Intellectual Property Insights
Analysis and practical guides on intellectual property.
446 articles, checklists, and guides on intellectual property law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice—for a specific matter, contact the firm.
Global Trademark Portfolio Toolkit: Filing Matrices, Bad-Faith Registration Responses, and Watch Programs
This toolkit supplies the working documents for building and defending a trademark portfolio outside the United States, each introduced by its purpose, its owner, and when to use it, with drafting commentary tied to the governing authority. The planning templates are a country-by-country filing matrix and a priority and deadline calendar that tracks the Paris window, the Madrid dependency period, refusal windows, renewals, and U.S. maintenance. The prosecution templates are a foreign agent instruction letter for new filings, a local counsel engagement checklist, and an instruction memo for responding to provisional refusals. The defensive templates are a distributor and manufacturer trademark clause, a letter to a bad-faith registrant, an outline for opposing or invalidating a bad-faith filing, and a term sheet for buying back a squatted registration. A watch program specification, a foreign customs recordation instruction, and a contingency plan for central attack and transformation complete the set, with a running example following an Oregon cookware company.
The DMCA Anti-Circumvention Provisions: Section 1201, Digital Locks, and the Triennial Exemptions
Section 1201 of the Copyright Act makes it unlawful to break a digital lock on a copyrighted work, and unlawful to sell tools that do the breaking, even when the underlying use would be perfectly lawful. That decoupling of circumvention from infringement is what makes section 1201 both powerful and controversial, and it catches security researchers, repair shops, tinkerers, and competitors far more often than it catches pirates. This article explains the structure of the statute, the difference between access controls and copy controls and why it matters, the two trafficking bans, the seven permanent exemptions, and the triennial rulemaking through which the Librarian of Congress grants temporary exemptions for uses like jailbreaking phones, repairing tractors, and preserving video games. It works through the leading appellate decisions, including Corley, Chamberlain, Lexmark, and MDY v. Blizzard, and explains the circuit split over whether a section 1201 claim requires a nexus to infringement. It closes with compliance guidance for device makers, software vendors, researchers, and repair businesses, plus a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.
Copyright Registration: A Comprehensive Guide
Copyright protection is automatic the instant you fix an original work in a tangible form, yet registration with the U.S. Copyright Office unlocks the powerful remedies that make copyright worth owning. This comprehensive guide explains why registration matters after the Supreme Court's decision in Fourth Estate, how statutory damages and attorney's fees under 17 U.S.C. 412 turn entirely on timing, and how the certificate's prima facie presumption under 17 U.S.C. 410(c) shifts the burden of proof in court. It walks step by step through the electronic registration system, the basic, group, supplementary, and renewal application types, the deposit, best-edition, and mandatory-deposit rules, fees, examination and refusals, the two-tier appeal, and specialized tools like preregistration, special handling, and customs recordation. Worked hypotheticals and a practical FAQ make the system understandable for creators, businesses, and lawyers alike. Read it as the master hub and follow the cross-links to the specialized copyright guides.
Image Rights Toolkit: Claim Evaluation Worksheets, Response Letters, and Image Licensing Records
This toolkit collects the working papers for handling image copyright claims, each introduced by its purpose, owner, and when to use it, and each followed by drafting commentary tied to the governing authority. The evaluation templates are a claim intake and Section 412 worksheet and an exposure calculator that prices license value, statutory damages, copyright management information claims, fee risk, and the Copyright Claims Board alternative. The correspondence templates are a request for proof, a no-liability response, a settlement counteroffer, and a tender letter to insurers and vendors. A Board opt-out decision memo and a settlement agreement and release follow. The prevention templates are an image licensing record and an internal image use policy. A running example involving a Denver outdoor retailer fills in the samples throughout.
Estate Publicity Rights Toolkit: State Registrations, Licensing Terms, and Enforcement Letters
This toolkit collects the working papers an estate needs to own, register, license, and enforce a deceased person's publicity rights, each introduced by its purpose, its owner, and when to use it. It includes a domicile evidence memo, a persona and estate inventory, a state rights map, and registration worksheets for California and New York. The licensing papers cover an assignment from the estate or trust to a licensing company, an approval process and decision matrix, a license term sheet, a licensing agency term sheet, and a digital replica consent addendum for AI voices and likenesses. The enforcement papers include a demand letter for commercial misuse, a very different letter for expressive works, a marketplace takedown notice, a use and enforcement log, and an appraisal information request for estate tax. A running example follows a fictional actress's estate through every template, and the drafting notes tie each clause to the governing statute or case.
Copyright Licensing and Clearance Toolkit: Permissions, Rights, and Chain of Title
Clearance is the practice of knowing, before publication, exactly who owns each element of a work and exactly what you are permitted to do with it. This toolkit builds that practice. It starts with the inventory step that most projects skip, which is listing every separately owned element in a work, then works through identifying the owner and confirming chain of title, determining whether a license is needed at all, negotiating the license terms that actually matter, and documenting the result in a form that survives a distributor audit or an insurance underwriter. Separate stages cover the media-specific traps in music, photography, film, software, and user-generated content, the special problems of orphan works and public domain determinations, and what to do when clearance fails and the choice is between redesigning, relying on fair use, or accepting the risk.
Music Licensing in the Streaming Era: Mechanical Royalties, the MLC, and Direct Licensing Deals
Every time a listener presses play, one stream sets in motion one of the most intricate rights-clearance systems ever built, implicating two separate copyrights, four collective organizations, and reporting obligations across dozens of countries. This article explains how music licensing actually works in the streaming era—what rights exist, who holds them, how they are licensed at statutory and negotiated rates, and what every participant must navigate—by following an independent songwriter and a fictional streaming service through the whole machine. It covers the two copyrights in every recording, the mechanical right and the §115 compulsory license, the disaster that preceded the Music Modernization Act of 2018, the blanket license and the Mechanical Licensing Collective, the performance world of the PROs and the ASCAP/BMI consent decrees, sound-recording licensing and SoundExchange under §114, sync and master-use licensing, controlled composition clauses, and the direct deals running outside the collective system. It incorporates the 2024–2026 developments, including the Phonorecords IV all-in rate (15.1% rising to 15.35% of revenue) running through 2027, the dismissal—and partial revival—of the MLC's bundling suit against Spotify, and the majors' "around-the-bundle" deals.
Copyright Notice Checklist: A Practical Checklist
A copyright notice is the familiar line, c 2026 Acme Corp., that announces who owns a work and when it was published. For works published after March 1, 1989, notice is optional, but it still delivers concrete legal benefits, chiefly foreclosing an infringer's innocent-infringement plea that can otherwise drop statutory damages to as little as $200 per work. This checklist walks a creator or adviser through composing a complete and correct notice, choosing the right symbol for copies versus sound recordings, naming the actual owner, dating revisions honestly, placing the notice where people look and embedding it in digital files, and handling derivative, collective, and government-work situations. It also pairs notice with timely registration. Confirm the date a work was first published, since the legal effect of notice turns on it.
Protection of Trade Secrets
Trade secrets are the only form of intellectual property you create simply by keeping something valuable secret and guarding it sensibly, and they can last forever if you do. This guide explains what qualifies as a trade secret under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (18 U.S.C. 1836) and the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, how misappropriation works, and the full menu of remedies, including the DTSA's dramatic ex parte civil seizure power and the case law that governs when courts actually grant it. It walks through the practical "reasonable measures" program that separates a protectable secret from an unprotectable one, the enforcement playbook from forensic investigation through injunction, and the tangle of NDAs and non-competes (including the now-dead FTC non-compete rule and the patchwork of state law). It covers the inevitable-disclosure doctrine, the Economic Espionage Act criminal track, the lessons of Waymo v. Uber, and the strategic choice between patenting an invention and keeping it secret. The aim is a single, readable map of U.S. trade secret law that a judge, a lawyer, and a curious founder can all follow.
Intellectual Property Disputes Concerning Superheroes
Superheroes are among the most valuable intellectual property on earth, and the fights over who owns them are some of the most dramatic and consequential battles in copyright and trademark law. This article explains how a fictional character becomes protectable property, why creators and their heirs keep returning to court decades after a character is born, and how copyright and trademark protect a hero from completely different angles. We walk through the marquee disputes: the decades-long Superman termination wars between the Siegel and Shuster heirs and Warner/DC, Marvel's victory over the Jack Kirby estate on work made for hire, the Ninth Circuit's ruling that the Batmobile is itself a copyrightable character in DC Comics v. Towle, the Gaiman-McFarlane fight over Spawn, and the 2024 collapse of Marvel and DC's jointly owned "Super Hero" trademark. Along the way we cover fan works and fair use after Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, cosplay and costume copyright after Star Athletica, and what all of it means for ordinary creators. The piece closes with practical takeaways, hypotheticals, a plain-English FAQ, and links to related guides.
How to License Your Patent: From Valuation to Term Sheet
This guide walks the full arc of monetizing a patent through licensing, from honestly assessing whether your patent is a licensing candidate, to valuing it under the cost, market, and income approaches, to structuring and papering the deal. It explains the Georgia-Pacific reasonable-royalty framework and the apportionment rules that constrain it, the choice between exclusive and non-exclusive grants and the field-of-use and territorial hybrids in between, and the royalty architecture of upfronts, running royalties, minimums, and milestones. It covers the protective machinery of audits, representations, warranties, and indemnity, and the doctrinal landmines every licensor must know: the Brulotte/Kimble bar on post-expiration royalties, the Lear right of a licensee to challenge validity, patent exhaustion, and patent misuse. It includes an annotated term sheet and addresses university licensing under Bayh-Dole and standard-essential patents under FRAND. It is educational, not legal advice.
Copyright Ownership, Joint Authorship, and Termination of Transfers
Copyright vests automatically in the author the moment a work is fixed, and almost everything that goes wrong afterward is a failure to move that ownership deliberately. This article explains who owns a copyright at the moment of creation, how the work made for hire doctrine reassigns that ownership to an employer and why it almost never applies to independent contractors, and what joint authorship actually requires under the divergent tests of Childress v. Taylor and Aalmuhammed v. Lee. It then covers transfers: the strict writing requirement of section 204(a), the implied nonexclusive license that fills the gap when parties forget it, recordation and the priority rules that reward it, and the diligence questions that reveal a broken chain of title. The final part addresses the termination right, an inalienable statutory power that lets authors and their heirs claw back grants after thirty-five years under section 203 or during a five-year window under section 304(c), including the notice mechanics, the derivative works exception of Mills Music v. Snyder, and why the right cannot be waived no matter what the contract says. It closes with a worked example, a diligence checklist, an FAQ, and related reading.