by Lee Gesmer | Aug 4, 2006 | Copyright, DMCA/CDA
An interesting article in Business Week on the copyright issues raised by YouTube’s tremendous success.
When YouTube Inc. was sued on July 14 for copyright infringement, the shock wasn’t that the video-sharing service was being yanked into court. Questions had been swirling for months about whether the upstart, which now dishes up 100 million daily videos, was crossing copyright boundaries by letting its members upload videos with little oversight. continue . .
YouTube has a strong answer to this complaint based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (pdf file), which allows publishers like YouTube to avoid copyright liability for infringements posted by third parties, so long as an infringement is taken down after notice to the publisher.
by Lee Gesmer | Aug 4, 2006 | Business Lit. Session, Noncompete Agreements
It’s a bad day when your client wants you to enforce a noncompete agreement against a $10/hour Russian immigrant with “a very limited command of English,” who sends most of her earnings back to her son and elderly parents in Russia, and who, after a year of at-will employment and with no further payment of consideration, was told that unless she signed the noncompete agreement she’d be fired the next day.
Nevertheless, that’s what the plaintiff’s lawyer faced in Zabota Community Center, Inc. v. Frolova.
Not surprisingly, Judge Allan van Gestel of the Suffolk County Business Litigation Session threw the book at the plaintiff in this case, denying the motion for every reason conceivable.
You can read the case here (pdf file).
by Lee Gesmer | Aug 2, 2006 | Miscellaneous
Here is a link to the FTC decision, which is adverse to Rambus. More to come ….
[Link]
Update: Andy Updegrove discusses the background of this case and the implications of the decision on Consortiuminfo.com:
In what can only be called a stunning development in a high profile standards case, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) unanimously reversed the earlier decision of one of its own Administrative Law Judges and ruled that semiconductor technology company Rambus, Inc. had “unlawfully monopolized the markets for four computer memory technologies that have been incorporated into industry standards for dynamic random access memory,” or DRAM. The FTC will deliberate further before announcing the penalties to be levied against Rambus.
continue . . .
by Lee Gesmer | Jul 24, 2006 | Antitrust
It is axiomatic that an entity cannot “conspire” with itself. For example, the Supreme Court has held that a parent corporation and its subsidiary are not capable of an illegal conspiracy under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Of course, as is true with most legal principles, what looks simple at 30,000 feet altitude becomes more complicated the closer one gets to the ground, and the courts have struggled with the definition of a “single entity” in a variety of contexts.
Dean Williamson of the DOJ Antitrust Division has written an interesting and in-depth paper analyzing the law and economics of this issue. The paper, titled Organization, Control and the Single Entity Defense in Antitrust, is published here.
by Lee Gesmer | Jul 21, 2006 | Miscellaneous, Readings and Novelties
I usually find the Knowledge@Wharton reports and articles interesting. Here is a series of articles summarizing some of the topics discussed at their annual Supernova Conference, which was held in San Francisco in late June.
The topics include:
What’s the Future of Desktop Software — and How Will It Affect Your Privacy?
Kevin Lynch on Adobe‘s Plans for a New Generation of Software
The Rise of the ‘Videonet’
Tantek
