In 2006, Congress changed federal trademark dilution law when it enacted the Trademark Dilution Revision Act (“TDRA”). This Article first outlines the history of the dilution doctrine in the United States so that the changes enacted through the TDRA may be understood contextually. The TDRA’s new provisions are then delineated and explained. The author argues …
As the American prison population has exploded in the last quarter century, the prison telephone industry has grown into a billion-dollar market. Telecommunications companies are granted statewide prison monopolies that subject prisoners’ loved ones to grossly inequitable telephone charges. As a result, many families become saddled with outrageously high phone bills. Phone companies defend these …
With interest in renewable energy sources gaining momentum, it is only natural that controversy will arise surrounding the proliferation of wind energy. While this conflict has already manifested itself in the context of federal law, in North Carolina, a state with favorable conditions for wind energy development, the fate of the budding technology remains uncertain …
Within the past decade, companies seeking to purchase intellectual property for the purpose of generating licensing fees have become a major concern for U.S. businesses. These companies are often identified as “patent trolls,” and are perceived to take advantage of successful companies that utilize the technology by demanding often exorbitant licensing fees. The Supreme Court’s …
A lawsuit has been filed in the federal court system that threatens the continued success of online fantasy sports. The plaintiff in Humphrey v. Viacom, Inc. has sued the three main providers of online fantasy leagues, claiming that pay-to-play fantasy sports constitute illegal gambling. Since courts have traditionally distinguished between permissible and impermissible forms of …
Electronic discovery-including the contents of e-mail messages and/or the deletion of e-mails-has driven the outcome of many high-profile cases. We live in a progressively more digital world. Thus, when disputes ripen into litigation, clients, attorneys, and judges have had to focus increasingly on preserving, gathering, culling, reviewing, and producing electronic information. The complexity of information …
In 2002, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition held that the possession, creation, or distribution of “virtual child pornography,” pornography created entirely through computer graphics, was not a punishable offense because regualtion impermissibly infringed on the First Amendment right to free speech and did not harm real children. Only a few years after that decision, however, …
The case of Jacobsen v. Katzer is among the earliest to consider the enforceability of open source software licenses, and is therefore of key interest to the open source community. To the disappointment of that community, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California held that an open source project creator could …
Senator Harry Reid proposed S. 1642, an amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965. This amendment was a diluted version of his original amendment, S.A. 2314, which was proposed as an addition to the College Cost Reduction Act. Each of these amendments proposed procedures that would work to monitor copyright infringement more effectively on …
In June 2007, the United States Supreme Court ruled in FEC. v. Wisconsin Right To Life (“WRTL”), by a 5-4 decision, that section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (“BCRA”) was unconstitutional. The Court’s majority, however, could not agree to why BCRA was unconstitutional. The opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts held …
