San Francisco California Intellectual Property Law Blog

The U.S. Supreme Court released its January 2020 oral argument calendar and it schedules argument in an important trademark infringement case. On Jan. 14, the fourth case heard in the new year will be Romag Fasteners v. Fossil Inc., requiring the justices to decide whether the trademark owner must show the infringement was willful under the Lanham Act to be awarded the infringer's profits.

On Oct. 29, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, known as ASCAP, announced it had filed 19 lawsuits for copyright infringement lawsuits. According to its press release, the suits target bars and restaurants with music venues that allegedly failed to obtain proper licenses from ASCAP for performances and other use of copyrighted works.

ASCAP is a nonprofit organization with 725,000 member composers, songwriters and music publishers. ASCAP handles licensing of members’ copyrighted works – numbering more than 11.5 million works of music - and in turn pays members royalties. ASCAP sells a collective license granting permission to use all these works without limit. Licenses are available not only to bars and restaurants, but also to radio, television, internet, mobile phone services and others.

In March, MillerCoors sued Anheuser-Busch after AB’s prominent Bud Lite Super Bowl ad and billboard campaign highlighting that MC uses corn syrup in the brewing process for Miller Lite and Coors Light. MC accused AB of misleading the public into thinking MC’s beer brands include consumable corn syrup, when the ingredient is instead a brewing agent that does not make it into the final product, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the time.

Part of the alleged misrepresentation is that the ads imply that MC uses high fructose corn syrup in addition to regular corn syrup.

Nowadays, your URL is as big a part of your business branding as are company and product names. Domain name protection is a fast-growing area of intellectual property law as the threats to domain names - which trademark often protects - are real and aggressive. A recent federal case in Florida illustrates one legal remedy that can help protect a victim of domain name cybertheft.

An internet-based auto parts export company successfully went to court to request a temporary restraining order, or TRO, that the defendant transfer the plaintiff's stolen domain name back to the correct registry account from a Russian registrar that the thief had used, according to Domain Name Wire.