As is typical of a Breyer opinion, Unicolors v. H&M—the only IP decision this Term—illuminates the distinction between mistakes of fact and of law and explains the reasoning by virtue of a brief hypothetical. Imagine someone (named John) who sees a flash of red in a tree and blurts out,...

Contemporary intellectual property law applications illustrate a very dynamic and rapidly evolving conceptual environment. The proverbial conflict has been between the protection of intellectual creation and the general freedom to create de novo, including expressions of one’s intellect that...

This article discusses the legal status of links, in connection with the pending cases before the Court of Justice of the European Union in Svensson, C More and BestWater. Hyperlinks, deep links, framed links and embedded links are discussed. It focuses on the Opinion of the European Copyright...

Countries face a new threat that strikes at their ability to balance protection of intellectual property rights against other priorities, such as public health. They may have to pay substantial compensation to companies that dislike domestic intellectual property laws. This threat is much more...

In some countries an IP owner’s attempts to defend or enforce its IP rights in a conventional way may face difficulties, particularly if the country’s judiciary is not able to effectively render justice since it lacks the necessary resources, if the courts are subject to interventions by the...

The US case Akamai Technologies Inc v Limelight Networks Inc brought the patent world's attention to the issue of if and how a patentee may enforce a method claim against a party who performs some of the steps in a patented method but leaves other steps to be performed by a third party. The case...

In 1992, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a statute designed to prevent the further spread of state-sponsored sports-wagering. The statute’s language has the effect of granting a property right to sports leagues, implicating the Constitution’s...

All good 'cyberlawyers' know that in the late 1990s, legal and regulatory measures were adopted, both at the domestic and international level to address the then-growing problem of 'cybersquatting': that is, the registration of often multiple domain names corresponding to valuable corporate...

The first target of today's global commercial and military espionage, trade secrets, are the only form of intellectual property protection to be based on the necessity of nondisclosure and secrecy rather than on the paradigm of publicity and exploitability, with the obvious consequence that...