Articles - Page 3 of 4 - Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.

Third Party Cookies Crumble. Is Google’s Replacement Any Better?

As a scrappy Silicon Valley startup, Google's motto was "Don't Be Evil". The phrase was part of the employee Code of Conduct and was even the Wi-Fi password for its company shuttles. The phrase disappeared from the Code of Conduct in 2018, long after Google had become an Internet search giant and had begun acting the part. This includes aggressively collecting as much data as possible from users of its services and global users of the Internet generally. An important piece of this data collection is the use of "third party cookies". Google may now be rendering these cookies obsolete, [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:08-04:00February 1st, 2021|Intellectual Property|

New Copyright Laws: Tougher Enforcement and New “Small Claims Court”

At the end of December 2020, Congress passed an "omnibus" bill which justifiably received significant attention for funding the military and providing financial relief during the coronavirus pandemic. Included in the legislation were new laws relating to copyright: the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act and the Protecting Lawful Streaming (CASE) Act. The CASE Act The CASE Act is a new mechanism for handling copyright claims. The new law creates a Copyright Claims Board within the United States Copyright Office, which can hear cases involving total damages of up to $30,000. The purported benefit is that parties save money [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:08-04:00December 30th, 2020|Copyright, Intellectual Property|

Keeping Up with Fast-Changing Privacy Laws

How much personal data do you collect from customers, and what privacy laws apply to your business? Recent privacy violations have resulted in penalties of thousands or millions of dollars, with Facebook paying a record FTC fine of $5 billion. Every business needs to know its compliance requirements and potential exposure. Yet the current proliferation of privacy laws has made this increasingly expensive and difficult. The nexus of these laws is the need to protect the ever-increasing amount of data that businesses collect from customers. While certain categories of data are already highly regulated (for example, banking or health records), [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:09-04:00November 24th, 2020|Intellectual Property, Privacy|

Spirit v. Led Zeppelin Case Finally Ascends the Stairway to Heaven

After six years of litigation, Led Zeppelin has finally won. Michael Skidmore, the trustee for the estate of Spirit's guitarist Randy Wolfe, sued in 2014, claiming that Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" infringed Spirit's copyright in its song, "Taurus." On October 5, 2020, the Supreme Court denied Skidmore's request for a writ of certiorari after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him in March 2020, which now ends the litigation. In 2016, a jury ruled that "Stairway to Heaven" did not infringe "Taurus", and Skidmore appealed. A 9th Circuit panel disagreed, and remanded the case for a new [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:09-04:00October 30th, 2020|Copyright, Intellectual Property|

Cease and Desist Letters – What Would Bill Murray Do?

In the world of intellectual property, the "Cease and Desist" letter is king. These are letters from attorneys for the owner of a work or invention, sent to an alleged infringer of the owner's intellectual property rights. The letters cite the legal basis for their claim, may threaten doom, destruction, and huge financial damages, and are often quite stern. Overly aggressive cease and desist letters can backfire. The Lumen Database website (originally chillingeffects.org) began as a project to track overzealous use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's enforcement mechanisms, spotlighting the most egregious examples of cease and desist letters. Such [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:09-04:00September 29th, 2020|Contracts, Copyright, Intellectual Property, Patent, Trade Secrets, Trademark|

Star Trek Copyright – Where No Court Has Gone Before

Two thousand years ago, the Roman historian Tacticus said that "victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone." Such is the fate of successful creative works, whether they are music, art, or television shows. In recent years, the Star Trek universe has expanded to include several new shows, including the successful "Star Trek: Discovery." Enter the copyright infringement lawsuits. Anas Abdin created a videogame over the course of several years between 2014 and 2017. The video game is set in 20,000 B.C., and focuses on characters living on a space station. In 2015, he created a character based upon [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:09-04:00August 31st, 2020|Copyright, Intellectual Property|

Washington Redskins vs. Native Americans & Trademark Squatters

For almost 30 years, the NFL's Washington Redskins were involved in litigation over their team name. They recently decided to change the name, but they may now have to battle trademark squatters who have scooped up rights to likely replacement names. The Washington Redskins have been using the team name since 1933, and registered variations of the trademark starting in 1967. In 1992, Native American activist Suzan Harjo and other plaintiffs filed a petition to cancel six trademark registrations owned by the Redskins' parent company, Pro-Football, Inc., on the grounds that the name "Redskins" was offensive to Native Americans. They [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:09-04:00July 30th, 2020|Intellectual Property, Trademark|

Netflix and the Air Force Battle for Space (Force)

In a story that would make a screenwriter jealous, it seems that the newly-minted U.S. Space Force may have lost trademark rights in the term "Space Force" to Netflix. On June 18, 2018, President Trump announced the U.S. Space Force which came to life on December 20, 2019, with the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, as a division of the Air Force. Netflix debuted its "Space Force" comedy series on May 29, 2020. The problem for the Air Force is that Netflix filed its earliest trademark application for "Space Force" on August 2, 2018, in Jamaica. [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:09-04:00June 29th, 2020|Intellectual Property, Trademark|

Copyright Law Doesn’t “Heart” New York

Why is the famous "I [heart] New York" logo protected by trademark and not copyright? At first glance, you'd think that it's artwork, and therefore can be protected by copyright. However, the Copyright Act protects "original works of authorship." The "I [heart] New York" logo is simply the phrase "I love New York", with the word "love" replaced by a red heart. As the Supreme Court held in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., [t]he sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. … Original, as [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:10-04:00May 29th, 2020|Copyright, Intellectual Property, Trademark|

Post a Photograph to Social Media and License it to the World?

Authors, beware! The next time you post your work on social media, you may lose significant ownership rights. A core principle of U.S. copyright law is that the author controls how their work is used, and can earn money from that use if they wish. But what happens when a photographer posts her work on Instagram and a large corporation uses it without compensating the photographer? This is exactly what happened to Stephanie Sinclair, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, who has been published in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. On September 22, 2015, Sinclair posted a photo to [...Read More...]

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2026-08-13T15:07:10-04:00April 30th, 2020|Contracts, Copyright, Intellectual Property|