November 2016

Back in 2010, Aleksandr Yufa filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Rees Scientific claiming infringement of his portfolio of particle-measuring patents. He lost in U.S. District Court, and just lost his appeal. Worse yet, the Federal Circuit appointed a receiver to take title to Mr. Yufa’s patents to sell them to pay $166,365 in attorney’s fees charged to Mr. Yufa by the court for filing a “baseless” patent lawsuit.

It’s always the drummer who gets the girl. In this case, the issue is with the guitarist. It seems that the founder of a band known as “Boston,” one Tom Scholz, sued a former guitarist for the band, one Barry Goudreau, for trademark infringement. Goudreau left Boston and formed a new group called “Ernie and the Automatics.”

The plaintiff in this case gets no sympathy from the writer of this blog because I drink my coffee as the good Lord intended: Black. No milk, no cream, no Half & Half, no sugar, no sweetener, no nothin’. Straight from the coffee pot. I even drink iced coffee that way. Yeah!

World Chess Events, and its subsidiary, World Chess U.S., own the commercial rights to this year’s World Chess Championship. In a bold move (Sorry. It was too easy.), World Chess has filed a lawsuit against two chess websites, claiming that they “pirated” chess plays that are the intellectual property of World Chess Events and World Chess U.S. World Chess & Company is seeking $4.5 million in damages and asking the U.S. District Court hearing the case to block both websites from publishing chess plays from an upcoming championship match.

We are reminded of the line in Carol King’s Sweet Seasons: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes the blues just get a hold of you.” Selee, a manufacturer of foam-based filtration equipment, sued McDanel Advanced Ceramics Technology, a manufacturer of ceramic tubes and components, for infringement of its “Engineered Ceramics” trademark. We can only assume that the plaintiff or its lawyers just made a bad impression on the jury, because the jury found that McDanel had indeed infringed Selee’s trademark, but it awarded Selee $1. Ouch!