If one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to become more diligent about your intellectual property, it would be a good idea to start the year with an intellectual property (IP) audit. IP includes copyrights, trademarks, trade dress, patents, trade secrets, and the like. In fact, it's called intellectual property since it involves products of the mind. An IP audit [...]
Once again, New Year’s Day brought us more than resolutions, football games, and hangovers. On January 1st, works first published in 1929 (or, in the case of sound recordings, 1924) that were previously protected by copyright entered the public domain. Once a work becomes part of the public domain, anyone can reproduce it or create derivative works based on it, [...]
You may have heard there’s no need to register your copyright, because it’s automatically protected. But this is only half the story—you can’t enforce your copyright without either a certificate of registration or a denial of registration from the Copyright Office. Plus, there are a lot of reasons to register all of your copyrights promptly. 1. If you register a [...]
Happy Holidays from all of us here at The Duboff Law Group! Wishing you the best for the holidays and a healthy, joyful, prosperous new year!
As we mentioned in a previous alert, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has planned a number of increases to trademark fees. A list of fee increases can be found on the USPTO’s website. If at all possible, you should file applications and pay post-registration maintenance fees before January 18, 2025, when the increases take effect. No Salary Threshold [...]
As the year ends with holiday joy and time with loved ones, reviewing your estate plan and making tax-free gifts may not be at the top of your mind. However, it's the perfect time to ensure your estate is in order and to use the annual gift-tax exemption before it's gone. Estate Planning An estate plan ensures your assets are [...]
This year we are truly thankful for our incredible staff who have worked diligently to serve our clients’ needs. While we are still facing many difficulties, we are hopeful that the future will be brighter. The celebration of Thanksgiving by this nation is deeply rooted in our history. President George Washington proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving Day on October 3, [...]
Trademark-Registry Impersonators We frequently get questions from our clients about “important notifications” from companies offering to monitor, register, or renew their trademarks. The scam requests typically look like invoices or letters, often containing false due dates or threats about loss of rights if you don’t send payment immediately. These scams can be hard to identify because scammers often use names [...]
When you have a dispute with someone, your first thought may be, “I’ll sue that $#@*&^%!” but this may not be the best option. Litigation is a stressful, time-consuming, slow, and expensive way to resolve a dispute. This means that settling a dispute is often preferable to resolving the matter through litigation. It’s faster and cheaper, and no matter how [...]
When used in connection with a product or service, any name, symbol, logo, or combination of these items may be protected as a trademark. The purpose of a trademark is to identify the source of a product or service. Trademark laws are designed to protect consumers rather than trademark owners, so the test for infringement is whether the marks at [...]
