The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in U.S. ex rel. O’Donnell v. Bank of America Corp et al., No. 12-01422 (S.D.N.Y. 2013), has endorsed a broad interpretation of a savings-and-loan era law that the Justice Department is trying to use in cases against Wall Street banks. This ruling came as …
The Trademark Act Section 10(a)(1) clearly states that an intent-to-use application cannot be assigned “except for an assignment to a successor to the business of the applicant, or portion thereof, to which the mark pertains, if that business is ongoing and existing.” In the recent Trademark Trial and Appeal Board case, Cent. Garden & Pet …
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In 2004, the Fourth Circuit revived a two prong test for a copyright claim involving architecture between two home builders in Charles W. Ross Builder, Inc. v. Olsen Fine Home Building, 2012 WL 5447871 (4th Cir. Nov. 8, 2012). Rick and Jennifer Rubin, who wished to build new home, had visited the plaintiff Ross’s model …
On July 22, 2013, a model order relating to the number of asserted claims and prior art references in patent litigations was released on the Federal Circuit Advisory Council’s webpage. The order required that in the first phase, plaintiffs must select 10 claims per patent, and 32 claims total, 40 days after production of “core” …
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Authors: Cameron Tousi and Hein Lee On July 31, 2013, the Ninth Circuit affirmed dismissal of the Lanham Act claims brought by Jim Brown, a former NFL star, against video game developer Electronic Arts, Inc. (EA). The court concluded that the Rogers balancing test was the appropriate standard to evaluate defendant EA’s use of Brown’s …
The Supreme Court’s decision in FTC v. Phoebe Putney Health System Inc., 133 S. Ct. 1003 (2013) put a limitation on the state immunity under which local governments across the country have relied upon for decades to shield their activities from federal antitrust scrutiny. This decision will open the door to challenging numerous government transactions …
The Federal Circuit has recently articulated the position that a contractual agreement to transfer otherwise secret information will override trade secret protections that may be in place. The recent case on-point was Convolve, Inc. v. Compaq Computer Corp., No. 2012-1074, 2013 WL 3285331 (Fed. Cir. July 1, 2013), reaches back more than a decade to …
Do Business Method Patents Hurt or Help? A Financial Industry Perspective, 14 VA. J.L. & TECH. 147 (2009). Originally Published in the Fall 2009 issue of the University of Virginia Law School’s Virginia Journal of Law & Technology. Authors: Cameron H. Tousi and Ralph P. Albrecht. (Please note that substantial changes to the law on-point …
On June 24, 2013, the International Trade Commission (ITC) announced that it will launch a pilot program for early adjudication of potentially-dispositive issues in Section 337 investigations. This pilot program is part of the Commission’s ongoing efforts to streamline the investigation procedures to reduce the cost of investigations and to expedite the process. Under the …
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The June 2013 Supreme Court decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, 569 U.S. 12-398 (2013) which considered whether portions of human genes may be patented, fueled an extraordinary amount of heated discussion for an intellectual property case. The patents at issue in Myriad concern mutated genes associated with increased risk of breast and …
