The legal battles between Puffco and Focus V LLC over alleged patent and trade dress infringement for the vape device PEAK havetaken some interesting twists and turns over the last few years.
In 2019, Puffco sued Focus V in Federal court in North Carolina claiming that Focus’s marketing of their vape device named Carta e rig violated Puffco’s trade dress rights for their PEAK vaporizer.
OG Article: here
View our Fair Use Policy: here
SHO Products, the maker of the Focus V Carta e rig, sued Puffco for patent infringement over the design of the vaporizer.
Puffco convinced a Federal judge that SHO Products didn’t own the patent because the original patent holder had assigned the patent to Puffco. Accordingly, the judge dismissed the suit against Puffco because SHO Products didn’t have standing to file the action because they didn’t own the patent.
In another interesting development in patent law, a judgement for $863,000 was thrown out because the alleged holder of the patent did not label the product as patented or notify the infringing device maker that the vaping device was patented before filing suit. The practical effect of the failure to label and warn is that the plaintiff will be lucky to recover a fraction of the original award.
There are some lessons to be learned by the cannabis industry from these suits over vaping devices. It is critical to register your patent and lawfully assign the patent for legal protection. Further, if a trademark, or trade dress, is to be protected, registering the trademark/dress is critical. Aggressively protecting the trademark/dress is also critical.
Additionally, labeling the patent and/or trademark is essential to protecting and enforcing the patent and trademark rights.
As the cannabis industry achieves federal legality, the USPTO will begin to register cannabis devices and trademarks.
It is essential that companies holding valuable patents and trademarks have legal counsel ready to aggressively defend their rights.
As cannabis goes more mainstream, companies and products will become valuable through name recognition.
Coke and Pepsi fight vigorously to protect their intellectual property rights, and value. Cannabis companies will need to do the same.
Commenti