IP Litigation and the Potential Pitfalls of Underlying Prosecution – July 2013 Meeting

Greg Ahrens, Partner at Wood Herron & Evans LLP, will speak on the consequences of IP prosecution during litigation. The goal in preparing and prosecuting patent, trademark, and copyright applications is to gain issuance or registration of the application. However, techniques used or actions taken during preparation and prosecution of patent, trademark, and copyright applications may have unintended consequences that are revealed when the issued (or registered) intellectual property is litigated. For example, courts may find the issued property to be invalid or unenforceable or may limit the scope of protection based on the prosecution record. In particular, certain statements made (or even omissions) in the application and/or during prosecution, failure to comply with formal requirements, or fraudulent or inequitable dealings with the issuing office (e.g., the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the U.S. Copyright Office) can be detrimental to the intellectual property holder’s litigation position. For example, with respect to patent law, the presentation will likely address claim construction, doctrine of equivalents, prosecution history estoppel, and/or inequitable conduct. In the trademark and copyright contexts, the presentation will address failure to satisfy certain formal requirements, as well as limitations on the scope of protection that may arise during prosecution.

For registration information, click here

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Copyright and Fair Use in Politics – October 9, 2012 Monthly Meeting

CincyIP Presents:
Copyright and Fair Use in Politics

Featuring

Jill Meyer
Frost Brown Todd

Charles H. “Chip” Gerhardt, III
Government Strategies Group, LLC

and

Davida H. Isaacs
University of Kentucky

October 9, 2012
12:00pm– 1:30pm

Location: The Cincinnatian Hotel

This course has been approved by the Supreme Court of Ohio Commission on Continuing Legal Education for 1.0 total CLE hour instruction.

Intellectual property is most often appropriated by non-owners/licensees for commercial purposes. However, some political campaigns have also (mis?) appropriated others’ intellectual property, most frequently copyrighted works. As we come to the end of another election cycle, this panel will review these past and recent disputes in political races, and discuss related issue including whether courts would be likely to find such IP use to be “fair use”, to what extent campaign strategists consider the decision to use others’ IP, and how those strategists deal with possible infringement allegations.

Jill Meyer is Member-in-Charge of the Cincinnati office of Frost Brown Todd. She also oversees the Firm’s advertising practice and concentrates her practice on counseling and litigating advertising & media law issues. She represents a wide variety of clients – corporations, advertising agencies, and media outlets – on an array of issues, including advertising review and clearance, sweepstakes and promotions, viral marketing and interactive media, compliance with COPPA and FTC requirements for advertising and websites, intellectual property, right of publicity, advertising-related litigation and regulatory challenges. She also represents media clients in all aspects of First Amendment and newsroom-related matters, including pre-publication/pre-broadcast review, issues related to access to courtrooms, public meetings and public documents, and defamation and privacy related litigation. She is a graduate of Northern Kentucky University’s Chase College of Law and the College of Mount St. Joseph, and a member of the Ohio and Kentucky Bars.

Charles H. “Chip”Gerhardt, III is President and Founder of Government Strategies Group, LLC and Development Strategies Group, LLC. Prior to forming GSG, Chip was Vice President of KMK Consulting Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Keating, Muething and Klekamp. While at KMK, he led the firm’s government affairs practice. Chip has an extensive background in the fields of economic development, government affairs and issues advocacy. He has worked in these areas both in the private and public sectors, and on local, state and Federal levels. He is the former Vice Chairman of the Hamilton County Republican Party and a veteran of numerous campaigns, including John Kasich for Governor, Josh Mandel for Treasurer and Mike DeWine for Attorney General. Chip received his Juris Doctor from the St. Louis University School of Law and his B.B.A. in Marketing from the University of Notre Dame.

Davida H. Isaacs teaches intellectual property, including copyright, and constitutional law courses at the University of Kentucky. Prior to moving to the University of Kentucky, she taught at Northern Kentucky University’s Chase College of Law. She practiced intellectual property law for over seven years in New York, Washington D.C. and in Cincinnati at Wood Herron and Evans. She has published four articles in major law reviews, including “Application of the Fair Use Defense against Copyright Claims for Unauthorized Appropriation of Litigation Documents.” She is a graduate of the New York University School of Law and Brandeis University, and a member of the New York, D.C., Ohio and Kentucky Bars.

PRICES (including lunch):
• $20 for Members (includes 1.0 Hr Ohio CLE)
• $30 Non-Member with CLE
• $20 Non-Member without CLE
• $15 Students and Full-Time Academics

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Termination of Copyright Transfers – July CincyIP Monthly Meeting – July 12, 2011

CincyIP Presents:
Termination of Copyright Transfers

Featuring
Stephen E. Gillen
Partner, Wood, Herron & Evans, LLP

Timothy K. Armstrong
Professor, University of Cincinnati College of Law

and

Davida Isaacs
Professor, University of Kentucky College of Law

July 12, 2011

11:45am – 1:30pm

The Cincinnatian Hotel
This course has been approved by the Supreme Court of Ohio Commission on Continuing Legal Education for 1.0 total CLE hour instruction.

In order to protect authors of older works from being bound to an unfair deal they entered into when they had little bargaining power, the Copyright Act provides for certain opportunities to terminate the transfer of a copyright, thus recapturing control of the copyright. Currently, such rights of termination are not waiveable by contract or other means.

This program will describe the contours of these opportunities for termination, as well as their costs and benefits. In addition, program participants will discuss the impact of these statutory provisions on public grants under widely used “open content” licensing arrangements, such as the GNU General Public License (“GPL”) for software or the Creative Commons family of licenses for other sorts of expressive works. Users of such works must confront the possibility that the licenses may be revoked in the future and the works effectively withdrawn from public use, with potentially chaotic results. Participants will also consider Professor Armstrong’s proposed legislative solution, which would authorize authors to make a nonwaiveable, irrevocable dedication of their works to the public — a possibility that the Patent Act expressly recognizes, but the Copyright Act presently does not.

Stephen E. Gillen is a partner at Wood, Herron & Evans, LLP. Prior to entering private practice in 1994, Steve served as house counsel for South-Western Publishing Company (an educational publisher owned by Cengage, f/k/a The Thomson Corporation). In addition, Steve has served on copyright and permissions committees with the Association of American Publishers. He has written and spoken nationally on various publishing and copyright topics and teaches a course in Media Business and Law at the University of Cincinnati and a course in Electronic Media Law at the College Conservatory of Music. He currently serves on the Council of Advisors to the Text and Academic Authors Association, the Board of Trustees of Voyageur Media Group, Inc., and is a member of the Authors Guild. Steve’s practice emphasizes publishing and entertainment transactions and disputes, internet issues, advertising law, computer law, copyrights, technology transfer, trade secrets, and related matters. His clients include several East Coast publishers as well as authors, artists, photographers, videographers, independent producers, Internet service providers, multimedia developers, and software programmers from Maine to California.

Timothy K. Armstrong is a Professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. Professor Armstrong earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The University of
Texas at Austin and his law degree, with high honors, from the University of Texas School of Law. Following his clerkship with the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Professor Armstrong practiced with the law firm of Howrey, Simon, Arnold & White in Washington,
D.C. He has also earned a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School.
During his career in private practice, he specialized in Supreme Court and appellate litigation. Professor Armstrong’s other primary areas of experience in practice included administrative law, antitrust law and trade regulatory issues, labor arbitration, and government contract disputes. Before joining the University of Cincinnati College of Law faculty, Professor Armstrong worked as a Clinical Teaching Fellow for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Professor Armstrong is a co-author of Info/Law, a weblog focusing on legal issues arising from the domain of high technology and the Internet. His research interests include copyright issues as well as other issues surrounding free and open-source software, among others. He is the author of “Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers for the Benefit of the Public”, recently published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation.

Davida H. Isaacs is a Professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. Professor Isaacs graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University, then with her law degree from New York University School of Law where she was Associate Editor of the NYU Review of Law and Social Change. She then practiced intellectual property law (primarily litigation) at Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays and Handler in New York and Venable, Baetjer, Howard and Civiletti in Washington, D.C., handling clients including Pfizer, Teva, Johnson & Johnson, Coach, and New Line Productions.

She has taught intellectual property courses, including copyright law, at a variety of law schools including Northern Kentucky University and the University of Maryland. She is currently on the faculty at the University of Kentucky, teaching copyright. Professor Isaacs’ scholarly focus is the balance between the rights of intellectual property owners and the public interest, including issues such as which intellectual property qualifies as ’property’, what is the scope of those property rights, and when the public interest justifies limiting intellectual property owners’ rights. Her article on the copyrightability of legal documents has been the subject in numerous fora, including academic conferences, The Wall Street Journal’s legal blog, and most recently several blog posts concerning Apple’s current patent and trade dress lawsuit against Samsung.

PRICES (including lunch):
• $20 for Members (includes 1 Hr Ohio CLE) [cart-button item=”4″]
• $30 Non-Member with CLE [cart-button item=”5″]
• $20 Non-Member without CLE [cart-button item=”6″]
• $15 Students and Full-Time Academics [cart-button item=”7″]

Registration ends at noon on Wednesday, July 6.

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