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Satava v. Lowry, 323 F.3d 805 (9th Cir. 2003)
We study the Satava case early in the semester when I teach the IP law course at St. Mary’s. It is an amusing case involving an artist, Satava, known for his beautiful glass jellyfish in glass jar artwork. Satava has made and sold thousands of these pieces and they often sell from a few hundred to several thousand dollars a piece. When Lowry started selling similar glass jellyfish sculptures, Satava filed a lawsuit. Initially, a district court issued a preliminary injunction preventing Lowry from creating sculptures with “a vertically oriented, colorful, fanciful jellyfish with tendril-like tentacles and a rounded bell encased in an outer layer of rounded clear glass that is bulbous at the top and tapering toward the bottom to form roughly a bullet shape, with the jellyfish portion of the sculpture filling almost the entire volume of the outer, clear glass shroud.” However, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed the district court’s decision on the basis that the district court applied an incorrect legal standard. In particular, Lowry's sculptures shared only elements that were not protected by copyright law.

United States Patent and Trademark Office, et al. v. Booking.com B.V., 591 U.S. ___ (2020)
Booking.com filed a trademark application for its name BOOKING.COM. A trademark examining attorney, as well as the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, determined that BOOKING.COM was not registrable and therefore refused registration. Booking.com appealed the decision of the TTAB to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and later to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Both courts affirmed the refusal. The Supreme Court heard the case and reversed the decision. Although the terms “booking” and “.com” were both considered generic, the combination was recognized by consumers as a unique service due to the online domain name. The Supreme Court determined that consumer perception, which was demonstrated largely through consumer surveys, was sufficient to show that consumers perceived BOOKING.COM as a source identifier (i.e., trademark) rather than a generic term.

U.S. Patent No. 4,239,129
Rather than share a third case, I thought it would be fun to share a patent. Instead of a machine or chemical composition, I decided to share a patent issued for a toy water pistol. This patent was the subject of a patent lawsuit, Larami Corp. v. Amron, 27 USPQ 2d 1280 (E.D.  Pa. 1993). Larami manufactured a line of toy water guns called “SUPER SOAKERS.” It sued Amron for patent infringement. The attached patent illustrates the three sections of a patent: the drawings, the specification, and the claims. Note, this patent contains 35 claims. See if you can find the claims!