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
"Hideous Company Sends Boing-Boing Pre-Emptive Nastygram"
One of the risks of sending a legal demand letter to someone in the Internet age is that they will post it on the web and ridicule you. That's what happened when the Baker & McKenzie law firm sent the very popular web site Boing Boing a letter warning it not to broadcast the World Cup competition, and containing the ominous threat that it would have its "agents actively monitor your website and others to identify unlawful activity." Boing Boing published the letter here. (The letter is an...
100 Million Videos, Daily
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...
Covenant Not-to-Compete Not Enforceable Against English-Challenged Russian Immigrant
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....
Long-Awaited Rambus FTC Decision
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...
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