Chicago IP Attorney & Lawyer : R. David Donoghue : Chicago IP Litigation Blog

Here are several items that did not necessarily warrant a separate post, but are worth some attention:

• Chicago blogger Evan Brown of Internet Cases recently participated in episode 16 of the This Week in the Law podcast with law blog luminaries Denise Howell (the host), Nicole Black, Marty Schwimmer and Ernie Svenson -- click here for Brown's post and a link to the podcast. Their lively discussion included numerous IP topics including: 
  • DMCA anticircumvention provisions;
  • ediscovery; and
  • the Viacom v. Google discovery issues (the parties ultimately agreed that the compelled user data could be produced anonymously).
    
• Mike Atkins did a great series of post comparing the benefits of state and federal trademark registration -- click here and here for the posts.  These posts are a great primer, if you want to understand the differences between and trade offs for state versus federal registration.
  
• The John Marshall Law School has been included in the PTO's new Law School Clinic Program.  Beginning this fall, second and third year John Marshall students will represent inventors in actual PTO proceedings.  This is a great opportunity for both the students and the inventors.  Click here for John Marshall's press release about the new program.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Chicago Tribune ran a story on the front page of Wednesday's Business section about the use of trademarks in keyword internet advertising:  Trademark Battlefield.  The story discussed various efforts to stop internet search engines (like those offered by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) from selling trademarked terms as search keywords.  For example, the story suggested that State Farm, an insurance company, may have purchased the name of its chief competitor, Allstate, from Google.  As a result, if you google "Allstate" Allstate's websites will come up first in the search results, but in the upper right corner of the search results page, you will see a State Farm ad. 

The story also discussed comments from a Google trademark lawyer, Rose Hagan, during a standing-room-only panel at the International Trademark Association's ("INTA") meeting on Monday, which was held in Chicago.  Hagan said that Google sells advertising space, not trademarks.  The story also notes that Utah has passed a law which prohibited the use of a competitor's trademarks as advertising keywords.  For more on the Utah law, check out Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog (via Marty Schwimmer's Trademark Blog).  The Utah law and the various lawsuits against Google, Yahoo and Microsoft on this issue are all evidence that this is a very unsettled area of trademark law.  A Yahoo attorney, Laura Hauck Covington, explained that "[w]e're all trying to find the right, reasonable balance for the owners of trademarks, consumers and advertisers."

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks