The Foundry Law Blog

Trademark Modernization Act: Overview

  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; […]

Can you Trademark a Hashtag? When Your ™ is a #hashtag

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 […]

Amazon Brand Registry – What it is and How to Enroll

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 […]

Web Scraping: Pitfalls and Proactive Best Practices

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 […]

Can you Keep a (Trade) Secret? The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016

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 […]

Who wore it better? The grey area of copyright in the world of fashion design and imitations.

Trends in fashion tend to spread like wildfire amongst both retailers and consumers. Clothing companies endeavor to keep up with current styles and popular trends to market to customers, resulting in various products stemming from one “design.” When Kate Middleton married Prince William in 2011, her wedding dress was immediately replicated by various fashion houses […]