Slate magazine gives us today’s chuckle.  Your daily laugh at the expense of attorneys concerns the overzealous representation of none other than corporate coffee behemoth Starbucks. According to the Slate article, lawyers for Starbucks became concerned when a bar and microbrewery in Cottleville, Missouri, began selling a stout called “Frappicino.”  Attorneys for Starbucks sent a cease and desist letter to the microbrew informing them that they were violating a registered trademark of Starbucks.   The bar owner was not amused and penned this response. At a very high level, intellectual property law is broken down into three basic categories: patent, copyright, and trademark.  Thinking about them in the context of Starbucks, patent would be the specific, unique combination of ingredients in a Frappucino, copyright would be the slogan advertising a Frappucino, and a trademark would be the name “Frappucino” or even the Starbucks logo. The owner of any of these three often has legitimate interests in protecting their intellectual property.  Basic economics instructs us that value in a thing often stems from its scarcity or …

From time to time, we will post some other developments in Texas law as we see them.  This is the first in that series. The Texas Supreme Court continued its line of cases narrowing protections for whistleblowers.  Earlier this month, the court handed down an opinion deciding whether a whistleblower’s report of alleged violations of law by a school district would receive protection under the Whistleblower Act if the reports were made only to other officials within the school district.  Existing – but recent – precedent from only a few months prior indicated that internal complaints were insufficient to fall within the ambit of the Whistleblower Act. The problem goes to the language of the statute itself and the interpretation of “law-enforcement authority” status under the Act. The Court held that such reports – made internally – were not contemplated by the Act and did not give such internal compliance officers such authority. Background A principal at a pre-K school in the Ysleta Independent School District (YISD) reported asbestos hazards at the school to the …