Reese's consumers sued Hershey because some candies didn't have the designs depicted on the packaging (e.g., "Ms. Hennick was very disappointed and would not have purchased the Reeseโs Peanut Butter footBalls product if she knew that it did not have the detailed artistic carvings of stitches on the football as pictured on the packaging")
@design_law@ericgoldman "cutouts" would have sufficed. But I agree with the principle, the design is the whole point and presumably one pays a premium.
@Teri_Kanefield I'm curious, was the tax treatment for Trump different for a campaign self-contribution (what the payments actually were) vs a legal expense (what he documented the payments as). Are legal payments deductible on taxes whereas campaign contributions are not? Is taking a deduction he wasn't entitled to tax fraud?
In this week's column I argue for creating a sales tax lottery that incentivizes folks to keep their receipts and scan them into a database -- entering them in a chance to win and reducing the ability to suppress sales on the merchant's end.
@andrew@law you know, China had something like this, to avoid tax evasion, and every restaurant we dined had a offer is some sort, free gift if you didn't need a receipt. The only people who got receipts were people who needed to submit them for reimbursement
Well, here's a twist: American Airlines filed--and won by default--a #ScheduleA case against defendants who allegedly "carried out a scheme to defraud jobseekers in which they sent out emails holding themselves out as Recruitment Directors for American," using AA marks and "unauthorized copies of American's copyrighted images."
Am. Airlines v. Schedule A, 2024 WL 945262, at *1 (S.D. Fla. Feb. 16, 2024).
Not only are the two design patent infringement claims that are actually alleged in the complaint absolutely baseless, the plaintiff (or perhaps more correctly, their attorneys) don't seem to understand the difference between a design patent and a utility patent.
Federal Circuit reverses the grant of a preliminary injunction (based on utility patent and trade dress infringement) in a dispute between indoor "adventure parks":
@design_law also I strongly suspect that the colors of the game were determined by the game manufacturer, in which case, any IP in them should really belong to the manufacturer
Sazerac v. Central Standard - new complaint alleging infringement of GRIND mark (registered for use in connection with โalcoholic beverages except beersโ):
Five years of reading Money Stuff and over 30 years of living in Silicon Valley/SF got me 12/12 on the LL IPOs 1DS. Missed my calling as an M&A lawyer.
Judge Kendall REFUSES to maintain the asset freeze in a utility patent #ScheduleA case because ยง 284 does not provide a remedy of equitable disgorgement:
@design_law I don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be that you could write in and suggest useful opinions to be given citations. I did it a few times and they were usually pretty fast to add
One of the defendants sued over the GODZILLA mark (by Toho Co., Ltd.) tells the judge that she only had one accused product, which she sold before the case was filed, and that the plaintiff's evidence of infringement against her is a screenshot from...2019.