Friday, September 18, 2009

ABA Webinar Sept. 30: "Trademark Fraud on the USPTO - A New Landscape"

The ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law will host a webinar entitled "Trademark Fraud on the USPTO - A New Landscape" on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM (EST). Details may be found here.


At the end of August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in In re Bose, overturned an ever-growing line of Trademark Trial and Appeal Board decisions enabling challengers to invalidate pending trademark applications and issued registrations on grounds of fraud - resulting from circumstances of simple inadvertence or misunderstanding. The Federal Circuit's Bose decision clarified the standard for alleging and establishing that fraud had occurred before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, making the litigation of these claims before the Board more challenging. However, even after Bose, many questions remain unanswered.

This teleconference will feature a distinguished panel of trademark experts who will discuss their views on litigating fraud claims and on best practices for trademark portfolios that may be still vulnerable to fraud claims after Bose.


For some background on the issue, see the TTABlog posting here, with comments and commentary.

The panel will include former TTAB Judge Beth A. Chapman of Oblon Spivak in Alexandria, Virginia; Charles Hieken of Fish & Richardson P.C. in Boston, who represented Bose at the TTAB and the CAFC (.mp3 of CAFC oral argument here); and Bill Barber of Pirkey Barber LLP in Austin, Texas, co-author of the AIPLA amicus brief before the CAFC. Yours truly will serve as panel moderator.

If you have a question you would like answered, please leave a comment.
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1 Comments:

At 4:43 PM, Anonymous Paul Reidl said...

I'm just not convinced that Bose was as dramatic as everyone thinks. All it did was to remove the "should have known" requirement from the standard. Regrettably, however, the decision is a bit of a muddle. But I would not be surprised to see the TTAB continue using fraud to invalidate registrations or applications where the declaration is simply not true and there is a strong and undeniable inference from the objective facts that the declarant knew that at the time. I just don't read Bose as requiring a party to prove thru direct evidence that the declarant had a malevolent intent.

 

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