The Wall Street Journal has the following to say:

“Lawyers say a growing number of firearms owners are creating special gun trusts, which are designed to allow collectors to share and pass down firearms to loved ones without inadvertently breaking any laws. The trusts also make it easier for gun enthusiasts to procure certain restricted firearms, such as suppressors, because of a quirk in federal regulations.” Read more.

 The White House Takes Aim at Patent Trolls

Frustration with patent trolls, and momentum for reform, has been building for some time now. Today, the stakes got even higher when the White House announced that it was actively taking on the troll problem. This is big news, and not just because of the seven legislative proposals the White House recommends (more on those below). Even more important are the five executive actions the President intends to take with or without congressional help.
Read more here.

DIGITAL LAW

Tesla Stock Breaks $100 for the First Time

Tesla certainly isn’t a loser anymore.

The car company’s stock topped $100 a share for the first time ever in early trading Tuesday, following a string of good news in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Tesla reported its first profitable quarter as a company, a hugely important milestone that helped send the stock up 25% in after-hours trading from its closing price of about $55, and sent it up more than 50% in the first three days of trading afterwards.
Read more here.

SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT LAW

Google Brings Skeeball to Your Browser

Just in time for summer, Google is rolling out a modern twist on the classic boardwalk game Skeeball.

The game, called “Roll It,” can be played directly in your Chrome browser — and if you don’t already have Chrome, this is as good as an incentive as any to download it now.
Read more here.

ESTATE PLANNING

 10 More Estate Planning Questions That Might Make You Squirm

Spoiler Alert: The stork doesn’t deliver babies. But after reading this you may wish it did. The use of artificial reproductive technology is on the rise. And with it comes some murky questions involving ethics, estate planning and the law.Read more here.

If you’re scouring the Internet looking at the millions of photos that come in on a simple Google search, then think again before you copy and paste a photo to use on your website.

Getty Images owns millions of the photographs online, and they have a bot that searches the Internet looking for their photographs that were used without a valid license purchase. Getty Images notoriously sends letters to people that are caught infringing and they demand settlement payments on the upward of almost $900 a photo.

They will screen shot their photos on your website and will even contact 3^rd party creditors to collect their money.

Melfi & Associates recommends that if your want to avoid costly settlement disputes, then you should purchase your photographs outright from 3^rd party websites.

If you’ve already received a Getty Images cease and desist settlement agreement in the mail, then consult our webpage and inform yourself here. After you should contact one of our in house attorneys so we can better assess your particular circumstance.

Whose Patent is it Anyway? New Bill to End Patent Anonymity

Representative Ted Deutch (D-FL) introduced a new transparency bill last week called the End Anonymous Patents Act (H.R. 2024, PDF)—the third piece of legislation in the last year to take on the problem of patent trolls.

The bill sets out to solve what Professor Colleen Chien refers to as the “Who Owns What” problem: we currently don’t have an effective way of confirming who owns a particular patent, nor do we know what patents a particular person or company owns. A combination of poor record-keeping infrastructure and practices, as well as scheming businesses that transfer patent ownership to shell companies, has resulted in a hazy patent system where the lack of transparency has become a competitive tool. Rep. Deutch’s bill provides a welcome fix to a legitimate problem with patent transparency, but repairing one component still leaves us with a broken machine. Real patent reform must be bigger.
Read more here.

Hey, Patent Trolls. Pick on Someone Your Own Size.

The patent troll problem is not new. Trolls have been targeting companies large and small for some time, dragging productive businesses into court and extorting licensing fees that have become a nearly unavoidable tax on innovation. This is wrong.

But even worse are the trolls who target end users. These end users are small businesses, startups, and even individuals who find themselves facing lawsuit threats and licensing demands for simply using everyday products. Their stories are compelling and totally depressing.
Read more here.

DIGITAL ASSET LAW

Update to Email Privacy Law Must Go Further

Proposals to update the email privacy law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), are moving quickly in Congress. ECPA is in dire need of an update as it was written in the mid-1980s long before the advent of ubiquitous webmail and cloud storage. In the past, ECPA was used by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to obtain emails and other private online messages older than 180 days without a probable cause warrant. If law enforcement sought those same messages in the physical world, a warrant would be required. This difference is not only wrong, but also inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment. Senators Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee plan to fix this.
Read more here.

SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT LAW

Power Lawyers: 5 Music Attorneys to Know

Just look at these guys.
Read more here.

Melfi & Associates attended this week’s event at Campus Martius Park in an effort to help bring the X Games to Detroit.

There were ramps set up with BMXers and skateboarders riding in the rain’s aftermath, graffiti artists painting, live music from the Beastie Boys’ own Mixmaster Mike, drinks, and tons of people that showed up to support the cause.

Detroit is among the top 4 finalists that are eligible to host the summer X Games for the next 3 years, which would start the summer of 2014.

Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the chairman and founder of Quicken Loans, is a huge supporter of the bid.

The announcement for the winning bid is set for August 1^st.

Follow more coverage on Twitter, and stay tuned for more Melfi & Associates sports and entertainment related happenings going on around Detroit.

This is a reminder that artists should consider copyrighting their own original works so that they are entitled to greater copyright protection under the law. Melfi & Associates works with entertainers who want to protect their hard work and dedication to their craft.

Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, just bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion dollars and promised not to “screw it up.” Yahoo thinks that the purchase is going to attract younger crowds to their webpage who prefer Google or Bing.

Mayer mentioned that the acquisition would be different than Google buying YouTube in that Yahoo is not going to brand itself on the Tumblr page. The companies are going to remain entirely separate from one another.

Unless Yahoo can reinvent itself, then they are going to sink with the rest of the old search engines. Does anyone remember Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, or Infoseek?

We don’t.

While it is not necessary to hire a competent trademark attorney to file a trademark application with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), it greatly increases your trademark’s likelihood of acceptance.

A recent study by Deborah R. Gerhardt and Jon P. McClanahan, Do Trademark Lawyers Matter?,analyzed 25 years of data published by the USPTO from 1985 to 2010.

They found, through the various stages of the trademark application process, that those that hired an attorney greatly increased their likelihood of successful registry:

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 According to the Gerhardt and McClanahan,

“From our academic and practice experience, we have observed that students gain valuable analytic skills through law school that will help them understand and follow the online form.  Also, knowledge of legal barriers to registration may cause attorneys to be more discriminating in the applications they file.  We predict that having counsel will be especially beneficial at moments where the application faces an obstacle, such as an office action from the USPTO or an opposition filed by a third party.”

Melfi & Associates provides 3 comprehensive trademark service packages. We recommend that you let our team of experts handle your trademark application process. This allows your team to put your full focus on your brand. Own your investment before you have to defend it.

How a Bitcoin Transaction Actually Works

There’s a lot out there about Bitcoin transactions. We found this nifty chart to help clarify and educate our readers on how the process unfolds. FULL ARTICLE.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW

Another Bill to Fix the Patent Troll Problem… Well, Part of It

Though it was paraded around as the biggest change to patent law in half a century, the America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011 failed to address many of the patent system’s largest problems. In particular, patent trolls continue their deplorable business model of buying up patents and using the threat of litigation to force companies—frequently startups—to pay up or face ruinous legal fees. These trolls have a weapon of choice: overly broad software patents—many of which shouldn’t have been granted in the first place.FULL ARTICLE.

SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT LAW

Most Marketable…Agency?

Earlier this week SportsPro released its list of the World’s Top 50 Most Marketable Athletes. The list was created based on an athlete’s marketability over the next three years, using parameters including age, value for money and crossover appeal. Brazilian soccer player Neymar topped the list.FULL ARTICLE.

Athletes Fined Over Tweets in the U.S. and in Europe

A British soccer player playing for the French Olympique de Marseille team, Joey Barton, was suspended last week over tweets directed at Thiago Silva, a Brazilian player from rival team Paris Saint Germain. The sentence was handed down by the National Ethics Committee of the French Soccer League which found, rather surprisingly, that calling a player an “overweight ladyboy” and asking whether he was “Pre-Op or Post-Op” were inappropriate but not homophobic. Barton also called Thiago Silva a “pussy” and a “FatBoy”. Inappropriate indeed, and completely devoid of any sportsmanship.FULL ARTICLE.

The policy prevents players from “displaying or transmitting content that questions the impartiality of or otherwise denigrates a major league umpire.”

The policy, which was implemented last year, seeks to prevent using social media to comment on game politics. This is not the first, nor probably the last fine that will be implemented under the policy.

Social media policies are becoming more and more common as businesses seek to define what they expect from their employees.

At Melfi & Associates, we draft individualized media policies for companies that are enforceable. As for the Tampa Bay Rays pitchers, they will probably think twice before their next tweet.