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
Supreme Court Reverses 9th Circuit in Raging Bull Copyright Case
The idea behind statutes of limitations is usually straightforward. If someone commits an illegal act, after a certain period of time they can no longer be liable (or prosecuted) for that act. In civil cases the statute of limitations usually begins to run when the injured party knew or should have known of the illegal act. Once that period has passed, the injured party is barred from filing a lawsuit. For example, in Massachusetts the statute of limitations for most tort actions is three...
Supreme Court Overrules CAFC In Limelight v. Akamai
In September 2012 I wrote a post titled Why Can’t We All Get Along? CAFC Fractures Over Divided Infringement. The post discussed an August 31, 2012 Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ("CAFC") en banc decision in two cases consolidated on appeal, Akamai v. Limelight and McKesson v. Epic Systems (link). As I described in that post, the 11 judges on the CAFC, were unable to agree on whether patent infringement occurs when separate entities perform the steps of a patented method. Six of the...
CAFC Reverses Judge Alsup – Java API Declaring Code Held Copyrightable
On November 26, 2013 I wrote a post titled "Oracle v. Google: How Google Could Lose on Appeal" (link). After oral argument before the CAFC a couple of weeks later I wrote a follow-up post, "Oral Argument in Oracle v. Google: A Setback for Google?" (link). I thought I was being a bit paranoid on Google's behalf, but I was wrong - if anything, I was being too optimistic. The CAFC reversed California federal district court judge William Alsup, upholding almost every argument made by Oracle....
Ripoff Report Has a Fight on Its Hands In Massachusetts
Can a state court order assignment of a defamatory posting on Ripoff Report to a prevailing plaintiff? That may be the central question in Small Justice LLC, et al. v. Xcentric Ventures LLC, pending the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Here are the basic facts. A Boston attorney* was defamed by a litigation adversary on the Ripoff Report (a website owned by Xcentric Ventures). The former adversary party, Richard Dupont, claimed that the lawyer was a perjurer with “a...
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