New York painter Chuck Close and other artists are suing Sotheby’s, Christie’s and eBay, claiming that the auctioneers willfully violated a California law requiring royalty payments on sales of their works. Three federal suits filed Tuesday (on behalf of Close, Los Angeles artist Laddie John Dill, and the estate of late sculptor Robert Graham) seek class-action [...]

 The new Research In Motion operating system may be potentially infringing on another company’s trademark. RIM made an announcement at a software conference recently that the new operating system for the next generation of BlackBerry phones will be named BBX. But a software company based in Albuquerque, N.M., holds the trademark for a slight variation [...]

Currently, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”), the government is permitted to, among other things, track your movements using the signal your mobile phone silently sends out every few seconds, read your e-mail and sneak a peek at your online calendar and the private photos you have stored in “the cloud,” all without a [...]

The European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday, October 18, that stem cell research cannot be patented. This may have far-reaching effects on the future of stem cell research. Read more here and listen to an audio recording of the discussion here to learn more.

            Last month, President Obama signed into law the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, an overhaul of the U.S. patent system which is purported to be the most significant reform in decades.  The Act aims to create jobs and foster economic growth by speeding up the filing process and reducing filing fees for certain defined small [...]

“[A] litigious Clinton Street resident has waged epic David-vs-Goliath battles against corporate fashion brands eager to cash in on the neighborhood name. Unfortunately for them, Robert Lopez owns the trademark to ‘Lower East Side,’ and has since the mid-nineties. Previous legal pursuits to protect the grassroots brand included cases against J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, Payless [...]

What do Three Elephants and a sculpture artist have in common? They’re all being censored in South Africa. From BusinessDay: “The Three Elephants is a life-size public sculpture by the internationally respected artist Andries Botha at the Warwick Triangle Viaduct in Durban. [However,] the eThekwini municipality has decided the sculpture — which the municipality selected [...]

The digital music movement is about to pick up another heavyweight player as Google prepares to launch its MP3 store. Google will be competing with Apple’s iTunes and Amazon’s mp3 store. The entrance of Google into the digital music market space will certainly stir things up. Thus far, iTunes has led the revolution in the [...]

Arguing before the Second Circuit yesterday, Viacom renewed its $1 billion copyright infringement claim against YouTube. The colossal claim was first launched in 2007, and turns on the interpretation of the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor provisions. According to the DMCA, a website like YouTube is liable for infringement only when it has “actual knowledge” that a user has posted [...]

The iconic “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster has recently been revived from its British, Second World War roots.  This poster was originally designed by the British Ministry of Information and was intended to boost the morale of British citizens in case of a severe wartime incident such as an air raid.  Interestingly, although 2.5 [...]