Blog Posts: Intellectual Property

There is a good chance you have never even heard of greenwashing. Yet, your company may be at risk by engaging in the practice of greenwashing. Wikipedia defines greenwashing as the practice of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly. In today's world, "green" is good marketing, but saying your product is green whe...

Let's face it, some marketing ploys are pretty clever and some spam is brilliantly disguised as valid e-mail. There are many great reasons to register your trademark with the United States Patent & Trademark Office, including:Constructive notice nationwide of the trademark owner's trademark rights Preventing others from registering and limiting your geograp...

Maybe you have heard that the Internet is about to drastically change.  Maybe you have heard that by the middle of this year, domain names ending in .app, .web, .pizza, .shop, .hotel, .restaurant and over a thousand others will become available for public registration.   These new extensions are called generic top level domains, or gTLDs. If you are a br...

If you used to think that SOPA was a misspelling of soap, after January 18th, 2012 you know better. What is now being called, National SOPA Blackout Day, the internet was flooded with thousands of articles, hundreds of petitions and most chilling to many users - blocked websites. Wikipedia shut down its services for the day and Google's home screen icon contained ...

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...