On December 27, 2020, the Trademark Modernization Act (“TMA”) was signed into law, making changes—some effective immediately—to the Lanham Act. Among the changes, some specifically important ones to note are: New and more expeditious procedures for ex parte expungement and reexamination of deadwood marks from the federal register; Changes to office action response periods; […]
It may go without saying, but #hashtags are a vital part of attracting the right eyes to your social media marketing efforts. However, what happens when your #hashtag becomes associated with your particular brand of goods or services? Is it now a trademark? Can (and should) you obtain federal trademark protection for your mark? This […]
Brand Protection Among the various brand protection services offered by Amazon, such as Transparency, an item-level tracing service to help protect against counterfeits, is Amazon Brand Registry. This is a suite of tools available to proactively protect and give more control to brands. What is Amazon Brand Registry Amazon’s Brand Registry has been improving over the […]
One of my favorite responses to any question is: “I guess I’ll have to answer your question with another question.” It’s probably the reason people generally avoid me at parties, but so often when giving any advice, it makes more sense to leave the decision in the hands of the person with the most intimate […]
A “Privacy Policy” commonly refers to what is technically a business’ “Privacy Statement” or “Privacy Notice”. The policy is made up of the internal and external protocols, rules, guidelines and steps that a business takes regarding the collection, use, storage and destruction of personally identifying information (PII) and non-personal (aka. “technical”) information. Businesses put a […]
If your business relies on insights from reviews, comments or other aggregated data, chances are that you are tempted to engage in a little (or a lot of) web scraping. Web scraping is essentially conducting automatic data extraction from one website, for use by a different party. It’s sometimes referred to as “web harvesting” or […]
2016 will be remembered as the year that privacy became the buzzword small businesses took notice of. We saw the establishment of the first ever Federal Privacy Council this year, read about numerous data breaches (and maybe even felt the impacts personally), and the US specifically felt the repercussions of the overturning of its data […]
Before May 11, 2016, only three out of four forms of intellectual property – patents, trademarks and copyrights – were protectable and enforceable at the federal level. The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA) now provides federal protection for – you guessed it – trade secrets. Prior to the DTSA, trade secrets were enforced […]
As a cannabis business owner you have probably invested quite a bit in your brand and creating a market for your product. The last thing you want is for someone else to tell you that you have to change your brand or you see someone using something very similar to your brand. We have all […]
Recently, we’ve been asked several times about the nature of a certain work as it relates to copyright infringement. “Is my work a derivative of theirs? I should be fine, right?” “Sure, I incorporate some of their copyrighted work, but mine is transformative enough, so I’m good, right?” As with most gray areas, […]