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
The Federal Trade Commission Puts Companies That Abuse Noncompetes On Notice
The Federal Trade Commission would like to preempt state law and make most noncompetes illegal as a matter of nationwide federal law. In January it began a rulemaking toward that end. See The FTC: Noncompete Agreements Must Go. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking over your shoulder now. The FTC may be coming for you, especially if you’re a large company that uses noncompetes abusively and without legal justification. The reason for this is that, in addition to its rulemaking, the...
Section 230 Supreme Court Argument in Gonzalez v. Google: Keep An Eye on Justice Thomas
When a traditional print publication - a print newspaper or magazine - publishes a defamatory statement it is “strictly liable” for defamation. This is true even if the statement is written by an an unaffiliated third-party - for example a “letter to the editor." But the law for print publications is not the same for Internet websites. A law enacted in 1996, the Communications Decency Act, prohibits courts from treating a provider of an “interactive computer service” i.e., a website, as the...
The FTC: Non-Compete Agreements Must Go
There aren’t many issues in business law as divisive as non-compete agreements. Some people believe that non-competes are essential to protect trade secrets and confidential information. Critics argue that they suppress wages, reduce competition and keep innovative ideas from breaking into the market. In the eyes of many critics they are a contractual form of involuntary servitude. We’ve encountered many employees who were unaware that their employment agreements contained a non-compete clause...
Lanier v. Harvard: “Do The Right Thing”
Louis Agassiz thought that black and white races had different origins. In 1850 Agassiz - an eminent professor at Harvard - embarked on a tour of South Carolina plantations in search of racially "pure" Africans whom he could study as evidence to support this theory, known as “polygenism.” On the trip Agassiz commissioned a photographer to take daguerreotypes of Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, two slaves who lived on a South Carolina plantation. The images - believed to be the earliest...
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