Mass Law Blog
Intellectual property and business litigation, Massachusetts and nationallyWritten by humans
Lee Gesmer’s Mass Law Blog began in 2005, and contains almost 600 posts. The site initially focused on Massachusetts law, but today it follows business and intellectual property law nation-wide. The site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm represents startup and established companies in the areas of litigation, transactions (including financings, mergers and acquisitions), IP rights, taxation, employment law, standards consortia, business counseling and open source development projects and foundations. You can find a summary of the firm’s services here. To learn how Gesmer Updegrove can help you, contact: Lee Gesmer
Seeking to Capitalize on Booking.com, Kevin Kickstarter Seeks Advice From Attorney
(Bill Hilton, a partner at my firm, co-authored this post with me.) On June 30, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the addition of “.com” to a generic term has the potential to create a protectable trademark. In so ruling the Court rejected the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s “nearly per se rule” that when a generic term is combined with a generic top-level domain the resulting combination is generic. The background of this case is discussed in detail in an earlier post,...
Is the Internet Archive’s “National Emergency Library” Copyright Infringement or Fair Use?
After the Internet Archive launched a “National Emergency Library” the copyright community held its collective breath, waiting to see if the authors and publishers affected would tolerate it, or challenge it in court. Now we have the answer. On June 1, 2020, four major publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House — filed a copyright infringement suit against the Archive. Background. In late March 2020, in response to the COVID 19 pandemic, the Internet Archive opened a...
The Messy Legalities of Trump’s Social Media Executive Order
On May 28, 2020 President Trump issued an “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship” (the Order). It takes aim at Twitter, Facebook and Google through the lens of 47 U.S. Code § 230 (Section 230), the federal law that allows internet platforms to host and moderate user created content free of liability under state law. The Order came just days after Twitter, for the first time, added warning labels and fact-checking to several of Trump’s tweets. A lot has already been written about...
Massachusetts Recognizes Contract Damages Based on Destruction of Researcher’s Life’s Work
[Disclosure: Kevin Peters and Jennifer Henricks, attorneys at Gesmer Updegrove LLP, represented Dr. Hlatky in the case discussed below] Contact law is complicated. It dates back centuries, and is mostly common law, meaning it evolves case-by-case in judicial opinions. There are thousands of cases, involving thousands of fact patterns, and it seems like there’s always room for one more variation. This was the case in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s (SJC) April 28, 2020 decision in...
This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find a summary of our services here. To learn how GU can help you, contact:
Lee Gesmer