (SUPs). Bote LLC v. BOTEBOARD.COM and John Does 1-10 et al., No. 1:21-cv-00612-LMB-MSN (E.D.Va.). By serving subpoenas and demands on multiple registrars, proxies, website hosting services and privacy providers, the client was able to take down 81 “copycat” websites spanning an array of top level domains that were unamenable to jurisdiction in a single court. The case had elements of so-called “cybersquatting” but was more complex than… Read more

Hailed by Google and others as the “copyright case of the decade,” the U.S. Supreme Court issued its long awaited decision in Google LLC.v Oracle America, Inc. The Court sided with Google in deciding that it is “fair use” for Google to verbatim take 11,000 lines of Java code and incorporate that into their application programming interface (“API”) software. Notably, the Supreme Court made no ruling on the fundamental issue of whether APIs are eligible for copyright protection. Google argued that they were not. Instead, the Court assumed for the sake of considering fair use that APIs were protectable, and then found that the… Read more

The following responds to a request by the Intellectual Property Court of the Russian Federation (IPC) for public comments on the Court’s development of methodological recommendations for the judicial assessment of consumer survey evidence in American trademark infringement cases. Survey results are typically used as evidence that a trademark is recognized as famous, distinctive, or a designation of origin or source, or that the mark is descriptive or generic for particular goods and services. The purpose of developing these recommendations is to consider how such polls should be conducted and what factors to consider when evaluating them. The Court is… Read more

An order providing sweeping post-injunctive relief to a non-profit fraternal organisation serves as a cautionary tale for infringers who fail to take permanent injunction orders seriously.  Click here to continue reading the article in the World Trademark Review.

It’s often said that the world is full of great ideas. That’s probably true, but laying claim to a great idea can be a tricky business. Joyce Bozarth Klemmer knows all about protecting ideas. The College of Business alumna has made a career out of representing corporate clients involved in cases of potential infringement of intellectual property rights. “Every year, for the last twelve, I have played a lead role in notable patent litigation cases,” Klemmer explains. “In today’s competitive business world, protecting your company’s crucial intellectual property can mean the difference between success and failure. And it’s not just… Read more

Does your company develop software that gives you an edge over your competitors? Is the source code for your software a closely guarded secret that adds to your bottom line? Would you be reluctant to publish your source code on the internet? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you should know how open source software can negatively impact your business. Open source software can be defined as any software where the source code is licensed along with the actual functioning program. The source code for a program is the collection of human readable statements that… Read more