Last month we reported on the unusual "right of publicity" case involving Harris Faulkner and Hasbro ("A plastic hamster by any other name..."). You may recall that Hasbro, a toy manufacturer, released a line of plastic toy animals with real sounding names, including...
In the world of trademarks, the success or failure of trademark infringement lawsuits are measured by the "likelihood of confusion" standard. Broadly speaking, this means that if consumers are likely to be confused (or, better yet, actually are confused) about the...
If a major toy manufacturer named a plastic toy hamster after you, would you be upset? Flattered? Angry enough to file a lawsuit in federal court seeking a permanent injunction and monetary damages of more than $5 million? Well, if you're FOX News personality Harris...
If you're a fan of the NFL, then you remember last year's Super Bowl. With time running out, the Seattle Seahawks were a play away from scoring the game-winning touchdown when a controversial play call led to an interception by New England and the championship...
As we've previously reported (and with apologies to the author), the grapes of copyright wrath have been trampled by the U.S. court system over the past ten years in a series of lawsuits filed by the descendants of John Steinbeck against one another. With books like...
As noted in part 1 of this article from the July 2015 issue we discussed our fictional account of acquiring a mobile home park through EBay. The lens we used focused on acquiring a mobile home park as a business (i.e., a going concern). This article will focus on the...
Most Americans could probably find Cuba on a map (or at least identify it as one of the larger islands in the Caribbean off the coast of Florida). But if you asked them to tell you what else they know about the country, they would probably have a hard time recalling...
There is a story that an investor bought a mobile home park on Ebay, the popular online auction site. It is unclear how proper due diligence can be done when acquiring a park in that manner. There are a lot of moving parts to acquiring and operating a mobile home...
As noted in part 1 of this article from the May 2015 issue there are usually at least two types of liens. Both of these lien types are "enforced" - or collected in a similar fashion. For a warehouse lien, the park can begin to enforce the warehouse lien when the...
Thousands of them occur every year, and yet very few people have a grasp on what the value or purpose of a warehouse lien sale is. Every state has its own statutory scheme due to the mixed nature of "real and personal" property that is inherit in the manufactured...
