Earlier this month, at the annual Coachella Music Festival, concertgoers were stunned to witness the performance of a lifetime, or should we say, an afterlife-time.  At the festival, nearly 100,000 fans witnessed a holographic Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996, performing alongside Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.  Shakur appeared on stage, performing two songs and [...]

Recently, pictures of the wedding ring that Brad Pitt has designed for wife-to-be Angelina Jolie have been released.  Undoubtedly, replicas of such rings are soon to follow.  Kate Middleton’s sapphire ring has yielded many imitations and there is no reason to believe that Angelina’s ring will be any different.  Some have speculated that Brad may [...]

Perhaps someone should have let Francis Ford Coppola know about this common phrase before he went ahead and sued the owner of Tavola Italian Kitchen restaurant in Novato, California, claiming the name infringes his “a tavola” trademark used to market his eateries.  Francis Ford Coppola Winery and restaurants in San Francisco and Napa Valley have used the [...]

Daniel Boulud, the world-renowned chef, is suing a Buffalo music club and restaurant for trademark infringement.  Boulud wants the owners of Duke’s Bohemian Grove Bar to stop using the name DBGB, according to a lawsuit filed in Federal Court in Manhattan. Boulud’s complaint claims he claimed the name after he opened DBGB Kitchen & Bar [...]

After file sharing (or “cyberlocker”) website Megaupload was taken down by law enforcement on January 19, 2012, the companies charged with storing data relevant to the case have begun to complain about the costs of letting their servers sit unused.  In fact, Carpathia Hosting has petitioned the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for emergency protection from the [...]

Patent litigations between competing high tech companies have become standard business practice. In recent years, patents have increasingly gained importance in the high-tech industry as tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and others have sought to stockpile patents in order to sue their competitors and to ward off lawsuits.  Companies are willing to [...]

While SOPA and SOPA 2.0 have been getting all the attention, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is still very much alive, and the Second Circuit recently handed down an important decision interpreting the statute. Unfortunately for YouTube, which had been granted summary judgment, the decision revives the litigation, and the decision has been called a [...]

The Sports Blawg with the Fordham Sports Law Forum MICHAEL JORDAN CRIES FOUL AS CHINESE COMPANY USES HIS CHINESE NAME TO MARKET PRODUCTS For the past three decades, Michael Jordan has been arguably the most popular and marketable athlete in the world.  This is especially true in the basketball-crazed China where Jordan is known as [...]

Vermont businessman Bo Muller-Moore’s 6-year ongoing battle against Chick-fil-A took an unexpected turn this week when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sided with the chicken chain. The office issued a preliminary decision supporting Chick-fil-A’s assertion that Muller-Moore’s popular “Eat More Kale” t-shirt and related merchandise infringes on its trademarked “Eat Mor Chikin” advertising slogan. The company filed a [...]

The Trayvon Martin killing has spurred significant, world-wide controversy and rage.  As expected to be the case with anything that receives such astounding publicity, people are trying to profit off it.  Similar to the absurd T-shirts created in response to the “Twilight” hysteria, “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob,”  many merchandisers are creating various objects bearing [...]