Intellectual Property

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When building a successful brand, businesses may more often focus on protecting their name, logo, and other trademarks, but a brand’s value can extend far beyond these traditional identifiers. The colors, packaging, product design, and overall visual presentation that customers associate with your business can become valuable assets of their own. This is where trade dress protection comes into play.

For many businesses, the way a product looks is just as important as the product itself. A distinctive design…
Continue Reading Trade Dress Matters: Protecting Your Brand’s Look, Feel, and Competitive Advantage

If you are of a certain age, and occupy that certain point on the nerd spectrum, you’re probably familiar with Commander Keen.

Commander Keen was one of the first major games created by the team that would later become id Software, the company responsible for Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake. Those games did more than sell a lot of copies. They helped turn the first-person shooter into one of the most dominant genres in video games, with Wolfenstein…
Continue Reading Keen Dreams: Moonlighting, Softdisk, and the Unexpected Road to Castle Wolfenstein

We at Ogden Glazer + Schaefer literally have a written directive to “geek out.” That may be about legal stuff or other stuff. But be passionate and interested and maybe a tiny bit obsessed. One of those things that I geek out about is geographic indications. So be warned. Geographical indicators are special marks that help indicate that certain places in the world imbibe things that come from that region with unique attributes. Roquefort cheese and blue cheese…
Continue Reading Love for the Driftless

When people think about IP, they often envision tech companies, software developers, and research and development labs—not construction companies. In reality, most companies, including those in construction, manage far more IP than they may realize. From brand identity to proprietary building methods, these assets can be as valuable as cranes, trucks, or tools, and, like any asset, they need protection.

Below are key areas where construction companies should take a closer look at how they manage and protect their

…
Continue Reading Why Construction Companies Must Protect Their Intellectual Property Now

With the 2026 FIFA World Cup set to be the largest tournament in history, businesses across the United States, Canada, and Mexico are preparing marketing campaigns designed to capitalize on the excitement surrounding the event. However, before incorporating World Cup-themed branding into advertisements, promotions, or social media content, businesses should understand that FIFA aggressively protects its intellectual property rights.

FIFA owns an extensive portfolio of trademarks, copyrights, and other intellectual property associated with the tournament, including official names, logos,…
Continue Reading Avoid the Red Card: What Businesses Need to Know About FIFA’s Intellectual Property Rules During the 2026 World Cup

Think of all the travel centers you know. Now, think of which one of those has the largest convenience store with 75,593 square feet. If you still cannot figure it out, think of the smiling beaver wearing a red hat with a yellow circular background. You guessed it, we are going to talk about Buc-ee’s!

Buc-ee’s is a cultural phenomenon that, despite having over 50 locations and spanning over 12 states, has a legal team that actively monitors …
Continue Reading Don’t Mess With the Beaver: What the Buc-ee’s Lawsuit Says About Trademark Enforcement 

When a business owner sells only part of their company, social media accounts are too often treated as an afterthought. Yet these accounts are an overlooked asset holding enormous value: brand recognition, customer goodwill, and a strong existing audience that both sides of the transaction may expect to use after closing.

In scenarios where one location, division, or product line of a business is being sold while the rest is being retained, a single social media account for the

…
Continue Reading Who Owns the Social Media Account? Managing Digital Assets in Partial Business Sales

Vector Trio Astronaut Silhouettes with Guns on an Alien Planet Stock Illustration
Vector Trio Astronaut Silhouettes with Guns on an Alien Planet Stock Illustration

Dua Lipa sued Samsung for using a photograph of her on boxes of TVs sold by Samsung. She accused Samsung of copyright and trademark infringement and of violating her “right of publicity”. The photograph is one of Dua Lipa, but more importantly for the copyright claim, she owns the copyright to the photo. Without her permission to use it, they have to show why they can use it. Given they were using the photograph on the packages of the…
Continue Reading Get Permission, OK?

Conversational AI Concept - Natural Language Processing - NLP - Computational Linguistics Concept
Conversational AI Concept - Natural Language Processing - NLP - Computational Linguistics Concept - AI-based Virtual Assistant Generating Voice as a Soud Wave

AI-generated impersonation is real, and it’s a problem. No question.

The legal challenge is identifying existing bodies of law to support claims and provide meaningful remedies. Copyright? Contract? Unfair competition? Privacy? Publicity? Kind of, but none of those fit the facts very well. All are like forcing a round peg into a square hole.

Recently, celebrities have started filing applications for US trademark registration to see if trademark…maybe…could be useful on this front. That’s all it is: a “maybe.”…
Continue Reading The Noise Over AI-Impersonation

At some point in every organization, legal feedback arrives at the wrong moment. The team is close to launch, a deal is almost across the line, and then counsel comes back with redlines, qualifiers, replacement language, and things that cannot be said the way they were written.

It lands as interruption. The work was moving, a decision had been made, and suddenly that decision is open again. The concerns may be completely valid, but they can still feel like…
Continue Reading Legal Gets Lighter When It Becomes Infrastructure

Not all business information is created equal, especially when it comes to legal protection. Companies often use the terms “trade secrets” and “confidential information” interchangeably, but under Wisconsin law, the distinction is meaningful and can significantly impact both risk exposure as well as available remedies. Understanding how these categories of information differ is essential for businesses to protect valuable business assets and navigate any potential disputes.

1. What Is a Trade Secret?

A trade secret is a specific category…
Continue Reading Not All Secrets Are Created Equal: Trade Secrets versus Confidential Business Information

Book about Defamation Law and gavel.
Book about Defamation Law and gavel.

A new lawsuit filed by Lebohang “Lebo M” Morake, the Grammy‑winning composer behind the iconic opening chant in Disney’s The Lion King, raises important questions about defamation, comedy, and reputational harm. Morake has sued comedian Learnmore “Jonasi” Mwanyenyeka for $27 million, alleging that a joking “translation” of the chant during a podcast appearance damaged his reputation by misrepresenting the meaning of the lyrics to a global audience.

At the center of the dispute is a viral podcast clip

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Continue Reading Defamation or Comedy? Lion King Composer’s Lawsuit Tests the Limits of Reputation Protection

It’s springtime. According to my inbox, graphic designers consider this the best of times to “refresh” your logo.

Cool.

Before relegating the old, though, consider the trademark implications.

United States trademark registrations can be “standard character” — which means the registration covers words in the mark regardless of how they are depicted visually — or, they can be “design” registrations. That means the registration covers only the particular design as depicted in the original drawing file.

And US trademark…
Continue Reading How the ‘Logo Refresh’ Can Wreck Your Trademark

AI copyright and law concept with magnifying glass and wooden blocks
Magnifying glass and wooden blocks with AI chip copyright and justice scale icons representing artificial intelligence copyright ethics and legal regulation concept

Under the Copyright Act, anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner is an infringer of the copyright. On top of that, the Supreme Court has also recognized two categories of secondary liability. Secondary liability happens when a party is liable for the copyright infringement of another. Those two categories are “contributory” liability and “vicarious” liability.

Contributory liability has been in the news lately as the Supreme Court provided its decision on Cox Communications, …
Continue Reading Infringers Infringe – Not Internet Service Providers

Most of the public conversation about AI still focuses on the technology itself. Is it safe? Is it biased? Which company is building the most powerful model?

Those questions matter. But when the government uses AI to help make decisions that shape people’s lives, a different question comes into view. This strikes me as more a governance question than a technical one. Who gets to decide what is permissible, what is prohibited, and what kind of oversight is required…
Continue Reading When the State Buys AI, Who Decides the Limits?

There is a common assumption in the business world: If you paid for it, you own it. As laid out in one of Erin’s earlier posts, that is not always a case with IP. To quickly summarize, the default under copyright law is that whoever creates the thing owns the copyright, even if someone else paid to have it created. The exception to this is a “work made for hire,” where the person paying is the one who…
Continue Reading Setting Yourself Up to Own What You Think You Own