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
Judges For Life
Andy Updegrove provided me with an article by Roger C. Cramton, Professor Emeritus at Cornell Law School, which Andy (a Cornell Law alum) thought was particularly interesting, and I thought it was worth sharing here. The article, entitled Reforming the Court: How Long is Too Long (published in a Cornell Law alumni magazine) is based on the introduction to a book by Professor Cramton and Professor Paul Carrington of Duke Law School, entitled Reforming the Court: Term Limits for Supreme Court...
Copyright and Fair Use: The LA Sheriff’s Department and the Grateful Dead
I'd fallen behind on some reading, but in catching up I noticed two copyright "fair use" cases that I thought were pretty interesting. The first was decided by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California. This case is similar to a situation that we encounter often, but on a scale that I've never seen before. Briefly, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department entered into a license that allowed it to make approximately 3600 copies of a software program on its computers. Through inadvertence, poor...
Supreme Court Changes the Rules on Vertical Price Fixing
As recently as 1977 virtually all "vertical restraints" were per se illegal under the federal antitrust laws. This included "nonprice" restraints, which are agreements between firms operating at different levels than the manufacturer that restrict the conditions under which firms may resell goods. An example might be a restriction on the locations from which a retailer may sell a manufacturer's product. Supreme Court precedent also restricted both vertical "maximum" price restrictions...
Incase v. Timex: Rare Trade Secret Case From First Circuit
It's rare for a trade secret case to reach the First Circuit Court of Appeals. In fact, based on a Westlaw search only about five cases dealing with trade secret issues (except in passing) have reached the First Circuit in the last ten years. So, a trade secret decision from a court of that eminence is worth noting. In Incase Inc. v. Timex Corp., Incase (a packaging design and manufacturing company based in Hopedale, Massachusetts), sued Timex after Timex commissioned Incase to design watch...
First Circuit Applies the CDA to Protect Lycos
I've written often about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which protects "interactive computer services" as follows: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker or any information provided by another information content provider And - No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be liable on account of -- (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material...
Everything Old is New Again – The Cost of Failing to Get IP Ownership Assigned
When I began to practice in the area of technology law area in the early 1980s one of the issues we often brought up with clients was the need to get clear ownership assignment of their technology. We wrote articles about this, spoke on the topic, and generally beat the subject to death in publications and seminars. It's surprising (but not too surprising) that seemingly sophisticated businessmen still don't focus on this. Two cases we recently settled are illustrative of this issue. In the...
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