Blog Posts: Intellectual Property

Whether your business has always been internet based or your traditional brick and mortar business has evolved to a click and mortar business, you have a website. It's likely that you know that you need the fine print - "terms of use" and a "privacy policy."   While you have many options when creating these policies, these are the most common approaches:Let...

This is not only a common legal question but also a great question as the answer is - it depends!  A domain name simply is an address on the Internet.  Computers find web addresses by a series of numbers known as an IP address.  To make the process more user friendly, the numbers are matched to words that, hopefully, can be easily remembered.  ...

For the first time ever, an Arizona state court has recognized that individuals enjoy a right of publicity that protects them from the unauthorized use of their name or likeness for commercial or trade purposes. In its April 24, 2014 decision in Reynolds v. Reynolds, the Arizona Court of Appeals recognized the right of publicity and determined that right surv...

A recent case decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the federal appellate court for Arizona and California, has made a predictable determination that a sequence of yoga moves cannot be protected as intellectual property.  Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit ruled that a series of yoga poses and breathing exercises are not entitled to copyright ...

By Maria Crimi Speth & Aaron K. Haar People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) recently filed a copyright infringement lawsuit on behalf of a crested macaque monkey, who famously snapped a smiling selfie of himself using wildlife photographer David Slater's camera. The lawsuit alleges that the monkey, named Naruto, owns the rights to the selfies and t...

One of the biggest mistakes made is that people assume that if a photograph comes up on Google Images then it must be public domain or free game to use on their website. This is absolutely not correct.  You MUST have permission to use any photograph you find on the internet. The fact that it came up on Google Images does not mean anything, as Google is just a...

PHOENIX, Ariz. (Jan. 22, 2015)- Join Maria Crimi Speth, Intellectual Property attorney at Jaburg Wilk and author of Protect Your Writings for an informative presentation about laws affecting writers and their creative work on Saturday, January 31st from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. at city of Glendale's 20th annual Chocolate Affaire located at 58th Ave. and Glendale Ave. At...

Suppose you discover that someone has anonymously posted a statement about you online that's not just harshly critical opinion, it's blatantly false. You are considering filing a defamation lawsuit against the author, but there's a problem-the statement was made anonymously and you have no idea who could have posted it. How can you discover the author's true identi...

Arizona's restaurant scene is buzzing these days with last Friday's  season finale of "Kitchen Nightmares".  Just Google "Amy's Baking Company" and a proliferation of stories about the featured business appears, including a massive social media backlash against the restaurant.  Users of Yelp, Reddit, and Facebook, among others, have taken to the Internet to disc...