Keep it Legal Blog

If you have a website or app that includes user-generated or user-submitted content, you are vulnerable to a lawsuit from the copyright owners of that content. This applies to all social media sites/apps and any apps/sites with public forums or other types of user content. The U.S. Copyright Act provides for statutory damages of up to $150,000.00 per infringement. The good news is that you are shielded from all such liability under the “Safe Harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – as long as you comply with all of the necessary provisions, including registration. In this post,…

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When you’re coming up with a trademark, such as a brand name for your products or services, there are a few key points to consider. In other blog posts, I go into some of these points in a lot more detail, but for this post I wanted to pull the basic concepts together so you know on a high level what you should be thinking about. That said, here are 5 things to consider when creating a trademark: 1. Is it generic? A generic term is the common name for a type of good or service. Examples include “Pizza Shop”…

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Note: try not to be scandalized, but this post contains bad language. You can determine for yourself whether or not it’s immoral. OK, read on… Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a ban on the registration of disparaging terms as trademarks. That decision, in the case Matal v. Tam, held that part of §1052(a) of the Lanham Act, which prohibits the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO, or just PTO) from registering terms that are disparaging as trademarks, is unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. The Lanham Act is the U.S. Federal law that covers trademarks. On June…

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