Tag: Marvel

Names and Brand Names

A key aspect of trademarks has been at the forefront of both fiction and real-life sports news over the past few weeks: what makes a name a name and who can use a name as a trademark? While trademarks are commercial rights, trademark law also protects a person’s right to control their own identity, including well-known pseudonyms and nicknames.

Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney-at-Law is, like most TV shows about lawyers, often cavalier with how it represents the law, but when the question of the protagonist’s rights in her nom de guerre came up, it was more accurate than most courtroom dramas. Jen Walters (the civilian identity of the titular She-Hulk) discovers a “super-influencer” has launched a line of cosmetics under the SHE-HULK brand and based on that use, is claiming trademark rights in SHE-HULK, going so far as to sue Jen Walters for her use of the name She-Hulk. While much of the terminology is mangled, the show’s hearing on the issue reaches points that are relevant in the real world. First, does “She-Hulk” identify a living person? And second, would another’s use of SHE-HULK be “likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association” (as set forth in 15 U.S. Code § 1125) of that user and the person known to the public as SHE-HULK? It being a superhero show, Jen Walters ultimately vindicates her rights to the She-Hulk name and SHE-HULK Mark.

Circumstances in the real world are rarely as cut-and-dried. In a proceeding before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, NBA player Luka Doncic is attempting to reclaim the trademark rights in his own name from his ex-manager, his mother. Doncic, born in 1999, was a basketball star from his early teens. During his meteoric rise in European basketball, his mother, with his consent at the time, registered a design trademark (consisting mainly of his name) for goods and services including soaps, recorded basketball games, apparel, sports equipment, and promotional and educational services, starting with an application in the European Union in 2015 (when Doncic was 16) and filing in the U.S. in 2018 (when he was 19).

Doncic, as stated in his petition to cancel that U.S. Registration, has since withdrawn his consent to his mother’s use and registration of his name as a trademark. Instead, he has, through his own company, Luka99, Inc., applied to register a few marks including his own name, which have been refused registration because of the existing registration owned by his mother. To clear the way for his own registrations, he is seeking to cancel hers on the basis that (as in the fictional example above) her use or registration is likely to make consumers believe the goods and services offered with her authorization are associated with or endorsed by him, and because he has withdrawn his consent, her registrations are no longer permitted to remain on the register.

As Doncic was a minor when he gave consent, he has a good chance of regaining control of his name. Not everyone is so lucky, so you should be especially careful when entering any agreement that allows someone to use your name as a trademark.

Article By David H. Siegel of Norris McLaughlin P.A.

For more intellectual property legal news, click here to visit the National Law Review.

©2022 Norris McLaughlin P.A., All Rights Reserved

In Light of Supreme Court’s Spider-Man Case, Which Antitrust Precedents are Ripe for Overturning?

On June 22, 2015, the US Supreme Court in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment LLC declined on stare decisis grounds to overturn a criticized intellectual property precedent on royalty payments. In both the majority and dissenting opinions, the justices said that their respect for precedent would have been less had it been one interpreting the Sherman Antitrust Act. These comments prompt the question: Which old and criticized antitrust precedent might be subject to reversal?

Kimble had a patent on a device that allowed a user to shoot webs—really, just pressurized foam string—from the palm of his hand. Kimble and Spider-Man’s owner, Marvel, reached an agreement that allowed Marvel to sell such toys in exchange for a lump sum payment to Kimble plus a 3% annual royalty that had no end date. After years of payments, Marvel discovered Brulotte v. Thys Co., a 1964 Supreme Court case that had read the patent laws to prevent a patent owner from receiving royalties for sales made after the patent’s expiration. The Court considered such arrangements illegal per se because they were attempts to extend the patent’s monopoly beyond the patent’s life. Relying on that precedent, Marvel convinced lower courts that its payments to Kimble should stop with the 2010 expiration of the patent.

Kimble asked the Court to overturn Brulotte and replace it with a rule of reason analysis. Six justices declined that invitation, saying the long-standing precedent was based on an interpretation of patent statutes that Congress could, but had declined to, amend and that contracting parties might have relied on. The dissent would have overturnedBrulotte because its rationale was based on now-discredited antitrust policy, not statutory interpretation.

Perhaps more interesting to antitrust practitioners, the two opinions discussed the lower level of respect for the Court’s antitrust precedents. As the majority opinion pointed out, Congress “intended [the Sherman Act’s] reference to ‘restraint of trade’ to have ‘changing content,’ and authorized courts to oversee the term’s ‘dynamic potential.’” As a result, the Court has “felt relatively free to revise our legal analysis as economic understanding evolves.” The dissent agreed, saying “we have been more willing to reexamine antitrust precedents because they have attributes of common-law decisions.”

Given that seeming-unanimity on the weakness of antitrust precedents, the next obvious question for antitrust lawyers is which antitrust precedents might be overturned. One candidate is the so-called baseball exemption. In 1922’s Federal Baseball Club v. National League, the Court found that the “business [of] giving exhibitions of base ball” did not constitute interstate commerce and so was not reached by the Sherman Act. Commentators and even subsequent Court opinions have termed the decision an “anomaly” (though refusing to overturn it).  Even retired Justice Stevens criticized the breadth of the exemption in a recent speech. In reaching this conclusion, Stevens relied on his experience on the Court, his early representation of the former A’s owner, and his work for Congress in the 1950s as it studied the exemption. Yet, while lower court decisions and The Curt Flood Act of 1998 have narrowed its scope, the exemption is still very much alive and has been used recently to cut short actions involving both the Cubs and the A’s. The Court could revisit the exemption yet again if it accepts the cert petition from the City of San Jose in the case involving the latest possible relocation of the A’s franchise.

Another candidate is the per se rule against tying, the only remaining vertical restraint to which the per se rule applies. In a tying arrangement, a seller agrees to sell one product (“tying product”) but only on the condition that the buyer also purchase a different product (“tied product”). Early Court cases applied the per se rule and described the arrangements harshly, saying they “serve hardly any purpose beyond the suppression of competition.” More recently, the Court has recognized that tying might be pro-competitive in certain circumstances. It has retained a rule that it calls per se; however, unlike per se rules against horizontal price fixing and the like, the tying per se rule requires proof of the seller’s power in the market for the tying product. If an appropriate case reaches the Court, it might complete the evolution of vertical restraints analysis and make all tying arrangements subject only to the rule of reason.

Finally, the Court’s 1963 Philadelphia National Bank opinion has faced severe criticism. In that case, the Court found that a merger that “produces a firm controlling an undue percentage share of the relevant market, and results in a significant increase in the concentration of firms” is presumptively anticompetitive. While that presumption has been significantly weakened in the various iterations of the DOJ/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines, it still plays a role at least when the agencies challenge a merger in court. FTC Commissioner Wright has called it bad law based on outdated economics and has criticized its continued use by the agencies. DOJ Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer, on the other hand, has called the presumption a useful tool for the agencies when challenging mergers in court. Because so few merger cases go beyond the preliminary injunction standard, let alone all the way to the Supreme Court, this precedent might remain safe.

ARTICLE BY Steven J. Cernak, Gregory L. Curtner & William M. Hannay

© 2015 Schiff Hardin LLP

Kimble v. Marvel – Supreme Court Sticks With Brulotte Rule on Royalty Payments

In a rather breezy opinion filled with Spiderman puns and references, Justice Kagan, writing for a 6/3 Court, affirmed that Brulotte v. Thys Co., 379 U.S. 29 (1964) controlled the outcome of this dispute over Marvel’s decision to halt royalty payments on a web-slinger toy that it had apparently agreed to make “for as long as kids want to imitate Spider-Man (doing whatever a spider can).” Slip op. at 2. (A copy of the opinion is found at the end of this post.)

The toy was patented by Kimble, and the patent expired in 2010. The ninth circuit affirmed the district court’s grant of S.J. confirming that, in accord with Brulotte, a patentee cannot receive royalties for sales made after his/her patent’s expiration. Cert. was granted and the Court affirmed that stare decisis was operable to keep Brulotte as controlling law, particularly since the dispute involved statutory interpretation – [as opposed to, e.g., first amendment rights?] – and that Congress had rejected attempts to amend the law.

I posted on the “back-story” earlier – see here– so a lot of repetition seems unnecessary, but the Court spent some time discussing various work-arounds to the Brulotte bar. These include deferred royalty payments, licensing non-patent rights and alternative “business arrangements,” that universities and other developers of early stage technology might use to temper the loss of patent protection prior to the generation of maximum income from the patented technology. Slip op. at 5-6. Nonetheless, as Justice Kagan wrote: “Patents endow their holders with certain superpowers but only for a limited time.”

Click here to read the Supreme Court Decision in Kimble v. Marvel

ARTICLE BY Warren Woessner of Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A.
© 2015 Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A. All Rights Reserved.