In law, an en banc session is a session in which a case is heard before all the judges of a court rather than by a panel of judges selected from them. The equivalent terms in banc, in banco or in bank are also sometimes seen. En banc review is often used for unusually complex cases or cases considered to be of greater importance.
Trademark dilution is a trademark law concept giving the owner of a famous trademark standing to forbid others from using that mark in a way that would lessen its uniqueness. In most cases, trademark dilution involves an unauthorized use of another's trademark on products that do not compete with, and have little connection with, those of the trademark owner. For example, a famous trademark used by one company to refer to hair care products might be diluted if another company began using a similar mark to refer to breakfast cereals or spark plugs.
The doctrine of assignor estoppel is a doctrine of United States patent law barring a patent's seller (assignor) from attacking the patent's validity in subsequent patent infringement litigation. The doctrine is based on the doctrine of legal estoppel, which prohibits a grantor from challenging the validity of his/her/its grant.
Diane Schwerm Sykes is a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and former Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Heidsieck & Co "Monopole" is a champagne house located in the Champagne region of France.
Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin is a French Champagne house based in Reims, specializing in premium products. It was founded in 1772 by Philippe Clicquot and is one of the largest champagne houses in the world. Madame Clicquot is credited with major breakthroughs, creating the first known vintage champagne in 1810, and inventing the riddling table process to clarify champagne in 1816. In 1818, she invented the first known blended rosé champagne by blending still red and white champagne wines. This process is still used today by the majority of champagne producers.
Under United States patent law a prosecution disclaimer is a statement made by a patent applicant during examination of a patent application which can limit the scope of protection provided by the resulting patent. It is one type of file-wrapper estoppel, the other being prosecution history estoppel.
The doctrine of foreign equivalents is a rule applied in United States trademark law which requires courts and the TTAB to translate foreign words in determining whether they are registrable as trademarks, or confusingly similar with existing marks. The doctrine is intended to protect consumers within the United States from confusion or deception caused by the use of terms in different languages. In some cases, a party will use a word as a mark which is either generic or merely descriptive of the goods in a foreign language, or which shares the same meaning as an existing mark to speakers of that foreign language.
Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc., 976 F.2d 700, is a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in which the court appeared to overrule or drastically limit many years of U.S. Supreme Court precedent affirming the patent exhaustion doctrine, for example in Bauer & Cie. v. O'Donnell.
Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court reaffirmed the validity of the patent exhaustion doctrine, and in doing so made uncertain the continuing precedential value of a line of decisions in the Federal Circuit that had sought to limit Supreme Court exhaustion doctrine decisions to their facts and to require a so-called "rule of reason" analysis of all post-sale restrictions other than tie-ins and price fixes. In the course of restating the patent exhaustion doctrine, the Court held that the exhaustion doctrine is triggered by, among other things, an authorized sale of a component when the only reasonable and intended use of the component is to practice the patent and the component substantially embodies the patented invention by embodying its essential features. The Court also overturned, in passing, the part of decision below that held that the exhaustion doctrine was limited to product claims and did not apply to method claims.
Anderson's-Black Rock, Inc. v. Pavement Salvage Co., 396 U.S. 57 (1969), is a 1969 decision of the United States Supreme Court on the legal standard governing the obviousness of claimed inventions. It stands for the proposition that, when old elements are combined in a way such that they do not interact in a novel, unobvious way, then the resulting combination is obvious and therefore unpatentable.
Fujifilm Corp v. Benun, 605 F.3d 1366 was a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the judgment made by the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey that the defendants infringed patents owned by Fujifilm Corporation.
Under Canadian trade-mark law, "confusion" is where a trade-mark is similar enough to another trade-mark to cause consumers to equate them. Likelihood of confusion plays a central role in trade-mark registration, infringement and passing-off. Whether a trade-mark or trade-name is confusing is a question of fact. The role of confusion in trade-mark law is analogous to the role of substantial infringement in patent law.
Waesche, Sheinbaum & O'Regan was a New York law firm focusing on international litigation and arbitration.
Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013), is a United States Supreme Court copyright decision in which the Court held, 6-3, that the first-sale doctrine applies to copies of copyrighted works lawfully made abroad.
Masterpiece Inc. v. Alavida Lifestyles Inc. [2011] 2 S.C.R. 387, is a Supreme Court of Canada decision concerning the relevant criteria and basic approach to be undertaken by the Court in analyzing the likelihood of confusion in Canadian trademark law under the Trade-marks Act, 1985 The test adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada is whether, as a matter of first impression, the "casual consumer somewhat in a hurry" who encounters the Alavida trade-mark, with no more than an imperfect recollection of any one of the Masterpiece Inc. trade-marks or trade-name, would be likely to think that Alavida was the same source of retirement residence services as Masterpiece Inc. Furthermore, Rothstein J. affirmed a consumer protection principle of trade-marks as an indication of provenance, "providing consumers with a reliable indication of the expected source of wares or services." Rothstein J. delivering the majority judgment of the Court held that Alavida's proposed trade-mark "Masterpiece Living" was confusing with at least one of Masterpiece Inc.’s trade-marks when the registration application was filed on December 1, 2005. Alavida was therefore deemed to be not entitled to registration of its proposed marks, allowing then for the Registrar of Trade-marks to expunge Alavida’s registration from the registrar.
The Château de Boursault is a neo-Renaissance château in Boursault, Marne, France. It was built between 1843 and 1850 by Madame Clicquot Ponsardin, the Veuve Clicquot who owned the Veuve Clicquot champagne house. It was sold by her heir to the Berry family of Canada from 1913 to 1927 and was used as a military hospital in both the first and second world wars. Today the Château de Boursault brand of champagne is made from grapes grown in the vineyards around the château and is aged in its cellars.
The misappropriation doctrine is a U.S. legal theory conferring a "quasi-property right" on a person who invests "labor, skill, and money" to create an intangible asset. The right operates against another person "endeavoring to reap where it has not sown" by "misappropriating" the value of the asset. The quoted language and the legal principle come from the decision of the United States Supreme Court in International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918), also known as INS v. AP or simply the INS case.
The reverse doctrine of equivalents is a legal doctrine of United States patent law, according to which a device that appears to literally infringe a patent claim, by including elements or limitations that correspond to each element or limitation of the patent claim, nonetheless does not infringe the patent, because the accused device operates on a different principle. That is, "it performs the same or a similar function in a substantially different way." It has been said that "the purpose of the ‘reverse’ doctrine is to prevent unwarranted extension of the claims beyond a fair scope of the patentee’s invention."
