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
Mass Law Blog Update, Week Ending January 31, 2014
House hearings on copyright reform continue. January 28, 2014 focused on the scope of fair use. Paper submissions from the five panel members are collected here. Harvard Law School professor William Fisher's 2014 CopyrightX online course has begun. If you are not one of the 500 students selected to participated in the course, you can still audit the course. First week lecture is on "The Foundations of Copyright Law." CopyrightX Prince's N. D. Cal. lawsuit against "Doe" defendants who have...
Viacom v. YouTube, Mother of All DMCA Copyright Cases (part 2 of 2-part post)
[This is part 2 of a 2-part post. To read part 1, click here] [Update: Viacom v. Youtube was settled before the Second Circuit rendered its decision on the appeal discussed in this post] After the events described in part 1, Kevin Kickstarter, founder of YouPostVid, meets with his lawyer, Mr. Jagger, to discuss whether YouPostVid needs to change its approach to managing copyrighted videos posted by users of the site. In preparation for this meeting Kevin has read the decisions in Viacom v....
Mass Law Blog Updates, Week Ending January 24, 2014
Ninth Circuit holds that the First Amendment provides same legal protection to blogger as it does to journalist. "The protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities ..." Obsidian Finance v. Cox EUs highest court holds that DRM circumvention is subject to a "principal of proportionality" analysis. Techdirt summary here Devlin Hartline explains Aereo in a Nutshell The Copyright Alliance makes...
Mass Law Blog Updates, Week Ending January 17, 2014
Massachusetts district court judge O'Toole denied a motion to dismiss copyright claims based in part on foreign publication, where plaintiff asserts that the foreign conduct stems from a domestic infringement (the "predicate act doctrine"). Palmer/Kane LLC v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing LLC D.C. Circuit opinion in Verizon v. Federal Communications Commission, holding that the FCC doesn’t have the authority to impose net neutrality laws on companies An interesting article in PetaPixel,...
Supreme Court Grants Cert in Aereo Case – See My 4-Part Blog Post on the Case
On Friday the U.S. Supreme Court granted review in American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. I wrote a 4-part post on this case in the Spring of 2013. Part I of the series begins here. The series begins as follows: Aereo is a company that has developed a system that captures over-the-air television (broadcast TV) and retransmits it to subscribers over the Internet. Subscribers are able to watch broadcast TV on their computers, tablets and smart phones. Even better, Aereo acts as a...
MassLawBlog Update, Week Ending January 10, 2014
As the week was ending the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the broadcasters' appeal in the Aereo copyright case . . . . . . as well as Limelight Networks v. Akamai Technologies, which originated in federal court in Boston. The issue in Akamai is whether a company be found to have induced someone else to infringe on a patent, when neither one has directly infringed on patent rights. See my blog post on the CAFC's fractured en banc decision in this case. Aereo receives $34 million 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