How to search for lawsuits where I know the plaintiff&#39;s name and a brief outline of the facts? The Astronomy SE question Did a watch company really try to sue radio astronomers for using the word &quot;pulsar&quot;? If so, which astronomers? includes the following quote from Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the rebound radio astronomer who discovered pulsars: These days as you know the name has traveled. There's watches called pulsars, certainly in the UK there's models of Nissan cars, you can sometimes find geraniums called pulsars, same name. I'm told that in the United States the watch company tried suing the radio astronomers for use of the name! The question there in Astronomy asks if this lawsuit happened and if so, which astronomers were sued. Here however I would like to ask how to search for lawsuits where the Hamilton Watch Company may have sued astronomers or astronomical organizations for using the word &quot;pulsar&quot; in a way that infringes somehow on their (potentially trademarked) Pulsar watch. If a byproduct of that answer happens to be an answer to that question as well, please feel free to post an answer to that question there. Some information that might be used in constructing a search: Notes from the video Jocelyn Bell Burnell Special Public Lecture: The Discovery of Pulsars (video cued at 48:37) Jocelyn Bell Burnell, winner of the 2018 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, delivered a special talk at Perimeter Institute about her 1967 discovery of pulsars and her remarkable career in physics. Note that Dr. Bell Burnell raises her hand (perhaps in victory?) when she mentions this, and in the same context mentions the suggesting party of the term Anthony R. Michaelis: Whilst at the Daily Telegraph, in 1968, Michaelis was the first person to coin and use the term &quot;Pulsar&quot; to describe the discovery of Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish of the &quot;Pulsating Radio star&quot; in 1967. From Wikipedia's Pulsar (watch): In 1970, Pulsar was a brand of the American Hamilton Watch Company which first announced that it was making and bringing the LED watch to market. It was developed jointly by American companies Hamilton and Electro/Data Inc. In spring 1972, the first Pulsar watch was marketed by Hamilton Watch (the parent company, not the Hamilton Watch Division). With an 18-carat gold case, the world's first all-electronic digital watch was also the first to use a digital display – created with light-emitting diodes (LEDs). A button was pressed to display the time. The first Pulsar initially sold for $2100 ($13,400 in 2020 dollars).
Given the following: We know the name of the plaintiff, The name is likely to be unique so that there won't be too many cases involving a different party with the same name, and The plaintiff is a company so it is not likely to have been involved in an overwhelming number of cases (as opposed to e.g. the IRS); The approach I would use would be to search a legal case database such as Westlaw for all cases where Hamilton Watch Company is a party, and review the abstract for each case that I find. In this case we also have a relatively rare keyword, &quot;pulsar&quot; so we can narrow down the results by putting that in the search as well. However there are several caveats: You will only find cases which went far enough that the court made a decision. Your quote says &quot;I'm told that in the United States the watch company tried suing the radio astronomers for use of the name&quot;. That sounds like pretty unreliable third hand information. It's quite possible that they merely sent a cease and desist letter and that got reinterpreted as &quot;tried suing&quot; by the time it was said by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Even if they did sue, the majority of cases are settled out of court without ever seeing trial, which means you are unlikely to find any formal record of it and your best hope may be media articles if it was high profile enough. Large companies often have complex corporate structures involving parents and subsidiaries so the suing party's name may not actually be what you think it is. That certainly seems to be the case here, so you may have to start searching for other company names within the group. Not all cases are reported in which case you are less likely to find them. My jurisdiction is england-and-wales but I surprised myself by discovering that my Westlaw access allows me to login to the US version as well. I found no relevant cases for any of the following searches (based on various companies that have been part of the same group as Hamilton Watch Co over the years): &quot;hamilton&quot; in the party name and &quot;pulsar&quot; in the text. &quot;buren&quot; in the party name and &quot;pulsar&quot; in the text. &quot;swatch&quot; in the party name and &quot;pulsar&quot; in the text. &quot;SSIH&quot; in the party name and &quot;pulsar&quot; in the text. &quot;HMW&quot; in the party name and &quot;pulsar&quot; in the text. The only vaguely related thing I found was when I searched for &quot;watch&quot; as the party name and found this case involving a &quot;pulsar&quot; trademark for watches owned by Seiko Kabushiki Kaisha. It has nothing to do with the purported facts in your question though.
I am answering primarily with regard to the U.S. Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. § 1501 et seq.) and state trademark laws in the U.S., but except as noted, these concepts are widely honored internationally in trademark law. As a general rule, generic names cannot be trademarked. Thus, you can't trademark "liquor store" for a liquor store, or "Calendar" for a calendar, but you might be able to trademark "liquor store' for a copying machine line, or "Calendar" for a perfume. Sometimes a trademark can be obtained for a stylized logo incorporating a generic name (e.g. "liquor store" in bold pink 48 point comic-sans), but to be valid, the trademark must disclaim any assertion of rights in the mere genetic words themselves. Also, sometimes a trademark that is descriptive but not truly generic, like "Palisade Red" for red wine made in Palisade, Colorado (as opposed to the truly generic name "red wine"), can acquire what is known as a "secondary meaning" through exclusive use over a period of time while registered with the Patent and Trademark Office, without contest from anyone else. If it meets these requirement it can win an entitlement to trademark protection. But, the nuances of this particular route to trademark protection are particular to U.S. Lanham Act (which is the name of the federal trademark law in the U.S.). Domain names and entity names in a particular jurisdiction are somewhat different. While it is possible for two competing products or firms to share a generic name, it is not possible for two owners to have precisely the same domain name or precisely the same entity name in the same jurisdiction, even if the firms seeking the same name sell completely dissimilar types of products. For example, there can only be one: "Calendar.com" domain name, even if one company uses the name "Calendar" to sell calendars and the other company uses the name "Calendar" to sell perfume. In those cases, however, it is relatively straightforward to determine what names are and are not taken.
We can't tell you if you can do that or not, because that would be specific legal advise. You should consult an attorney who specializes in trademark law to get an estimation of how risky it would be to use that name. So I am just giving you a couple general pointers. Names are not protected by copyright, but by trademarks. The purpose of trademarks is to prevent consumer confusion. They are supposed to prevent someone from selling a product under a name which consumers might mistake for official merchandise of someone else. Media companies in particular tend to be very protective of their trademarks, because merchandising is often one of their main sources of revenue. And they don't want to share that revenue with people creating knockoff products. Also, they must fight for their trademark in court, because when they only enforce it selectively, then they risk that a court will consider the mark so widely used already that it is no longer worth protecting. But the show is from the 1950s. Is the trademark still protected after all that time? Maybe. There are registered trademarks and unregistered trademarks. Registered trademarks, which usually but not always are followed by an &quot;®&quot; symbol, need to be renewed in regular intervals. So if someone still pays for the renewal, it might still be a protected trademark. Unregistered trademarks, which usually but not always are followed by a &quot;™&quot; symbol, are protected as long as they are &quot;used in commerce&quot;. Which means that if the IP owner of that show still sells products branded as &quot;Winky Dink and you&quot;, they can probably still claim unregistered trademark protection. In order to find out, you would need to do your own research or pay your attorney to do a trademark research for you. Are your proposed names even a trademark violation? Perhaps, perhaps not. That's for a court to decide. Personally I think that &quot;Winky Dink and Me&quot; is more infringing than &quot;My Winky Dink Syndrome&quot;, because the first is a lot closer to the original name and brand image, giving it a higher likeliness of causing consumers to mistake it for an official &quot;Winky Dink and You&quot; product. But that's an argument you got to make in court. Estimating the chance that the judge will side with you and how much in legal costs it will take you to get to the point where you are even going to have the opportunity to make that argument is a job for your attorney.
What Big Tech is doing is spending a lot of money on lawyers and appeals – doesn't matter if it costs millions if you can make money in the meanwhile. Facebook stores a lot of user data in the US. Initially, this was allowed because the US was recognized as offering an adequate level of data protection under the Safe Harbor and later the Privacy Shield Framework. Then Schrems I and Schrems II happened and the adequacy recognition was ruled to be invalid. Does Facebook pull back their user data? No. The GDPR offers alternative reasons why you might process data in foreign countries, such as “standard contractual clauses” (SCCs) or “binding corporate rules” (BCRs). Now, Facebook claims that they are using SCCs. Is this valid? Almost certainly not due to the issues of US law analyzed in the Schrems II case, but it can take years for the next round of court cases to work its way through the system. And when Facebook's use of SCCs is ruled invalid they will probably try BCRs next, and once that is over a decade will have passed and the US might actually have achieved an adequate privacy level by then. You do not have Facebook-style money to spend on lawyers and endless rounds of appeals, so you should avoid legally risky things such as outsourcing data processing activities to companies in the US (this doesn't mean you can't be compliant if you are a US entity). I mentioned adequacy decision previously. There is a list of countries that the EU considers to be sufficiently safe. Currently, the more notable countries involve Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, in addition to EU/EEA countries of course. If you want to process data in a location that is OK for both the UK and the US, then looking at companies in one of these countries is a good idea. For example, if most of your users are in the US but you would like your servers to be in a country with an EU adequacy decision, then looking at Canada could make sense. Even outside of this list, you can process data if you implement additional safeguards via SCCs. However, this requires a case by case analysis of the legal environment in that country. One problem with the US is that it has national security laws that impose requirements on companies in a manner that is incompatible with SCCs. A company bound by these US laws cannot enter into such a contract where it guarantees the privacy of your user's data. Countries other than the EU have much more tedious data residency laws. The GDPR does not impose any data residency requirements in the sense that data must not leave a particular country – you just have to ensure that the data is properly protected. In contrast, Russia and China have real data residency requirements that are fundamentally incompatible with the GDPR.
tl;dr No, N.Y. Times v. Sullivan established the actual malice standard in the context of defamation. It is not illegal for a public figure to claim the sun revolves around the Earth unless some other law intervenes (maybe something fact-dependant like fraud or lying under oath). Background Here's an example of how N.Y. Times would work in California. Under California law, slander, along with libel, are the defamation torts. See Cal. Civ. Code. § 44. The First Amendment limits California’s slander law by requiring public figures prove actual malice when they want to sue someone for defaming them. Khawar v. Globe Int’l, 19 Cal. 4th 254, 262 (1998). (The Supreme Court got involved in N.Y. Times in the first place because of the First Amendment implications on the States' defamation laws.) In turn, "actual malice" means a statement was made "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false." Khawar, 19 Cal. 4th at 275 (citing N.Y. Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 279–80 (1964)). As to knowledge, California courts consider only actual—not constructive—knowledge. Comedy III Prods., Inc. v. Gary Saderup, Inc., 25 Cal. 4th 387, 398 (2001). In turn, actual knowledge "consists in express information of fact." I.E. Assoc. v. Safeco Title Ins. Co., 39 Cal. 3d 281, 285 (1985). This is a bunch of lawyer-speak, but it basically sets up a pretty high bar for the public figure who is trying to prove defamation. Again, N.Y. Times doesn't have to do with barring public figures from making non-defamatory false statements. You'd have to look to other areas of law about false representations or lying under oath for a claim against the politician. california
This is the earliest dispute resolution clause I can find for Patreon. Some points to note: It calls up (as do all subsequent revisions) JAMS Streamlined Arbitration Rules &amp; Procedures, These allow the consolidation of arbitration’s between different parties over the same issue, Patreon’s liability is limited to the amount collected from the particular user. Do Patreon's terms of service cause Patreon to lose a minimum sum of money to arbitration costs in all cases, even if the claim is immediately rejected? Not necessarily. As stated above, Patreon can ask that the arbitrations be consolidated. I see no reason why the request wouldn’t be granted. That way they only pay for one. Alternatively, they can simply pay out their maximum liability if that is less than the expected costs. For many users, it’s likely the commissions they have paid will be less than their $250 filing fee. If yes, is Patreon required to go through full arbitration for each individual claim made? Or is there some mechanism to avoid additional costs for subsequent claims that are essentially identical to one that was already decided? There are no precedents set in arbitration so each has to be decided individually. However, it’s likely there will be only one arbitration, see above. If yes, roughly what number of plaintiffs would be required for the combined claims to bankrupt (or seriously damage) a company like Patreon? Well, it depends if they are insured or not. If they are insured for legal costs then the question is how much to damage their insurer. And the answer is - a lot. Patreon has revenues in the tens of millions - insurance companies work in the billions. If they aren’t insured, there would need to be a significant number (far more than 72). Realistically, this is little more than a minor inconvenience.
In Egbert v. Boule, 596 U.S. ___ (2022), the Supreme Court held that &quot;there is no Bivens action for First Amendment retaliation.&quot; The Court was unanimous on this point. This means that right now, there is no way to sue for a damages remedy for First Amendment retaliation by federal officials. The majority said that &quot;Congress, not the courts, is better suited to authorize such a damages remedy.&quot;
Amazon and most similar vendors (e.g. Wal-Mart) requires vendors to warrant to them that the products sold do not violate intellectual property laws and indemnifying Amazon for any harm it suffers if the representation is inaccurate. (I came to learn this in intellectual property litigation involving a Wal-Mart supplier and in separate patent infringement attorney malpractice litigation involving other vendors of different firms.) But it doesn't generally do any independent due diligence to confirm that these representations are true. As a practical matter, determining if something infringes any existing patent is a non-trivial matter, and even in cases where patent infringement lawsuits are brought by lawyers in court who have done due diligence, the validity of the patent is upheld in only about 50% of the cases that go to trial. The basic problem is that there is no definitive way to index patents that isn't vulnerable to an invention which is infringed being described in a different way than you are conceptualizing it for your search. Generally speaking, simply buying a patent infringing good as an end user in the good faith belief that it is not infringing is not a violation of patent law or actionable, and the knowledge that large firms require representations with legal consequences from their vendors probably suffices to show good faith. But if you plan to use the purchased good in some product that will be resold to others that incorporates it, that might be an infringement. If you are a prospective vendor, there are firms that specifically do patent searchers to determine if there is an infringement, but they aren't cheap. Typically the fee would start at $5,000-$10,000 and go up from there, and typically that is for a non-guaranteed search. An opinion letter from a patent practitioner would be necessary to be really sure (assuming that the patent practitioner or non-patent practitioner search doesn't find a clear infringement which could happen quickly and be cheap by comparison) and that would be much more expensive, maybe $25,000-$100,000, if it wasn't a particularly close case. On the other hand, if what you are primarily concerned about is the design of the bit that plugs into the Apple product, rather than all aspects of the product, it is a relatively trivial matter to determine if the connector involves an industry standard which is either in the public domain or widely available for license at a modest price for manufacturers, in which Apple does not itself claim a patent, or a proprietary design, in which Apple claims rights. USB-C connections, for example, are an industry standard connector, discussed here, which would give you some further leads. In contrast, earlier Apple-promoted (and developed) Lightning and MagSafe connectors, are proprietary connectors, which would potentially be infringing and would require more analysis.