IP Law Bulletin

Imagine you’re a fashion designer with a unique clothing design. As with any other business, you wish to protect your intellectual property through the standard combination of patents, trademarks, and copyrights. Sounds simple, right?

Wrong! There is no one-stop shop for protecting your intellectual property and, until recently, the law was not completely on your side. Though a single garment may be the result of a single creative process by a designer, multiple mechanisms may be needed to protect the design of that garment. One of those mechanisms—copyright law—historically has presented a significant hurdle to protecting fashion designs. The Supreme Court, however, recently clarified and expanded how copyright law can be leveraged to protect designs, often quickly and relatively inexpensively.

Below is a high-level overview of the various legal forms of protection for the fashion industry and what those legal mechanisms cover.

On May 22, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an important and long-awaited Opinion in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, a case that centered on where a patent infringement suit can be filed. In a resounding 8-0 decision, the Supreme Court put an abrupt end to the decades-old practice of forum shopping in patent cases.

For almost 30 years, patent venue law allowed patent owners to file infringement suits in federal judicial districts in which the accused infringer is subject to the district court’s personal jurisdiction. This flexibility opened the doors to a patent owner’s home court and to distant courts that are perceived to be friendly to patent owners. Observers believe that this flexibility was being abused, especially by non-practicing entities or “patent trolls.” Non-practicing entities generate revenue by licensing and enforcing their patents as opposed to making or selling their own products.

If you have ever gone apple picking in late season, you may recall seeing more apples on the ground than on trees. As you begin picking apples, you realize why. You haphazardly grab and yank an apple off a branch and the branch sways, sending many ripe apples to the ground. What a waste!

Harvesting innovation is no different. Without a proper strategy, potentially valuable fruits of R&D may never make it into your IP basket. Today, we explore various strategies your organization can implement to better foster and capture innovation.

If you’ve filed for patents in any industry – be it biotech, high tech, manufacturing, or another sector altogether – you’ve likely been faced with a decision on whether to file a “continuation” application at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In simple terms, a “continuation” application is a new patent application allowing one to pursue additional claims based upon the same description and priority date(s) as a pending “parent” application. Continuation applications are a flexible tool, useful for furthering numerous business objectives.