Law Offices of A. Edward Doudera, lawyers in Camden, ME, Maine

Color as Trademark Subject Matter

Under the Lanham Act "any word, name, symbol or device" may be eligible for trademark registration. Courts have differed as to whether or not the law recognizes the use of color alone as a trademark because the Lanham Act does not specifically mention color. For many years the general rule had been that color would not be given trademark significance because of the limited number of colors available, unless the color was employed as an element of a distinctive design.More...

Copyright and the Protection of Ideas and Facts

Copyright law protects the expression of ideas and facts, not the ideas and facts themselves. Copyright protects only fixed, original, and creative expression, not the ideas or facts upon which the expression is based. Works that have not been fixed to a tangible medium are just ideas. Ideas are fair game for everyone to express in their own words. Allowing authors to monopolize their ideas would defeat the underlying purpose of copyright law, which is to encourage people to create new work. One may express ideas in writing or drawings and claim copyright in the description, but that copyright will not protect the idea itself as revealed in the written or artistic work. This exclusion helps maintain the distinction between copyright protection and patent law. Ideas and inventions are the subject matter for patents, while the expression of ideas is governed by copyright law. If copyright were extended to protect ideas, principles, and devices, then it would be possible to circumvent the rigorous prerequisites of patent law and secure protection for an invention merely by describing the invention in a copyrightable work.More...

Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act

As part of the Intellectual Property and Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999, on November 17, 1999, Congress enacted the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). It amends the Lanham Act by adding a new paragraph. The new section provides trademark owners with a civil remedy against cybersquatting, which is the registering of others' trademarks as domain names and profiting from the sale of those domain names or traffic through the site. The ACPA is a domain name dispute law that is intended to give trademark and service mark owners legal remedies against defendants who obtain domain names "in bad faith" that are identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark. The bill does not provide blanket protection to the trademark owner or owner of a personal name protected as a mark, rather it provides a remedy against the "bad faith" appropriation of the mark. If a mark is a famous mark, the same remedies are available if the domain name is identical to, confusingly similar to, or dilutive of the mark. More...

Reproduction Rights

The reproduction right is one of the exclusive rights granted to the owner of a copyright by the Copyright Act. Under this right, no one other than the copyright owner may make any reproductions or copies of the work. Under the Copyright Act the copyright owner has the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work or to authorize its reproduction. Examples of unauthorized acts which are prohibited under this right include photocopying a book, copying a computer software program, using a cartoon character on a T-shirt, and incorporating a portion of another's song into a new song. The Copyright Act covers reproduction in any form. More...

Investigating the Copyright Status of a Work

There are several ways to investigate whether a work is under copyright protection and, if so, the facts of the copyright. The following are some of the main ways:More...