This afternoon, as we pored over a complaint, filed in New York federal court by rapper 50 Cent, our new editor, Jennifer Forsyth, asked a fair question: What does “50 Cent” mean? Not surprisingly, this exposed a gap in our admittedly shoddy knowledge of things hip-hop. We’ve seen “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” the 2005 [...]

Dora the Explorer. For law students looking for a little freelance in-house trademark work, one option might be to police fake handbags or allegedly infringing doggie toys. That seems easy enough. But how about putting the kibosh on a kid’s birthday plans? Could you do it? On the front-page of today’s WSJ, Katherine Rosman takes [...]

Expect Barbie to put on her best beaded dress tonight and celebrate on the town. That pesky little Cloe is getting what’s coming to her.
What has Barbie grabbing a tiny glass of something sparkling (pink, surely)? A federal jury in Riverside, Calif., determined Thursday that MGA Entertainment’s hugely popular Bratz dolls (pictured left) were designed [...]

Our unintentional spotlight on international law continues today at the LB. But first, let us return briefly to New York, where U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan has ruled that Tiffany, not eBay, must bear the burden of monitoring its trademark, including that lovely Tiffany Blue box, which helps us all aspire to a higher standard. [...]

Ending a six-week doll-fight that included a lawyer-squabble over historic hotel rooms, lawyers from Quinn Emanuel and Skadden Arps faced off for the final time yesterday in the case of Mattel v. MGA (a/k/a Barbie v. Bratz) — a litigation that stretches back to 2004. In today’s LAT, David Colker covers the closing arguments. Mattel, [...]

Aside from noting that many of the Law Blog’s neighbors mourned the 2004 closure of the Domino Sugar factory, which had been a Brooklyn landmark since the 1880’s, we don’t much follow the goings-on in the sweetener industry.
As is the case with many industries, it takes a lawsuit to pique our interest. So here we [...]

Last week, in the context of Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google’s YouTube, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube. To give you an idea of how many users might be affected by the order, the WSJ reports that, [...]

Try typing “Rosetta Stone” — the name of a language-software company, as well as an Egyptian artifact that helped advance modern understanding of hieroglyphic writing — into your Google search engine. On the right, under “sponsored links,” you’ll see links entitled “Don’t Buy Rosetta Software,” and “Rosetta Spanish a Scam?”
As detailed in this WSJ article [...]

About eight years ago, Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft exec started Intellectual Ventures, a company that amasses patents that it can then license. Several tech giants, including Nokia, Intel, Apple and Sony, invest money in the holding company’s war chest.
Now, several big tech companies are banding together in a slightly different patent-related venture. As the [...]

A French court today cracked down on counterfeits — and an outlet that sells them — ordering eBay to pay Louis Vuitton and other luxury brands — Kenzo, Guerlain, Dior and Givenchy — $63.1 million in damages for auctioning fake goods. Here’s the early story from WSJ. LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and sister company [...]