Dane E. Johnson

Dane Johnson’s practice concentrates on independent filmmakers who want to develop, finance, produce, and distribute professional film and scripted television projects.

He concentrates on helping clients accomplish their cinematic visions, protect their legal interests, and monetize their creative assets. Along with handling entertainment transactions from development through delivery of the final project, structuring new business entities, and advising on literary property acquisitions and other copyright matters, film finance, and the legal aspects of film production, Dane assists film and television production companies in navigating the effects of COVID-19 on the film and television industry. He also counsels clients on choosing, searching, and registering trademarks as well as avoiding liability when using them onscreen.

Dane is admitted to practice in California and Oregon. With a creative background including an undergraduate degree from Art Center College of Design, he brings a unique understanding to the legal issues affecting content creators and producers.

University of Oregon School of Law

J.D. (2008) | Law

2005 - 2008

Honors: Order of the Coif

Art Center College of Design

B.A. (1988) | Advertising

1985 - 1988

Honors: Honors

Attorney

DeepFocus Law

2008 - Current

Statute of Anne-imals: Should Copyright Protect Sentient Non-Human Creators

Animal Law

2008

Cages, Clinics, and Consequences: The Chilling Problems of Controlling Special-Interest Extremism

Oregon Law Review

2007

Order of the Coif

Order of the Coif

2008

The Order of the Coif is a national honor society for law school graduates who attended member schools. Each year it extends invitations to the top 10% of graduating J.D. students by grade point average.

California

State Bar of California

ID Number: 331885

Since 2020

Oregon

Since 2008

U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon

Since 2008

• Free Consultation
• Credit Cards Accepted
• Rates, Retainers and Additional Information
  I accept flat fees.

Entertainment & Sports Law

Intellectual Property

Trademarks

Trademark Litigation, Trademark Registration

Q. Registered a trademark, however it appears as abandoned or failure to response. Is there a quick solution to this?

March 22, 2022

A: The USPTO record for the CELOSA ROSE trademark application shows a status of abandoned “because the applicant failed to respond or filed a late response to an Office action.” The records also show that the USPTO requested that the applicant “either provide documentation to support applicant’s domicile address or appoint a U.S. licensed attorney.” It is sometimes possible to revive a trademark that has unintentionally been abandoned by filing a Petition to Revive Abandoned Application - Failure to Respond Timely to Office Action form. But the petition must be filed within two months of the issue date of the notice of abandonment. If the deadline has passed, an abandoned trademark cannot be revived. Registration might still be possible with a new application. A good step would be retaining an experienced trademark lawyer to search for whether the desired mark still appears available. Someone else might have filed the same or a similar application while the previous application was pending. An attorney can also assist in handling any other Office actions and moving the application to a successful trademark registration.

Q. How do I get my trademark up to date

January 11, 2022

A: Missing deadlines happens to trademark owners sometimes. Deadlines are usually long, but that makes them easy to forget. So don’t be too hard on yourself. If you mean that a federal trademark registration was cancelled due to failure to file a required declaration of continued use, the trademark may be able to be revived. It depends on whether there is a valid reason the declaration was not filed. It is also important to know when the Trademark Office issued a Notice of Abandonment. A Petition to Revive must be filed within 60 days of the date on the notice. If you mean something else by your question, please provide further facts so a better answer can be given. If the trademark cannot be revived, then a new application for registration will need to be filed. Whether the mark can be registered again will depend on whether someone else has already applied for and registered it. A good step to take for a mark that is important to your business would be to work with experienced trademark legal counsel. Important deadlines and other issues that can affect a mark can be monitored while there is still plenty of time to handle them.

Q. I want to write a medical drama. How do I know whether it plagiarizes/infringes on another or is illegal?

January 7, 2022

A: You’ll probably want to make the medical scenes in your drama accurate but not so much because of a legal reason. Professional screenwriters often use medical consultants to provide realistic context to their stories for film and television. Scripts also go through extensive clearance for potential copyright and trademark issues before they are produced. But there are some parts of any genre drama that no show can exclusively use. In copyright law, these are referred to as “scènes à faire”, which means basically scenes that are such a part of the genre that a story could not be told without them. Specific sequences of these kinds of scenes could still be protected by copyright, so it is not any kind of permission to just copy plots of your favorite shows. But making up your own stories is not an infringement of copyright just because they are about the same themes. An example of unprotectible scenes a faire from another genre would be police stories. As one court has said, “[f]oot chases and the morale problems of policemen, not to mention the familiar figure of the Irish cop, are venerable and often-recurring themes of police fiction.” Original stories that include such scenes and characters remind us that “in Hollywood, as in the life of men generally, there is only rarely anything new under the sun.”