
HIPLA Annual Conference
10/16/2008 08:35I attended this year's HIPLA conference over the weekend. Anthony Matheny did an excellent job of rescheduling as a result of Hurricane Ike. The event was held at the Omni in Houston. The majority of the speakers were excellent. Some of the speakers of note to me were Joe Beauchamp of Jones Day who talked about inevitable disclosure. The key behind that is to get your in-house council involved during talks of hiring away from a competitor. Get a contract in place stating the new hire won't divulge trade secrets for a period of time.
Mark Thurman's "worse case" award was comical. There is a battle in Utah between an anti-mormon website and the mormon church that is being parodied. Seems the church built an almost identical website, complete with the anti-mormon's mark. The court decided that the mormon's anti-anti-mormon website was a "parody" and thus could use the mark, even though there was nothing funny about the website. It appeared to be serious.
Peter Strand of Shook, Hardy, and Bacon had a good piece on the exhaustion doctrine. The U.S. v. Univis Lens Co case discussed when a sale/license actually exhausts the patent rights. He then threw up 10 rules of exhaustion but I'll have to review the presentation for that information.
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