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
Second Circuit Copyright Decision Vindicates Richard Prince’s “Appropriation Art”
Assume I were to take a well-known, in-copyright work of art, modify it in a variety of ways and publish the results as a coffee table book. To make this thought experiment easy, assume that the Statute of Liberty is covered by a U.S. copyright registration today—in fact, the Statue of Liberty was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in 1876, but its registration has long-since expired. Assume I took 30 photographs of the Statue and published my book with the images modified in various...
What Happens When You Get A Federal District Court Judge Really, Really Mad In a Civil Case
I haven't written a post that falls in the "what were they thinking" category for quite a while, but you don't see this very often. In Angiodynamics v. Biolitec AG Massachusetts federal district court judge Michael Ponsor (pictured left) entered a preliminary injunction forbidding the defendant from entering into a merger with its German subsidiary corporation, so as not to put the company's assets outside the reach of the plaintiff. In addition to corporate defendants, the corporate...
YouTube Scores Big Victory on Remand in Viacom DMCA Copyright Case
The copyright content industry has launched two no-holds-barred legal challenges against non-piratical websites that host third-party videos. That is, service providers whose intent is not obviously to induce or encourage copyright infringement and that follow the "notice and take down" rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Until last Thursday the outcome had been a complete loss for the content industry in one case, UMG v. Veoh (9th Cir. 2013). In the second case, Viacom v....
Video Porn Mass Copyright Litigation Plaintiffs Not Welcome in Massachusetts
Copyright owners who wish to file mass copyright suits based on a "BitTorrent Swarm" joinder theory—cases in which dozens (sometime hundreds) of anonymous defendants are joined in a single suit and then identified by serving subpoenas on their ISPs—are not welcome in Massachusetts. I've written about the phenomenon of BitTorrent swarm mass copyright suits before, but it looks like the door has been all but closed to these cases in the District of Massachusetts. As a reminder, here's how these...
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