Archive for the ‘Licensing’ Category
Microsoft Can't Sell Windows in China
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
According to PC World, a Chinese court has ruled that WIndows violates a Chinese company’s IP rights.
Of course, China, where somewhere around 80% of electronic materials such as computer software, movies and DVDs, and other media are pirated copies, shouldn’t complain.
The problem is over the interpretation of a licensing agreement between Microsoft and the company in question; the company says that the fonts it owns are not included in the licensing agreement, Microsoft says they are.
We’ll see who wins in the Chinese judicial system. My best wishes and condolences to Microsoft (and I’m not usually on their side).
Tags: China, Microsoft
Posted in Contracts, Licensing | No Comments »
Disney to Buy Marvel for $4 Billion – ABC News
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Disney to Buy Marvel for $4 Billion – ABC News.
Wow. Just wow.
Disney is already among the biggest entertainment businesses in the world, what with the movies and the theme parks and the hotel properties and the Broadway shows and all the rest of it. I believe they even have an inroad in the comics market (if they don’t now, I’m sure they did when I was a kid; I remember Mickey Mouse comics). Marvel has a thoroughly different look from Disney, so this will be an interesting evolution. I wonder if Superman will develop the Disney eyes?
Tags: Disney, Marvel Comics
Posted in Contracts, Copyright, Franchising, General Business Law, Licensing, Trade Dress, Trademark/Service Mark | No Comments »
Jacobsen v. Katzer, from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
Monday, January 12th, 2009
This is a case from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which holds exclusive jurisdiction over patent appellate matters) that considers the intersection of copyright and licensing law. Is it possible for a copyright holder to dedicate certain work to free public use and yet enforce an A open source @ copyright license to control the future distribution and modification of that work?
Here, the plaintiff holds a copyright that he dedicated to the public domain through open-source licensing. The license for open-source technology, though, has a catch (the source of all open-source code must be acknowledged in downstream works), and the downstream users have to comply with the catch or be caught infringing the open-source license.
Tags: Copyright, intellectual-property, license
Posted in Copyright, Licensing | No Comments »
IP Audit a Necessity for Due Diligence
Sunday, January 11th, 2009
What IS an IP audit, anyway?
An IP audit is a systematic categorization of all of your business’s intellectual property, including but not limited to:
- Inventions (patented and unpatented)
- Copyrights (registered and unregistered)
- Trademarks (registered and unregistered)
- Trade Dress (registered and unregistered)
- Trade Secrets (obviously unregistered)
This categorization, with a simultaneous search for areas where your IP may have “holes,” is done by an intellectual property attorney in cooperation with your firm’s management team; despite the word “audit,” this is NOT an accounting function (although certainly an accountant belongs on your firm’s management team and probably on the IP audit team).
Use an IP audit as due diligence when you plan to merge, divest, buy, sell, create, license, franchise your property. Also use an IP audit when there has been a shift in the law that governs IP.
For more information about IP audits, read Nancy’s article, published in the December 2003 issue of Les Nouvelles (the flagship publication of the Licensing Executives’ Society), The Intellectual Property Audit (.pdf format) or visit our IP Audit webpage.
Tags: business-law, intellectual-property
Posted in Contracts, Copyright, Franchising, General Business Law, Licensing, Patent, Trade Dress, Trade Secret, Trademark/Service Mark, Universal IP | No Comments »