Consider this: 83 percent of marketers have indicated that social media is important for their businesses, according to the Social Media Examiner. In 2013, spending on social media ads in the U.S. was $6.2 billion, accounting for nearly 14 percent of all online advertising. And, according to the SocialTimes, businesses have projected doubling their social media marketing budgets in the next five years.
The show’s over. The fat lady has sung. Elvis has left the building. The "King" is dead. On Aug. 22, 2011, the Ninth Circuit, in Flexible Lifeline Sys. Inc. v. Precision Lift Inc., No. 10-35987, 2011 (D. Mont. Aug. 22, 2011), used such popular catchphrases to emphasize that its holding in Elvis Presley Enters. Inc. v. Passport Video, 349 F.3d 622 (9th Circuit 2003), was overruled. The Elvis Presley case had upheld long-standing precedent in the Ninth Circuit: If copyright owners established a likelihood of success on the merits, courts could just presume that, absent injunctive relief, they likely would suffer irreparable harm. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s holdings in eBay and Winter, the Ninth Circuit held that this presumption was no longer viable.
On November 25 of last year, Daniel C. DeCarlo explained the “growing rift between the Second Circuit and everywhere else” as to whether purchase of another’s trademark as a search-engine keyword, or use of another’s trademark in Web site metadata, constitutes “use in commerce” for trademark infringement purposes.
A federal appellate court recently became the first to weigh in on a narrow but increasingly relevant issue of copyright law that frequently revolves around the use or modification of software: whether an accused infringer of an unregistered copyright in software may “seek a federal declaratory judgment to clear up whether [its] actions are infringing even though the copyright holder threatens future infringement litigation.” According to the broadly worded holding of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Stuart Weitzman LLC v. Microcomputer Resources Inc., 542 F.3d 859, 867 (11th Cir. 2008), the clear answer is, “No.”