Looking forward to participating in the Virginia Bar Association’s Fall Career Panel and Intellectual Property CLE Presentation at William & Mary School of Law on November 10, 2011. For the first half, I am a speaker on a Career Panel geared to law students. In the second half, I am moderating a panel on “P.R.O.T.E.C.T. [...]

Companies can become overly aggressive in their efforts to obtain and enforce intellectual property rights. For example, two days after special operations forces killed Osama Bin Laden, as my colleague Donna Chmura noted, Disney filed federal trademark applications for “SEAL TEAM 6” for toys, handheld computer games, Christmas stockings, Christmas tree ornaments and decorations, snow [...]

Here’s the deal. You may own a trademark. A trademark is simply an adjective describing your good or service. Trademarks are designed to assist the consumer avoid confusion as to the source of the goods. For example, if I started a fast-food restaurant and

Victoria’s Secret seems poised to take the “sex” out of “sexy” with its crusade against a small retail store in Kentucky, “Victor’s Little Secret,” that sells sexually oriented merchandise.