Intellectual Property

The purpose of this lesson is to serve as an introduction to the rapidly growing area of trade dress law. Several new developments have occurred in this area of the law just in the past five years. Most of these developments deal with the correct balance between protecting the freedom of competitors to copy packaging or design features on the one hand and protecting the appearance or physical features of a product when these packaging or design features operate as indications of source on the other.

This lesson explores the concept of a "joint work" in copyright law, including the legal standards which determine whether a work has been jointly authored as well as the legal consequences that attach to this characterization.

This lesson covers the "cybersquatting" provisions of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. sec. 1125(d), which grant a cause of action to trademark owners against persons who, with a bad faith intent to profit, register, traffic in, or use domain names that infringe the rights of those trademark owners.

Likelihood of confusion is a core concept in trademark law. This lesson is designed to teach the basics of confusion, as well as some more advanced aspects of the topic. It requires students to work through the multifactor analysis used by courts with specific problems. It also includes a discussion of the different forms of confusion.

This lesson follows the Distribution Right lesson, CPY16. This lesson can best be characterized as the Limitation on the Distribution Right.

This lesson works through the details of patent law's novelty requirement as set out in the pre-AIA version of Section 102(a) of the Patent Act. It also briefly covers the pre-AIA version of Section 102(e) as well as the concept of inventorship. It does not deal with the statutory bars of pre-AIA Section 102(b).

This lesson reviews the threshold principles of ownership by analyzing the "works made for hire" doctrine codified in the Copyright Act of 1976.

This lesson is an introduction to the principles governing copyright infringement. After completing this lesson, you will be familiar with the standard used to determine liability for copyright infringement. Specifically, the lesson will introduce the elements necessary to support a claim of copyright infringement, which include assessments of copying, access, probative resemblance, striking similarity, improper appropriation, and substantial similarity.

The purpose of this lesson is to supplement your study of money damage recoveries permitted by The Lanham Act. Damage awards for trademark infringement may receive coverage in either your Remedies course or in your Trademark or Intellectual Property courses. This lesson will serve to introduce, review, and refine the principles you have studied in these respective courses to assist you in determining when damage awards for trademark infringement will be allowed.

This lesson deals with the basics of trademark registration under Section 44 of the Lanham Act. It includes discussions of eligibility under this provision, the value of foreign registrations, issues of priority, and the necessity for use prior to and after registration. It can be used either to learn the subject or for review, but does presume general knowledge of the bases for registration under Section 1 of the Lanham Act.

This lesson is designed to help the student determine the scope of protection given to a trademark. It is designed to supplement material that has been covered in the trademark law course. The determination of the scope of a mark's protection is helpful in the initial selection of a trademark, the trademark registration process, and the enforcement of the trademark. The student will review the concept of related goods by investigating the scope of trademark protection in several scenarios. Students should be familiar with how to select a trademark, register a trademark, and apply the likelihood of confusion test.

This lesson explores a copyright holder's right to control the performance and display of the related work of authorship.