Court Opinion | Kudos Inc. v. Kudoboard LLC

KUDOS INC. v. KUDOBOARD LLC

No. 20-cv-01876-SI (N.D. Cal. Nov. 20, 2021).

Available here.

In this case, Kudos Inc. challenges Kudoboard LLC over a trademark dispute and the term “kudos”. Multiple corpora and web sources are searched for the use of this term, i.e., COHA, COCA, iWeb, and GloWbE corpora; texts collected from Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook; a corpus created by Dr. William Eggington of employee recognition programs. Kudoboard uses this evidence to defend their claim that “kudos” is a generic term, unassociated with a specific third party.

Court Opinion | United States v. Scott

United States v. Scott, 990 F.3d 94 (2d Cir. 2021)

990 F.3d 94 (2d Cir. 2021).

Available here.

Scott, standing twice convicted of first-degree murder in New York State under state penal laws, faces the issue of whether Scott’s manslaughter convictions count as violent crimes. To answer this question, the meaning of the word “use” becomes important to define. The interpretation of the word “use” in Smith v. United States, based on frequently cited dictionaries, is faulted and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary English) is used as evidence of its failure to identify the ordinary meaning of “use”.

Court Brief | State v. Misch

State v. Misch, 256 A.3d 519, 2021 VT 10 (Vt. 2021)

Available here

Vermont’s ban on large-capacity gun magazines is argued to violate the right to bear arms under the Vermont Constitution by Misch. This is done in order to defend Misch’s carrying of these magazines, but the motion to dismiss charges against him is denied by the court. Studies using COFEA (Corpus of Founding Era American English) , BYU-COEME (Corpus of Early American English), and the Google Books database to determine the meaning of “bear arms” are cited.