News Byte
Liz Gannes in Social on December 8, 2011 at 11:00 pm PT
Facebook earlier this week countersued Timelines.com, the small Web company that filed a trademark lawsuit in September over the social networking giant’s use of the word “timeline” to describe its upcoming profile redesign. Facebook called the term generic and descriptive (while printing it in lowercase), and pointed out that other services like Twitter use “timeline” for their chronological views. Via paidContent.
Arik Hesseldahl in News on November 16, 2011 at 9:11 am PT
Three weeks after deciding to keep its PC business, Hewlett-Packard offers up its first Ultrabook.
Ina Fried in Mobile on April 18, 2011 at 1:01 pm PT
Cupertino says that Samsung’s phones and tablets infringe on Apple’s patents and trademarks, not to mention they just look a whole lot like the iPhone and iPad.
It’s the latest in a string of smartphone industry lawsuits ensuring that intellectual property attorneys will not go hungry any time soon.
John Paczkowski in News on March 21, 2011 at 4:13 pm PT
Apple is giving Amazon a bit of unwanted advance publicity ahead of the launch of the retailer’s new Android Appstore. Claiming trademark infringement and unfair competition, it’s suing Amazon over the “App Store” trademark.
“Having itself faced a decades-long genericness challenge to its claimed WINDOWS mark, Microsoft should be well aware that the focus in evaluating genericness is on the mark as a whole and requires a fact-intensive assessment of the primary significance of the term to a substantial majority of the relevant public. Yet, Microsoft, missing the forest for the trees, does not base its motion on a comprehensive evaluation of how the relevant public understands the term APP STORE as a whole.”
– Apple defends its right to trademark “App Store”
“Any secondary meaning or fame Apple has in ‘App Store’ is de facto secondary meaning that cannot convert the generic term ‘app store’ into a protectable trademark. Apple cannot block competitors from using a generic name. ‘App store’ is generic and therefore in the public domain and free for all competitors to use.”
– Microsoft appeals to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to deny Apple’s application to trademark the term “App Store
Tricia Duryee in Commerce on January 4, 2011 at 3:30 pm PT
Here’s the kind of attention you get when everyone thinks you have deep pockets.
John Paczkowski in News on December 17, 2010 at 8:12 am PT
Companies often file trademarks on brands that they never end up using, so this trio of USPTO filings, made by Hewlett-Packard on December 10 isn’t exactly remarkable. But it is interesting in that the marks for which the company has applied–“Gyst,” “Myte,” and “Veer”–sound suspiciously like the names of Palm products.
Frances Robinson, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on December 9, 2010 at 2:14 pm PT
EBay Inc. may have to change the way it protects L’Oréal SA’s trademarks after Europe’s highest court said Thursday that the cosmetics company can prohibit the sale on the auction site of free samples and products intended for outside Europe.
However, the European Court of Justice’s advocate general, Niilo Jaaskinen, in giving his opinion, said eBay could continue to purchase advertising keywords, including L’Oréal trademarks, in order to direct users of Internet search engines to its site.
Ethan Smith, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on November 11, 2010 at 5:00 am PT
LimeWire LLC, potentially liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for copyright infringement, issued a cease-and-desist notice of its own Wednesday, trying to prevent anonymous computer programmers from distributing a “pirate edition” of its file-sharing software.
