South Carolina Intellectual Property Legal Questions

I'm not sure I agree with the premise of the question. If a employee develops an invention (discoveries cannot be 'owned', unless we are talking about the company maintaining the discovery as a trade secret), the invention is owned by the employee absent a contract. The company can get shop rights without special contract, but not ownership. A trade secret on a discovery would also require a special contract. The intellectual property of a college athlete is a different beast. These can include rights of publicity, copyrights, and other performance rights, but have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever included discoveries/inventions. The law treats different types of intellectual property differently. If you want to use this analogy to try to think through the recent legal ruling that college athletes are employees, focus on the entertainment industry. To the extent college sports is an entertainment business (and only a small portion of college sports are revenue generating) and athletes entertainers, their intellectual property is comparable to actors, singers, dancers, and other performers.... Read More

It depends. Harry Potter (if my son's halloween costume was accurate) a gold and maroon scarf). If you made a gold and maroon scarf and sold it, you would likely not be guilty of copyright infringement. If you stitch a Hogwarts or Griffendor insignia or a lightning bolt into the scarf or sell it as a wizard's scarf or anything else that cause people to buy the article because of an implied association with the books/movies, you could receive another complaint.... Read More

You need to register the copyrights at www.copyright.gov. You will then be able to sue for copyright infringement.  You will prevail if you can demonstrate to the court using the rules of evidence that: 1) you created the poems; 2) you made them publicly available; 3) the funeral homes had access to the poems that would allow them to copy the poems. If the poems were copied before you registered your trademark, your damages may be limited to reasonable licensing fees.... Read More

I haven't dealt with this situation at this level before. I am familiar with examples in sports law, where you can be restricted from bringing video equipment to a sporting event, regardless of how much you pay to attend and regardless of who you know participating in the event. The business rationale is that the event organizers have the opportunity to generate revenue with this practice and allowing others to make recording subverts their efforts. At smaller events, where family dominates attendees, people with video cameras tend to believe they have license to obstruct the view of others and occupy restricted areas to make their recording, disrupting the enjoyment of the event. The legal right comes from the event coordinator controlling access to the event. If they can control your ability to be there (e.g., ticket, asking people to leave, etc), they can place reasonable restrictions on those to whom they grant access, including prohibiting event recordings.... Read More

Depending on the nature of the IP in question, your employer probably owns it already under the "work for hire" doctrine. Thus, the agreement in question doesn't grant them any rights they don't already have and merely confirms your release of your claims. If you don't want severance pay, you don't have to sign -- but that won't deprive your former employer of the right to continue to use the works of authorship you developed while employed.... Read More

You don't state what the "countersuit" would be for, but as a general matter, it is possible for the defendant in a copyright-infringement action to allege counterclaims, just as in any other civil litigation. It would be extremely rare for an attorney to take on such a case on a contingent-fee basis, because he is essentially representing a defendant and defense work has no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.... Read More

Copyright in the architecture of buildings was enacted fairly recently, and anything that was created prior to 1922 is no longer protected by copyright. However, also consider whether the building/gate work you want to reproduce serves as a source identifier in which case there could be a trademark issue. Trademark protection lasts forever so long as it continues to be used. ... Read More