TRADEMARKS, COPYRIGHTS AND OTHER Intellectual Property

Your intellectual property may be your company’s most valuable asset.  The success of your company depends not only on how well you innovate, but how well you preserve, protect and build on the results of your innovations.

We can help you to make the most of your intellectual property.  For example, we can clear and register your trademarks with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office or register your copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office and then help you to “police” your trademarks to keep them strong; we can help you take advantage of the safe harbor under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), so you can minimize your responsibility for user-generated content on your site; we can draft terms of use for your website to give you recourse against anyone who might try to appropriate content from your site or services, reverse engineer your technology or “scrape” your database; we can draft agreements with your employees, consultants and freelancers, and company policies, to help ensure that you get the IP rights you need and expect, and help ensure that your trade secrets remain trade secrets.

We can help you to exploit your intellectual property in ways that help maximize value and minimize legal exposure.  We can structure, draft and negotiate optimal ways to syndicate or license your videos, music, data, artwork, NFTs, software, applications, inventions, articles, photographs or other content; we can help you license your trademarks in a way that maintains their strength and avoids “dilution”; or we can help you license others’ intellectual property to create value in your own business.

 We can help you to defend your intellectual property from pirates and infringers.  Where appropriate, for example, we might: send a takedown notice, pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), to an Internet Service Provider; initiate an arbitration under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) to reclaim a domain name from a cybersquatter or typosquatter; or send a cease-and-desist letter to someone using your trademarks or servicemarks without authorization.

We can counsel you regarding whether your brands, products or services, or website or other media, infringe on others’ trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights or other proprietary rights.  We can advise on issues of “fair use”: Can you use someone else’s photograph, video, text or design without permission?  Can they use yours? What are the implications of using certain open source software?  And we can help you respond to allegations that your company’s products or services might be infringing.

Finally, we work with international counsel to accomplish these goals on a global scale.