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Congratulations to 3L Laura Steele, the winner of this year’s Frank DeGuire Award for the best student comment in the Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review.  Laura’s terrific comment, entitled “Actual or Hypothetical: Determining the Proper Test for Trademark Licensee Rights in Bankruptcy,” is available on SSRN.  Here is the abstract: As trademark rights become an increasingly valuable asset in Chapter 11 reorganizations, it is critical for Congress and the courts to clarify how trademarks will be treated in bankruptcy, particularly where the debtor is a trademark licensee. Without clarity, Chapter 11 reorganization may not be a viable option. This Comment urges that trademark licensees should not be stripped of a license simply because the licensee enters bankruptcy. Rather, where a licensee intends only to continue using an existing license under the terms of the existing agreement with the licensor, the licensee’s use of that license should be uninterrupted during reorganization. This recommendation, contrary to the position of trademark licensors, will not invade the province of trademark owners to control their marks. To support this recommendation, this Comment examines the statutory frameworks of both ... Read more..

Next week marks both the opening day of the baseball season in Milwaukee and the finals of the Jenkins Moot Court competition.  Few recognize the historical connection between these two events.  The moot court competition is named for James G. Jenkins, the first dean of the Law School whose bust adorns the waiting area outside the elevator stop on the second floor of Sensenbrenner Hall.  What is not very well known is that Jenkins was also instrumental in the re-establishment of baseball in Milwaukee after the Civil War.  The first modern baseball club, i.e., one playing by the so-called New York rules that mark the beginning of baseball as we now know it, was established in Milwaukee in 1860.  This amateur organization, known as the Milwaukee Baseball Club, featured more members of the bar than any other occupation.  Jenkins arrived in Milwaukee (from New York) in 1857, and was probably a member of this first club. Unfortunately, the Milwaukee Baseball Club folded during the Civil War, and Milwaukee reverted to the status of a “city with no modern baseball club.”  However, baseball ... Read more..

Congratulations to Professor Alison Julien, who was recently elected to serve on the board of directors of the Legal Writing Institute. The Legal Writing Institute (LWI) is the largest organization of legal writing professors and the second largest U.S. organization of law school professors.  LWI has over 2,100 members from 38 countries. Read more..

After three intense preliminary rounds of competition, four teams have advanced to the semifinal rounds of the 2010 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition.  Please congratulate the following teams:  Margaret Delain and Tiffany Winter Gabe Johnson-Karp and Alexandra Grimley Ashley Roth and Emily Lonergan Nathaniel Wojan and Nicole Kowalski  The semifinal rounds will take place on Wednesday, March 31 at 6:00 p.m., followed by a reception in Eisenberg Hall.  All members of the Law School community are invited to attend both the semifinal and final rounds of competition.  The final round will take place on Tuesday, April 6 at 6:00 p.m. at the Federal Courthouse, with a reception immediately following at the Milwaukee Club.  Congratulations to all the participants of this year’s Jenkins Competition:  April Ashby Christopher Bowen James Burrows Margaret Delain Peter Diercks Colin Forester-Hoare Laurie Frey Alexandra Grimley Rebecca Hammock Gabe Johnson-Karp Sarah Knutson Nicole Kowalski Rebecca Lindstrom Emily Lonergan Meghan Risser Ashley Roth Andrew Spillane Kevin Terry Tiffany Winter Nathaniel Wojan Read more..

I’ve long been interested in copyright and games—an interest that began with copyright and video games, but worked its way backwards to consider games generally. Games exist at the boundary of copyright law: they seem to include much that is protectable, and yet there is a general rule in copyright doctrine that games are not copyrightable. (For more, see my four-part series on PrawfsBlawg in 2008, in particular Part III and Part IV; also this post). I’ve now uploaded a new paper to SSRN, Games and Other Uncopyrightable Systems, that explains the purpose and argues for the continued vitality of that rule. Some may recognize the paper as what used to be Part I—the “background” section—of my long-awaited video games paper. The questions surrounding the copyrightability of games proved to be so intricate that it required a separate paper just to address them. In short, games are uncopyrightable because they are systems—a conclusion that is only moderately helpful, because systems themselves are not well understood. I therefore tackle that issue as well. Here is the abstract: This article solves two puzzles in ... Read more..