Alt Legal IP News – Issue #44
Hannah Samendinger | June 27, 2017
Alt Trademarks is back! Listen to our interview with Ryan Morrison of Morrison Lee. We talk video games and Reddit AMAs. Check out the episode here.
I Have Something To Say
– United Airlines has won a copyright and trademark infringement suit against Untied.com, a website cataloging complaints against the company from the past 20 years.
– Four of the top ten Supreme Court cases with the most amicus briefs are intellectual property cases.
– Ivanka Trump will testify in a trademark infringement case over her shoe design.
– How exactly is Facebook planning to detect our moods and emotions?
– John Oliver and HBO are the targets of a defamation suit following Oliver’s segment about the CEO of Murray Energy Corporation. Another one of his most well-known takedowns was the show’s piece on patent trolls.
Not Today
– Gene Simmons has already abandoned his trademark application for the devil horns hand gesture.
– Apple is missing some trademark applications. We have some ideas about why that might be the case.
– Following the recent Slants decision, there was a rush to file arguably scandalous applications. The USPTO released a Section 2(a) examination guide that might shed some light on the fate of these applications.
What a Picture
– A company has sued over 70 companies for allegedly infringing on their patent for picture menus. A court just threw out their patent.
– McMansion Hell, an architectural criticism blog, just received a cease and desist from Zillow for using photos from their site.
– A California couple is fighting to oppose Snapchat’s “geofilter” trademark application.
Odds and Ends
– A South Korean architect is suing the designers of the Freedom Tower for infringing on his 1999 graduate thesis.
– A New York judge held that “no reasonable attorney” would have sued news organizations for broadcasting clips of childbirth from Facebook Live.
– Louboutin is back in court over their trademark red soles and, this case looks promising.
– Amazon filed a patent for a literal drone hive.
– Microsoft has a plan (and a patent) for stopping laptop thieves.