New York Intellectual Property Legal Questions

It depends upon the safeguards established for the third party file format. Software files are copyright protected at the moment of creation. Some software providers are willing to permit others to go in and modify their software. They communicate some form of a license to the public to allow altering their files. Modifying a copyrighted work to provide something comparable to others/the public is copyright infringement absent a license. Others software providers provide security measures to try to prevent this reverse engineering. The law provided assistance to these software providers with the Digital Millenium Copryight Act. For instance, video games and movies have security in place to inhibit copying the files. Reverse engineering and altering the encryption/security software is copyright infringement and is criminally actionable. The copyright owner gets to decide in which format they want their work to appear. If I want to make a game only available on PS4, I have my right to do that. Perhaps I have financial incentive to do that. Regardless of your selfless desire to help poor Xbox One owners, you are not allowed to make my work available on Xbox One.... Read More

Copyright infringement is about copying an artistic work of someone else. The phrase "patterns involve sports teams" is too ambiguous to give you any opinion about what you are doing. The Giants, the Dolphins, and the Bills may have copyrights in their logos and if you are copying their logos, you may have a copyright concern. The bigger issue is trademark infringement. Trademarks are source identifiers for goods and services. If your patterns that involve sports teams cause others to believe that the dog collars originate with, are licensed by, or are associated with these professional sports teams, then you may have a trademark infringement concern. If all you are doing is making a random pattern using team colors (e.g., red and blue for the Bills) the common colors are probably not enough to cause the consumers to believe the collars are associated with a specific football team. If the collars are red and blue and feature the word 'Buffalo', maybe there is more of a question. At the end of the day, the question is, "Do the consumers believe there is a source relationship between the collars and the professional sports teams?" Information on becoming a licensee can be found here: https://www.nfl.info/NFLConsProd/Welcome/CpPrequalify.htm... Read More

You need to look at 35 USC 102. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/102 I am assuming the patent filing date on 28th March 2012 is for a foreign patent. If that patent application qualifies as prior art, any attempt to obtain a US patent on the same invention will be futile. If that patent application does not qualify as prior art, then it should not be a barrier to patent, keeping in mind that the first to invent rules are gone and any intervening event that disclosed the invention will be prior art against you. Good luck... Read More

Aaron, As I understand it, you work for Local Organization that is a member of National Organization. National Organization requires that it be a third party for any contracts that involve commercial filming of Local Organization events. Further, National Organization must be compensated as part of the filiming contract. I have been a director of a local Boys & Girls Club chapter for 8 years. We also have guidelines to follow for Boys & Girls Clubs of America. I would imagine that if we were to have commercial filming of our Club, our national would want to have representation there to make sure we did not harm the national brand in any way. They would also, likely, want to be compensated for the expense of monitoring and the value of the contract that might be tied to the fame/goodwill of the national brand as oppose to the fame of the local chapter. There is a general question reading between the lines about why your national organization should be allowed to siphon off revenue from your local organization's commercial filming contract. That is a healthy question to raise within management of your local chapter. If you are giving more value to your national organization than you are receiving, maybe you need to question whether there is more value for your local organization in being unaffiliated. When I think of 'owning the IP' for the commerical filming, I think of owning the copyrights in the work and nothing you've identified suggests you would not own the copyrights. Based on the subject line, you seem more concerned with the artistic integrity of the filming and whether the national organization has a right to influence authorship of the work. I would need to see the language to offer an informed opinion, but it is distinctly possible that a board policy requiring this authorship influence is not in conflict with the constitution/by-laws of the organization giving the local organization ownership of the filmed product.... Read More

Copyright protects the expression, not the content of a work.  Thus, if you use your own words to describe the content of a news article, you would not be infringing the copyright in the article.  There is no magic number of words strung together, and I could image the situation where infringment would occur even though every third word is different.  My advice to you would be to distill out just the bare facts contained in a news article, and then without looking at the article, write your own story describng the facts.... Read More

I would not recommend that you use any third party-owned copyrighted work in a commercial publication (one that you offer for sale and potentially make money on) - even if you do not believe that the legitimate copyright owner will not come after you.  Ideally, you should seek the owner's written permission to utilize the work in question.  Feel free to email me offline to further discuss this: ldunner@dunnerlaw.com Lisa... Read More

If you own the copyright in the record and picture, then you might have a copyright infringement claim. However, there are a number of factors that have to be satisfied before you can enforce your rights. First, the copyright in your works must be registered with the United States Copyright Office. If you have not registered the copyright, you cannot bring a lawsuit in a court of law. You can register the copyright after the infringement started but your rights will be more limited than if you had registered before the infringement started. Second, given that the work appears to have been created in the 1960s, you need to consult someone to determine if your works have gone into the public domain. This is because the copyright laws have changed over the years and if you did not register and then "renew" your registration during certain time periods under the old laws, you may not have any rights under copyright in these works any longer. Third, there is a statute of limitations of 3 years to bring a lawsuit under the Copyright Act, meaning that if the infringement started more than 3 years ago, you may no longer be able to sue. You will need to consult someone about these issues to see if you have a claim.... Read More

Nondisclosure agreements, or NDAs, are commonly used to allow parties to have initial discussions about a prospective business relationship. However, if you plan on protecting your ideas through patents, copyrights or trademarks, it is a very good idea to file before you disclose them, even if you have an NDA. The reason is most NDAs exclude information that the receiving party had developed on its own. If you end up with an unscrupulous venture capital firm, they could use your ideas and claim they had the ideas first and may even file for their own patent or copyright protection. In that case, you end up with a breach of contract action which can be very difficult and expensive to prove. If you filed before you disclosed, then you have a great deal more protection.... Read More

Foreign trade is 10x more complicated that a normal US business. Your legal options against the manufacturer are limited. You are correct that trademark and copyright infringement are rampant. If the goods are seized at Customs because they infringe, you chance of getting money back from China is zero. ODM or OEM will make no difference. You should consult with an attorney specialized in foreign trade who has colleagues in China if you are serious and insist on this source of goods. I always suggest "local" counsel and there are numerous great foreign trade attorneys in NY.... Read More