This Friday (6/13/08) starting at 2pm at the Chicago Bar Association building [map], there will be an interesting 3-hour seminar titled “Management and Enforcement of Digital Rights on the Web.” The CBA’s Cyberlaw and Data Privacy Committee (which I’ll be chairing next year) is a co-sponsor of this event.

Topics include:

• Trademarks online
• Copyright online
• Online terms and conditions
• Conducting investigations online

Great faculty lined up:

• Chris McGeehan (Greer Burns & Crain)
• Tom Fitzsimons (Greer Burns & Crain)
• Debra Hutchings (Reed Smith)
• E. Leonard Rubin (Reed Smith)

The cost is $80 for CBA members and $140 for nonmembers.

Hope to see you there.

Windy City Marketing, Inc. v. Places Advertising, Inc., No. 07-6401 (N.D. Ill., filed November 12, 2007) [Download the complaint]

Windy City Marketing, a Chicago company, has filed a federal lawsuit against a startup competitor, Places Advertising, Inc. The suit alleges infringement of copyright allegedly owned by Windy City Marketing in certain bound marketing pieces called “inside chicago”. Windy City Marketing claims that Places Advertising has wrongfully copied the marketing materials and is distributing those to Windy City Marketing’s customers.

The big problem with the complaint is that there is no allegation that Windy City Marketing owns a registration in the works at issue. A quick read of Section 411 of the Copyright Act will reveal what’s wrong with this picture. You gotta have a registration before you can file a lawsuit for copyright infringement. For the plaintiff’s sake, thank goodness for Fed. R. Civ. P. 15.