Cleveland rocks!

Originally posted 2014-03-05 15:01:19. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Now I have been to Cleveland a couple of times and I can’t say I actually saw this rocking take place.  I mean, this whole “rocking” concept, frankly, eludes me, as most people who have made my acquaintance for more than a minute or two since the 1980’s will attest.

I’m fine with that!

Still and all, Cleveland will rock in the fullest intellectual property sense of the word next Monday night, when LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® presents at the March 2014 meeting of the Cleveland Intellectual Property Law Association!  Look, it says right here:

I will be discussing questions raised by the pending appeal to the Federal Circuit in connection with the registration refusal by the PTO and TTAB of a trademark registration for THE SLANTS — not questions about free speech or ethnic identity, which anyone in a bar can and will opine about, but about:

1. Whether there are, or should be, any guidelines governing the use of information about a mark’s use obtained and considered by an examining attorney beyond the four corners of an application to register a trademark, and
2. Whether an individual applicant can, based on use of a mark at a given time in history regardless of how information about that use was obtained, be forever barred from registration because the use at that time was unacceptable.

I write more about all that here, for now.

Don’t worry, it will be short, and hopefully entertaining, and there will be other presentations and a talking judge and food.  Heck, you can even come to the meeting and instead of hearing my presentation, why, you can fake me out and jump in to the other CLE being offered at the same time, in which the learned Timothy P. McAnulty and P. Andrew Riley of Finnegan will discuss “Post Grant Challenges at the USPTO: Lessons Learned & Possible Strategies.”  (This appears to be a favorite topic around the Finnegan water cooler.)

That’s right:  Two patent lawyers of the illustrious Finnegan Firm with “P-period” in their names as against one LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® guy from Brooklyn.  Just saying.

Anyway, I am grateful to IP diva-in-the-making Katherine Eppley of Pearne & Gordon for suggesting that CIPLA invite me to rock in Cleveland next Monday, whatever on earth that means (I mean “the rocking” — the “invitation” I made sure to get in writing).  

And yes, I will be assiduously testing the supposed friendship of anyone even remotely nearby the event and monitoring the sign-in list to see who does and does not attend.  (As a New Yorker, of course, by “remotely nearby” in reference to a program in Cleveland, I mean anyone in or near Ohio … which includes any of those other square states abutting it, regarding which I recall distinctly from my days at Northwestern that there were several.)

And don’t give me some line that you came to the meeting but went to the Finnegan thing!  I said “rocks,” not … patents.