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
Why Bother With the DMCA? The Supreme Court’s Sony v. Cox Decision and Its Consequences
This post is the third in a series following Sony Music Entertainment v. Cox Communications through the courts. In May 2024 I wrote about the Fourth Circuit's decision, which reversed a $1 billion jury verdict against Cox on vicarious liability grounds while affirming a finding of contributory infringement, and sent the case back for a new trial on damages. Last November, when the Supreme Court agreed to hear Cox's appeal, I warned that the stakes extended far beyond the parties themselves. On...
The Massachusetts Noncompetition Agreement Act and Nonsolicitation Agreements: Miele v. Foundation Medicine
When the Massachusetts Noncompetition Agreement Act (MNAA) took effect in October 2018, I described the law in detail and wrote that employers and employees were entering “a new era” in noncompete law. The statute imposed formalities, created new employee protections, and limited the enforceable duration of noncompetes. But it also drew a set of carefully worded exclusions - most notably for nonsolicitation agreements. I predicted that those exclusions would become critical as employers...
Sony v. Cox Heads to the Supreme Court
Update: On March 26, 2026 the Supreme Court decided this case in favor of Cox. The Court held that an internet service provider would be liable for infringing content posted by a third party only when it induced users' infringement or provided a service "tailored to infringement." **************** Can your internet provider be held liable for what you download? That's the question the Supreme Court will wrestle with on December 1, when it hears Sony Music Entertainment v. Cox Communications -...
The Celestial Jukebox: Copyright Law and the Business of Music
“The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.” - David Bowie, 2002 In 1994, Stanford copyright scholar Paul Goldstein coined a phrase that captured the imagination of anyone following the collision between music and technology. He...
Did Anthropic Waive Attorney-Client Privilege?
Update: the same day I posted this article Bartz and Anthropic announced that they had settled the case. The terms are as yet unknown, and the settlement will need to be approved by the judge. However, this topic is not moot - it could easily arise in one of the many genAI copyright cases still pending. The eyes of the artificial intelligence community are laser-focused on the upcoming class action damages trial in Bartz v. Anthropic, scheduled for December 1, 2025. This will be the first...
Fair Use or Theft? The Copyright War Behind Generative AI
The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI). Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap broad economic and military benefits. Just like we won the space race, it is imperative that the United States and its allies win this race. . . . Build, Baby, Build. America's AI Action Plan, July 2025 The explosion of generative AI has triggered a legal crisis that few saw coming and nobody seems equipped to fix. At the center...
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