Church's Board Approved Sale
Questions of Fact About Ouster Precluded Dismissal of Accounting Claim Against Co-Tenant
Forgery Allegations Failed to Raise Question of Fact
No Private Right of Action to Enforce Food Cart Regulations
Copyright holders would be well advised to familiarize themselves with the Copyright Claims Board for resolving copyright infringement claims and to consider its benefits and potential downsides in bringing or defending copyright infringement actions.
In a case that may have significant implications for the ability of mark holders to enforce their marks against many types of products, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is now considering whether consumer products such as sneakers can be considered "expressive works" to which First Amendment protections can apply.
When it comes to expressive content, disputes over trademark rights in titles of creative works are commonly fought under the federal Lanham Act. Many of these battles play out in courts in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which has well-developed legal guidelines on the subject — many of them from lawsuits that have arisen in the entertainment industry.
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut sided with the family of a production company executive in finding that the wife of late Broadway lyricist Bob Merrill had no right, under §304(c) of the U.S. Copyright Act, to cancel a more than 50-year-old royalty agreement between the executive and Merrill.
A.B. Quintanilla III, founding member and leader of the Latin music group Kumbia Kings, prevailed on appeal in a dispute with a Texas attorney who claimed Quintanilla conspired to cut the lawyer out of his alleged share of a settlement.
With trillions of dollars to keep watch over, the last thing we need is the distraction of costly litigation brought on by patent assertion entities (PAEs or "patent trolls"), companies that don't make any products but instead seek royalties by asserting their patents against those who do make products.
Insiders (and others) in the private equity business are accustomed to seeing a good deal of discussion ' academic and trade ' on the question of the appropriate methods of valuing private equity positions and securities which are otherwise illiquid. An interesting recent decision in the Southern District has been brought to our attention. The case is <i>In Re Allied Capital Corp.</i>, CCH Fed. SEC L. Rep. 92411 (US DC, S.D.N.Y., Apr. 25, 2003). Judge Lynch's decision is well written, the Judge reviewing a motion to dismiss by a business development company, Allied Capital, against a strike suit claiming that Allied's method of valuing its portfolio failed adequately to account for i) conditions at the companies themselves and ii) market conditions. The complaint appears to be, as is often the case, slap dash, content to point out that Allied revalued some of its positions, marking them down for a variety of reasons, and the stock price went down - all this, in the view of plaintiff's counsel, amounting to violations of Rule 10b-5.
At the Oscars in March, Best Actress winner Frances McDormand made “inclusion rider” go viral. But Kalpana Kotagal, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll had already worked for months to write the language for such provisions. Kotagal was developing legal language for contract provisions that Hollywood's elite could use to require studios and other partners to employ diverse workers on set.
This article discusses the practical and policy reasons for the use of DPAs and NPAs in white-collar criminal investigations, and considers the NDAA's new reporting provision and its relationship with other efforts to enhance transparency in DOJ decision-making.
While the DOJ Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative is still in its early stages and cybersecurity regulations are evolving, whistleblower plaintiffs have already begun leveraging the FCA to pursue alleged noncompliance with government cybersecurity requirements.
