With trade dress being a hot topic in the news recently, you know the 28th Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference in Arlington, VA would have an entire CLE session devoted to the topic! “The Blonde, the Red Shoe, the Round-Cornered Rectangles: Debating the Frontiers of Trade Dress Law” CLE session will take place on Thursday, April 4th, from 8:30 AM until 10:00 AM in Salons I and II of the Arlington Ballroom.
“There will be 5 debates, each of them timed so our debater-panelists will really have to get their points across in a hurry,” says Mr. Erick Howard, a partner at Shartsis Friese LLP. “Based on the lively discussions we had when we were putting the panel together, attendees are going to see some great arguments.”
“I bet you are sitting there asking yourself – what in the world smartphones and stilettos have in common?!” Ms. Staci J. Riordan, a fashion attorney at Fox Rothschild LLP, teases in her blog post. “Well, I will tell you… but not just yet!”
What can be reveal about the upcoming CLE session is that the discussion will revolve around three recent cases in which trade dress status was determined by a district court, a federal appeals court, and a jury. The panelists will have a live discussion and debate about whether or not these cases reached the right result.
The program will be moderated by the Hon. Linda Kuczma, an Administrative Trademark Judge with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, VA. Additional program speakers include: Aaron Silverstein, an Intellectual Property Attorney at Saunders & Silverstein in Amesbury, MA; Michael J. Allan, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP in Washington, D.C.; Christine Haight Farley, a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C.; James Kyper, a partner at K&L Gates LLP in Pittsburgh, PA; Staci J. Riordan, a fashion attorney at Fox Rothschild LLP in Los Angeles, CA; Belinda J. Scrimenti, a partner at Pattishall McAuliffe in Chicago, IL; and Erick Howard, a partner at Shartsis Friese LLP in San Francisco, CA.
Follow the speakers of this CLE program on Twitter: Staci Riordan (@staciriordan), Christine Haight Farley (@artlawprof), and Belinda Scrimenti (@BScrimenti).
If you can’t make it to the 28th Annual ABA Intellectual Property Law Section Spring Conference this year, you can still follow all the action by following the tweets and blog entries of the ABA-IPL’s Law Student Reporters, who will be covering all the events of the Conference on Twitter. You do not have to sign up for Twitter to follow the Law Student Reports. Just bookmark http://bit.ly/IPLSpring and revisit the link from April 3-5, 2013 to follow all the action.
The “The Blonde, the Red Shoe, the Round-Cornered Rectangles: Debating the Frontiers of Trade Dress Law” CLE program will be covered by the following Law Student Reports: Franklin Graves, a second-year law student at Belmont University College of Law in Nashville, TN, Mannu Harnal, a third-year law student at University of New Hampshire School of Law in Concord, NH, and Veronica Torres, a third-year law student at Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, NY.
Red shoes image credit: garlandcannon on Flickr.