First came the iPhone. Then, there was the "iFart" flatulence noise download. Now, there's "Pull My Finger" -- and next could come the lawsuits.
Tiffany & Co. challenged Monday a federal ruling that largely absolved eBay Inc. of policing its auction site for counterfeit items, saying the judge was wrong to leave the primary burden to the jewelry maker
The makers of a gadget whose name is almost identical to the nickname of Wii's remote control wonder if their trademark is still worth anything
A judge said Monday that companies such as jeweler Tiffany & Co. are responsible for policing their trademarks online, not auction platforms like eBay
An underpants-clad New York guitarist known as the "Naked Cowboy" can proceed with his trademark infringement lawsuit against the maker of M&Ms and its ad agency, a New York judge has ruled.
Most New Yorkers and visitors to Times Square know of The Naked Cowboy.
Editor's note: This story was originally published Feb. 12, and is being republished to add additional reporting. Dear FSB: Both the name and URL of my company's website were registered with a domain name registration company. After more than five years they have sold the URL for my company's name to another person who now runs it in competition to mine. Do I have copyright to this name and URL?
Earlier this month, it was revealed that the New England Patriots had attempted to trademark the phrases "19-0 Perfect Season" and "19-0". Oops.
Dear FSB: Can you patent or copyright an idea for a website?
Hotel heiress Paris Hilton is seeking at least $100,000 in damages from greeting card maker Hallmark for using a photograph of her face superimposed onto a cartoon body and her trademarked catch phrase, "that's hot."
First came the iPhone. Then, there was the "iFart" flatulence noise download. Now, there's "Pull My Finger" -- and next could come the lawsuits.
Tiffany & Co. challenged Monday a federal ruling that largely absolved eBay Inc. of policing its auction site for counterfeit items, saying the judge was wrong to leave the primary burden to the jewelry maker
The makers of a gadget whose name is almost identical to the nickname of Wii's remote control wonder if their trademark is still worth anything
A judge said Monday that companies such as jeweler Tiffany & Co. are responsible for policing their trademarks online, not auction platforms like eBay
An underpants-clad New York guitarist known as the "Naked Cowboy" can proceed with his trademark infringement lawsuit against the maker of M&Ms and its ad agency, a New York judge has ruled.
Most New Yorkers and visitors to Times Square know of The Naked Cowboy.
Editor's note: This story was originally published Feb. 12, and is being republished to add additional reporting. Dear FSB: Both the name and URL of my company's website were registered with a domain name registration company. After more than five years they have sold the URL for my company's name to another person who now runs it in competition to mine. Do I have copyright to this name and URL?
Earlier this month, it was revealed that the New England Patriots had attempted to trademark the phrases "19-0 Perfect Season" and "19-0". Oops.
Dear FSB: Can you patent or copyright an idea for a website?
Hotel heiress Paris Hilton is seeking at least $100,000 in damages from greeting card maker Hallmark for using a photograph of her face superimposed onto a cartoon body and her trademarked catch phrase, "that's hot."
American Airlines, the world's largest airline, said Friday it was seeking damages from Internet search leader Google Inc. for selling search words involving its name.
Denim maker Levi's Strauss & Co. has filed a second lawsuit against another competitor this month alleging that the retailer - Abercrombie & Fitch - illegally stole its trademarked back-pocket stitching design, according to a published report Thursday.
Jeans and apparel-maker Levi Strauss & Co. is suing Polo Ralph Lauren Corp. for allegedly copying the denim maker's trademarked pocket stitching design.
Question: What do you get when you put 16 sure-minded Chinese officials in a chandeliered room with a dozen lame-duck Republicans?
Mr. Bill Gates! Mr. Bill Gates!" a young woman shrieks as the black car pulls up. A pallid student in a nylon windbreaker pushes his way through the security line and hands the world's richest man a small envelope with a floral design. "It's very important," he pants.
Going to court is near the top of the list of dreaded activities for small business owners. But many entrepreneurs say that their efforts to resolve disputes outside of litigation haven't worked, according to a 2005 report by the Small Business Administration. The result? Their companies end up with legal bills from $3,000 to $150,000 and have to cut overhead or drum up new sales to compensate.
SAP's chief executive admitted "inappropriate downloads" of documents from archrival Oracle by SAP's TomorrowNow unit but said on Tuesday SAP itself had not had access to that material.
Growing concern about the effects hedge-fund blowups can have on global financial markets has renewed a push for tighter controls on the $1.6 trillion industry.
Dear FSB: How long does it take to obtain a trademark? And how long will one protect my idea? --Chuck Christenson II, CBC Industries Columbus, Neb.
India's fast-growing biotech business has the potential to be one of the driving forces behind its enviable 8 percent GDP growth, and a government estimate sees the industry increasing 15-fold over the next eight years.
Viacom sued Google and its online video subsidiary YouTube for $1 billion Tuesday, the first big lawsuit against the online video site and its parent for copyright infringement.
To produce a pound of organic sun-dried coffee, farmers in the southern Ethiopian village of Fero spread six pounds of ripe, red coffee cherries onto pallets near their fields. They sun the fruit f...
Think Cisco's lawsuit against Apple is just about a name? Think again.
Cisco Systems is suing Apple Inc. in federal court for trademark infringement over the naming of Apple's new 'iPhone' iPod-phone, Cisco announced in a press release Wednesday.
Owner's Manual is written by entrepreneurs about lessons they have learned. Carter Weiss can be reached at CW@BuiltNY.com.
IBM has filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Amazon.com for unspecified damages, the company announced Monday.
HinesLab is open for business, but you'd never know it. It is tucked away in a corner of a dreary industrial park in Glendale, Calif. The front door is bolted and covered with a black shroud. Insid...
In the first business case to hit the U.S. Supreme Court's docket this term, the chief justices will have to decide whether biotech firm Medimmune can have its cake and eat it too.
The IRS has a surprising new enemy in the battle against abusive tax shelters: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In recent years the Patent Office has begun granting patents to people who claim...
The Internal Revenue Service has a surprising new enemy in the battle against abusive tax shelters: The United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The problem: an epidemic of shoddy patents.
Novo Nordisk has sued Pfizer, alleging that the new product Exubera violates patents on inhalable insulin for diabetics.
Pretty nearly everyone who deals with patents in the United States agrees on one thing: The system is a mess. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is swamped with a backlog of 600,000 applications ...
The ubiquitous yellow happy face is at the center of an angry battle between Wal-Mart Stores and a company owned by a French family, according to a report Wednesday.
(FORTUNE Magazine) - Gee, counterfeit products are getting so realistic!
China's leader Hu Jintao has arrived on his first visit to the United States since becoming president in 2003, landing in Seattle, Washington, on a four-day trip likely to be used to allay America's trade and currency concerns.
It's been quite a week for Sirna Therapeutics -- and it's still only Monday.
REDDER INK
U.S. brands, beware!
The most successful Internet companies have grown rich by exploiting other people's content -- without paying for it.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued the first final rejection on one the patents involved in the longstanding dispute between BlackBerry maker Research in Motion and patent holding company NTP.
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion and patent holding firm NTP are set to face off again Friday, when a hearing begins on whether to shut down the popular wireless e-mail device in the U.S.
The Seattle Seahawks face charges of trademark infringement by Texas A&M University just days before their Super Bowl appearance, according to a news report.
A trademark case brought by Mattel against Barbies Shop, a Canadian store selling bondage clothing has been dismissed by a New York court, but the nation's largest toymaker said Thursday the case "isn't resolved."
The "rebel billionaire" Richard Branson started out some 30 years ago with a small company that he turned into one of the world's most recognizable brand names -- in part by making sure no one else used the word "Virgin" to sell their wares.
IN THE WARM AND FROTHY bubble bath that is American spirituality today, it's hard to think of anything quite as familiar and comforting as the mini-homily known as "Footprints in the Sand." For any...
Is nothing sacred?
7
It took a half-day brainstorm session, followed by six weeks of conference calls, to work through the list of names. The client, a financial software startup called Aucent, was in the market for a ...
There's the equivalent of a land rush going on among Red Sox fans eager to cash in on the curse that has long haunted their team.
Maglica's life story would make a great movie. He was born in New York City in 1930, but the Depression forced him and his mother back to their native Croatia. During World War II they suffered suc...
Paris Hilton, known for her forays into amateur home video and her role on the Fox show "Simple Life," apparently is looking to slap her moniker on everything from body oil to rubber stamps to shot glasses.
First a hit reality TV show, now an online business school?
FBI agents searched a car in an airport parking lot outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Saturday in connection with the 2001 anthrax attacks.
In the ascetic waiting room of the SCO Group's Lindon, Utah, headquarters, the only reading matter is a stack of beige, telephone-book-sized binders. They are volumes I, II, III, and IV of the comp...
While fans of NBC's "The Apprentice" gear up for the final firing, one failed contestant is gearing up for a fight with the man who fired her.
Martha Stewart resigned from the board of the home decor and media empire that she founded, the company said Monday, just 10 days after she was convicted of obstructing an investigation into a well-timed stock sale.
When Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton co-founded TiVo in 1997, they could only have dreamed that three million people would one day use digital video recorders. But now that it has happened, TiVo is faci...
It's never a good sign for the tech sector when some of its biggest news involves lawyers, but that's been the situation so far this year.
In mid-may, CEOs at every company on the FORTUNE 1,000 and FORTUNE Global 500 opened a letter to discover that despite their various industries, languages, and far-flung locations, they all had som...
One of Microsoft's biggest brands finds itself in legal jeopardy as the result of a suit filed by a tiny start-up with the unlikely name of Lindows.com. Last spring, a federal district court in Sea...
You may not know Rob Johnston's company, but surely you've come across his e-tailing site. It's the one that uses shopping-cart technology to complete transactions.
THINK GLOBALLY, HIRE LOCALLY
Glenn Gundersen, author of the new 2002 "Trends in Trademarks" report, says you can read the future in trademark applications. Marketers, for example, are currently betting that Americans want bran...
In the realm of online marketing schemes, pay-for-performance search is a doozy. Forget banner ads, for which you have to (a) hope that someone visits the site where you've stuck your ad; (b) pray ...
When Tom Hazzard and his wife, Tracy, launched their company, ttools, in 1998--selling a combination stylus-ink pen that can go back and forth from electronic organizers like PalmPilots to paper--t...
As attempted billion-dollar heists go, this one was unobtrusive. There wasn't a pile of cash in the room or a trove of jewels stashed in a vault. The target was far more ethereal. Inside a banquet ...
The procrastinating, the overburdened, and the just plain lazy should all have lit a candle last May when Clifton Keith Hillegass died from a stroke at the age of 83 at his home in Lincoln, Neb. Hi...
As a child, Aida Alvarez learned a few lessons about running a small business while helping out behind the counter of her mother's restaurant in Brooklyn. For the last four years, she's put those l...
'I can make furniture just like Bo Concept's," brags Zheng Yong, a salesman at Xujiahui Furniture World in Shanghai, a cluttered department store near a busy shopping district. Based in one of the ...
For years companies like Du Pont have been struggling to find better ways to market their intellectual property. In Du Pont's case, the chemical giant has a warehouse of 18,000 patents, a huge sour...
Robert H. Rines is no stranger to complex topics or to controversy. An MIT-trained physicist and inventor, he holds dozens of patents on advances in fields as diverse as radar and fish farming. A p...
By now most people know all about laser eye surgery. You walk into a doctor's office with Coke-bottle lenses, and some 30 minutes later walk out with restored vision. Not surprisingly, the number o...
The year 2000 arrived right on time. Planes stayed up till they were supposed to come down. Phones worked. Power flowed. My pay was directly deposited in my bank account for a sum no less (and, ala...
We all hate CD jewel boxes. They're hard to open, their hinges snap, and those little plastic hubs that hold the disk inevitably break. Who is responsible for the jewel box, paragon of consumer pac...
Why do we need to protect intellectual property? Seriously, I'm beginning to wonder if we really need government protection of intellectual property in our new cyberworld.
Say the government wins. Then what? What the heck should we do with Microsoft?
One day last September, private investigator Douglas Erb sought enlightenment, as he often does, sitting in the back of a parked truck in central Los Angeles. Hidden behind a black glass window, he...
THIS MONTH: U.N. pay and perks: Are yours this good? Coping with Medicare cuts The best Websites for investors
China's flagrant piracy of American pop music, movies, and computer software is more than the biggest rip-off in global commerce. It's also the latest evidence of the growing and increasingly visib...
YOU'VE GOT TO WORRY about American technology when the newspapers seem to tell you there's less of it every day. Nikon emerges as the leading candidate to buy the division of Perkin-Elmer that make...
Q. On April 10, 1987, Vanguard, the mutual fund company, received a check from my wife to open two 1986 Individual Retirement Accounts. Because the dollar amount on the check did not agree with oth...
Just when the fever over superconductivity had begun to cool, an acrimonious dispute has broken out that has the circuits sizzling. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is grappling with the questi...
FORTUNES HAVE been made and lost over the ownership of ideas. The concept of intellectual property takes on special urgency in high-technology businesses because invention is the industry's stock i...
RUSHING to introduce an instant camera by 1976, Eastman Kodak's development committee issued a startling directive: ''Development should not be constrained by what an individual feels is potential ...
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