Litigation

A look at a key ruling.

In-house counsel for eBay Inc., Google Inc. and the National Music Publishers' Association agreed last month that the U.S. copyright system needs improvement, but they offered different views about how to approach reform.

In upholding a statutory damages award against a tavern owner who failed to obtain a public performance license for music used in the venue, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit formally embraced the principle that a co-owner of a copyright may sue for infringement.

For the third time in as many months, Sirius XM lost a court ruling over the issue of pre-1972 sound recordings. In a decision that further upsets the status quo for the music and copyright worlds, a federal judge in New York ruled that the owners of pre-1972 sound recordings have performance rights to their records, and that Sirius XM therefore infringed copyrights.

Data breaches at Target, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus and P.F. Chang's are front-page reminders of the vulnerability of customer payment information in the retail sector. In Wyndham Worldwide, the FTC brought suit claiming that a franchisor's alleged failures to maintain reasonable security measures constituted unfair and deceptive practices under Section 5 of the FTC Act.

Analysis of a case in which a restitution bid failed in wire fraud involving Kyrgyzstan.

Even though the costs and inefficiencies of paper records are an obvious strain on the law firm business model, law firms struggle with less-paper initiatives for one key reason: according to ILTA members informally surveyed in over 20 cities domestically, about half of today's attorneys would still prefer to work with paper, even if the entire file is digitally available from the DMS.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently reaffirmed the long-established rule that an over-secured lender's legal and other fees are subject to court approval as reasonable under section 506(b) of the Bankruptcy Code.