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
Is “Photo Embedding” Copyright Infringement? It Depends on the Court
If you own or manage a website you may be familiar with the process of “photo embedding” or “inline linking” an image or video on your site. Rather than hosting the image file on your own server you retrieve the image from another Internet site and embed the content as part of your webpage’s overall display. Users can’t tell the difference, but as a technical (and legal) matter you never “copy” the image to your server. This practice is common, and has been performed millions of times on...
When Does a Copyright Expire?
The scope of copyright law is vast - it protects traditional art forms such as books, music, photos and paintings, but also covers more exotic forms of expression, such as computer software, choreography, literary and movie characters (Batman, James Bond) and even useful objects (product and clothing designs). However, it can be difficult to determine whether a particular work is protected by copyright due to the passage of time or failure to comply with once-essential "formalities." Many...
Wage-Fixing, No-Poaching and Criminal Antitrust
When I was a newbie lawyer just out of law school I worked at a Washington D.C. “BigLaw” firm that concentrated on antitrust law. We represented a client in a criminal antitrust case that involved bid rigging in the highway and airport paving industry. It turns out that bid rigging was rampant in the U.S. southeast, leading to many indictments, guilty pleas and convictions.You can read about it in this 1982 court decision. What is bid rigging? Typically a state highway or transportation...
NFTs – An Existential Crisis for Copyright Lawyers
Many people who’ve lived with the traditional rules of intellectual property during their professional lives are struggling with non-fungible tokens, or “NFTs”. I'm one, and it’s a bit of an existential crisis for us. My advice - relax and repeat after me: “this has nothing to do with copyright law.” The existence of NFTs came to the attention of many people after Christie's sold Beeple’s Everydays: the First 5000 Days - a collage of 5000 digital art images - for $69 million in early 2021. One...
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