Silicon Valley IP Licensing Law Blog Silicon Valley’s Resource to Intellectual Property Licensing

I just spent about five hours on the phone with multiple clients over the last few weeks explaining to them the ins and outs of exclusively licensing joint intellectual property, so I was pleased to see the decision of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation v. Xenon Pharmaceuticals, Appeal [...]

The Supreme Court agreed this week to hear the Bilski Case. Given the issues at the heart of Bilski, this case will be closely watched by the Silicon Valley business community, since any decision could have a far-reaching impact on the patentability of intellectual property developed by Silicon Valley businesses.
What are the issues to [...]

The Federal Circuit has reached a decision in Tafas v. Doll, which is a case that challenged the rulemaking authority of the USPTO. As I explained at the California Biotech Law Blog, the particular patent rules at issue are Rules 75, 78, 114, and 265, which are as follows:
Final Rule 78: This rule provided [...]

Anticipating a likely copyright battle over its new Kindle 2 audio feature, Amazon has backed down on its previous position and announced that publishers and authors will be able to decide whether to enable the feature.
The Author’s Guild first signaled that a fight was brewing when it issued a February 12th alert over the Kindle [...]

Did artist Stephen Fairey commit copyright infringement when he painted the image of President Obama and based that painting on a photo owned by the Associated Press?
The Associated Press has approached Mr. Fairey and is claiming that he has in fact infringed their copyrighted photo. 
A photo of course is generally protected under Copyright Law; however, [...]

Entrepreneur.com ran an article this month, which advised business owners to practice “preventive lawyering” or “litigation avoidance” by conducting audits in some key areas of the business such as contracts and intellectual property.
I agree with the advice in this article. Regardless of their size, businesses need to conduct a periodic review of their [...]

Given where we are on the patent reform debate, is it time to move patent reform off the table and work on copyright reform?
If you haven’t heard many calls for this lately, you are not alone, but according to Wired, Judge Miriam Hall Patel, who presided over the Napster case has had time to think [...]

A verdict was reached yesterday in an interesting case filed by retired NFL players against the players union for failing to include them in lucrative licensing deals involving video games and other sports products.
NFL Gridiron Gab reported on the verdict as follows:
NFL Players Association was ordered by a jury on Monday to pay $28.1 million [...]

The Supreme Court is considering whether to take a case which would address the issue of whether major league baseball players’ names and statistics constitute the intellectual property of Major League Baseball, requiring the payment of a royalty fee.
Fox News reported on the case as follows:
St. Louis-based company called CBC Distribution and Marketing Inc. says [...]