A dispute concerning the screenplay for the 2016 Hollywood biographical comedy “Florence Foster Jenkins” (FFJ) – a film about a tone-deaf New York socialite who labours under the delusion that she is a talented opera singer – has this month produced a Court of Appeal decision centering on the parties’ own adjustment to reality. Apart from highlighting a perhaps lesser-considered pitfall of working with your other half, the judgment emphasises the practical difficulties of applying the test of joint authorship in English copyright law.
ILN IP Insider
October 30, 2019
Joint authorship of copyright: UK Court of Appeal tears up the script
October 16, 2019
Th-Inking About The Law: Tattoos Leaving Indelible Marks On Black-Letter Principles & Coloring Our Perspectives
Tattoos, one of the oldest art forms in the world, are all over the legal news in recent years. The news runs the gamut from a tattooist suing a movie studio over replication of Mike Tyson’s facial tattoo in The Hangover II to artists looking to gaming companies for compensation for reproduction of tattoos appearing on video game avatars of professional athletes, which even made it into the Wall Street Journal and been the subject of court decisions earlier this year and late last year. Even more recently it has included a Larry Bird’s mural being altered, at his request, to remove tattoos an artist had added for a modernizing flourish. (BTW, speaking of murals, the Chuck Wepner mural I had written about has been painted over). It has also included law enforcement receiving criticism from many directions for “Photo-Shopping” tattoos out of pictures of suspects used in policy photo arrays. Just recently, Cardi B was sued for using a photo of a tattoo on her album cover. Though the examples above may most resonate with a US domestic audience, the copyright and other legal issues emerging from, and connected to, tattooing are being considered worldwide. Consequently, it seems like an area worth exploring here.
October 7, 2019
Stop the Insanity! Sports Trademarks Run Amok
Sports and sports teams have a long history with intellectual property law and, more specifically, trademarks. Sports teams, colleges, and universities have long trademarked their names and logos, and have routinely and aggressively enforced those rights. In 1988 Pat Riley, then the head coach of the National Basketball Association’s Los Angeles Lakers, applied for a trademark on the term “three-peat” for shirts, jackets, and hats (U.S Reg. No. 1,552,980). Subsequently, others have attempted to trademark various terms, such as baseball player Manny Ramierz trademarking the phrase ‘Manny Being Manny’. In 2012, football player Robert Griffin III filed for seven trademarks: RGIII, RG3, Robert Griffin III, Unbelievably Believable, Go Catch Your Dream, Light You Up, Work Hard Stay Humble, No Pressure No Diamonds, and Dream Big Live Bigger.
September 25, 2019
Can Design Patents Be Limiting in Enforcement?
Suppose that you have an invention disclosure for a design of an article that you want to protect? When you review the invention disclosure, you notice that the design is ornamental, for example a pattern, on an article such as a chair. You draft and file a design patent application on the pattern described as applied to a chair, but you do not include any drawings showing the pattern applied to the chair. Subsequently, you obtain the design patent and later find out that a third party is making baskets including the pattern. Can you enforce your design patent against the alleged infringer? The answer is NO because your design patent is limited in scope to a chair.
September 12, 2019
The District of Delaware Holds Patent Description for Bacon Product Indefinite
An indefinite patent description will pass muster when pigs fly. In HIP, Inc. v. Hormel Foods Corporation et al., C.A. 18-615-CFC (D. Del. June 24, 2019), the United States District Court for the District of Delaware held that a patent failed to meet the requirement of 35 U.S.C. § 112 that a patent’s description must not be indefinite. As a result, the Court held that U.S. Patent Number 9,510,610 (the “#610 patent”) was invalid.
September 5, 2019
TheLegalBay.gr: No Pirates allowed
In the framework of its efforts against online copyright piracy, the Hellenic Copyright Organization (“HCO”, Greek Acronym “OPI”) launched, on August 1st 2019, a new web portal, under the domain name “theLegalBay.gr”. The new website aims to be the place where online users can easily find web platforms available either solely in Greece or worldwide (including in Greece), which provide copyright protected content legally.
September 3, 2019
New DOJ Antitrust Division Policy Incentivizes Robust Corporate Antitrust Compliance Programs
Last month the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division announced a landmark new policy to incentivize companies to develop robust antitrust compliance programs. For the first time, the Antitrust Division will now consider a company’s antitrust compliance program as a factor in evaluating whether or not to bring criminal charges against the company and its officers.
July 30, 2019
WORLD FAMOUS (By, Say, New Jersey Standards): Expanding The Right Of Publicity Nationally And Internationally
Chuck Wepner (for at least one night in 1975 and then through the “Rocky” avatar).
At least some of the people that rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike are named after.
These public figures are, or were, world-famous, and certainly had made a name for themselves outside of the Garden State, even if their growth as artists, authors, sports figures or icons was at some point nurtured in the fertile ground of the third state to enter the union. But, if either Springsteen or Sinatra, for example, wished to protect their image on the world stage or before a national audience, neither could invoke, directly or effectively, federal or international law.
July 24, 2019
A New Mechanism For Protecting Fashion Companies in Russia
At the end of June a mechanism providing for temporary protection of industrial designs was introduced into the Russian legal system. In short it requires somebody who uses an industrial design during the period of its patenting to pay compensation to the future holder of the patent. Previously, this type of protection was available only for inventions – although it is still not available for utility models, which are also patentable in Russia.
July 17, 2019
Establishment of the Intellectual Property (IP) List in the Court of First Instance of the Hong Kong High Court
According to the 2018 Global Competitiveness Report released by the World Economic Forum, Hong Kong was ranked 9th out of 140 economies in terms of IP protection. In accordance with the recommendations made by the Working Group on IP Trading in 2015 (of which the writer is a member), a wide range of measures were introduced to enhance Hong Kong’s role as an IP trading hub to serve overseas IP owners/users as well as those in Mainland China (rising as a major intellectual property user, buyer, provider and seller) including those on legal services and dispute resolution.
Welcome to ILN-terviews, a series of profiles of ILN member firm attorneys, designed to give a unique insight into the lawyers who make up our Network. For our latest interview, we chose ILN member, Arthur Li of our member firm Lee and Li in Taiwan, China. In one sentence, how would you describe your practice?...… 
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