You may have noticed some faux gravity in media outlets of late dealing with cheese. If you’ve been tuned to Olympic coverage, you are forgiven for having missed such rollicking headlines as: “Judge Won’t Give Gruyere the Champagne Treatment.”[i] Or Planet Money’s “cheesy story” on radio trying to decipher a label with a trade
International IP Policy
Dishing on Rice, Geographical Indications and the Holiday Spirit
Just in time for holiday meal prep, we have a legal quandary worthy of debate. Your side dish recipe calls for brown basmati rice bejeweled with cranberries and pomegranates. Sounds alluring. But what exactly is Basmati rice?
The answer, like so many things in law and life, is “it depends.” Cooking websites tell us that…
Booking.com Gets a Green Light, but Other Online Platforms Should Proceed with Caution
The Wall Street Journal heralded the Supreme Court’s decision in the Booking.com case with the headline “Supreme Court Eases Trademark Rules for Websites.” (United States Patent and Trademark Office et. al. v. Booking.com B.V., decision by J. Ginsburg.) The Court “gave online companies broad latitude to trademark their website names,” it proclaimed…
In an IP State of Mind
I’m from Billy Joel country, so you will forgive me if, despite living in Los Angeles, I am often in a “New York State of Mind.” But when I travel, I can’t help but notice that I get into an “IP State of Mind.” An example: I was in Buenos Aires a few years ago…
Section 2(a) of Lanham Act Trimmed Again
The Brunetti Case
The United States Supreme Court decision in Iancu v. Brunetti issued June 24, 2019 held that the Lanham Act provision barring federal registration of immoral and scandalous marks violated the First Amendment. The majority opinion, by an odd fellows grouping of justices (Kagan, Thomas, Ginsburg, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) explained that this…
USTR Delivers GI Protections for Cheeses in Time for the Holidays. Or Does It?
A press release from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in early October heralded the key achievements of the recently concluded U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, intended to replace the vilified NAFTA agreement that dated from the early 1990s. Let’s take a look at what the release said about Geographical Indications:
“The Parties agreed to provide…
Geographical Indications are Heating Up in Trade Disputes
It’s hot as the blazes in most of the U.S., Europe and Central America these days. Which makes a watermelon salad with mint and feta cheese sound very appealing, to say the least. But the recipe calls for “real” feta cheese, the salty kind, to offset the sweetness of the melon. Is there more than…
The Paradox of Term Extension – Part II
It’s almost August, signaling time to really kick back and relax in Europe. In the U.S., it’s time to buy back-to-school supplies. Vive la différence! In our last post, we looked at the significance of July 18th in Spanish history and copyright law and examined how the works of the prolifically gifted poet and…