Re: Abulhasan v. Uniroyal-Goodrich

From: Keith Taber <ket354[_at_]yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:30:29 -0500

I worked for a patent attorney who claimed to represent a tire company in the past. His story was that tire design has more to do with appearance than anything else, and that the tire companies typically get desing patents and copyrights rather than arguing the utility of small design changes. I suppose the "Aquatread" may be the major exception to this, but I have never looked.

This is in direct oppositon to my experience drafting patent claims on oilfield drilling bits where desing patents may have been more appropriate, yet we toiled at length to explain why minor modifications made a difference.

In both fields performance is very hard to define and the decision is made in a venue divorced from the performance. different tires are better on different cars in different conditions as different bits are better at different rpms in different soils at different depths. You buy tires at a tire store without getting to "try them on" and you buy bits at an oil show or out of a catalog without getting to "try them out". Because of this, looks mean a lot more than the engineers like to admit.

So, it is less of an intrusion, and more of an allocation between the various types of IP.

Keith

• Terry Carroll <carroll[_at_]tjc.com> wrote:

> I recently stumbled on the case of Abulhasan v.
> Uniroyal-Goodrich, 2005 NY
> Slip Op 00296 (N.Y, Jan. 20, 2005), online at
>

<http://www.courts.state.ny.us/reporter/3dseries/2005/2005_00296.htm>.
>
> The opinion is a dismissal for spoliation of
> evidence in a products
> liability case involving a defective tire; I
> thought the following
> passage was interesting:
>
> ...While [plaintiff's forensic tire expert]
> Nonnamaker asserted that
> the tread pattern on the remaining fragments of
> the subject tire were
> "unique" to UGTC [Uniroyal-Goodrich Tire Co.] and
> that UGTC has
> copyrighted same, he offered no factual basis for
> such assertion.
>
> I'd never heard of a tire company claiming copyright
> on a tire tread?
> This would seem to me to be far over that "dividing
> line" separating
> mechanical or utilitarian aspects from copyrightable
> expressive form of a
> pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work.
> Nonetheless, I see a number of
> copyright registrations with the BF Goodrich Company
> as claimant for
> things such as "Ming stripe," described as
> "Alternating bands of various
> widths" (VA-66-560); " Textural" ("Col. print on
> plastic; Narrow, parallel
> bands of various widths") (VA-66-561); and
> "Cobblestone stripe"
> (VA-119-160).
>
> I just thought this was an interesting intrusion of
> IP law into an
> unexpected area.
>
>
>

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