Last year, for the first time, the issue of downstream liability surfaced in the law of trade secret misappropriation. In 2010, a California appellate court held in Silvaco Data Sys. v. Intel Corp. that a software licensee did not know or acquire the secret source code the manufacturer used to make the product and, as a matter of law, it could not be liable for trade secret misappropriation.
The Federal Circuit's decision on Feb. 23, 2011 in Centocor Ortho Biotech., Inc. v. Abbott Labs., vacated a $1.67 billion verdict based on invalidity for insufficient written description. The case provides an example of when technology can be so complicated or unpredictable that the specification does not adequately explain how to practice the claimed invention.
In Levi Strauss & Co. v. Abercrombie & Fitch Co., the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently confirmed that Congress expanded the definition of dilution when it adopted the Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006.
As law firms and many other professional service firms including CPAs emerge from the turbulent economic environment of the past few years, they find themselves with an ownership group that continues to age and mounting concerns on how the enterprise will find the continuity to survive and prosper into the future.
When the White House's intellectual-property enforcement coordinator, Victoria Espinel, submitted a wish list to Congress in March recommending 20 changes to federal intellectual property law largely aimed at ramping up criminal punishment for IP infringement, IP lawyers said the white paper recommendations would likely have only a tenuous effect, if any, on civil IP litigation or patent prosecution.
Miami Beach songwriter Rafael "Rafa" Vergara Hermosilla bested Coca-Cola in 2010 when a federal judge issued an injunction in Vergara's fight for credit for the international mega hit of "Wavin' Flag" in Spanish. But litigation is a marathon, not a sprint, and Coca-Cola recently won the more important Round 2. Federal District Judge K. Michael Moore, of the Southern District of Florida, has granted Coca-Cola's renewed motion for summary judgment, dismissing Vergara's claim of copyright infringement by noting that when Vergara wrote the Spanish translation version of "Wavin' Flag," he assigned the rights of his work to Universal Music Group.
As in-house counsel continue to juggle their roles between corporate gatekeepers and confidants, they face a host of emerging risks.
The Supreme Court of Michigan dismissed an eavesdropping claim by city officials who were taped backstage while demanding that a video they considered improper for young audience members not be played during a Detroit concert that featured rappers Dr. Dre, Eminem and Snoop Dogg.
Concert tours can generate significant income for an artist. Yet every concert tour carries a risk that some event outside of the artist's control ' health issues, physical injuries, adverse weather or safety concerns, to name a few ' could force the cancellation of a single show or even an entire tour, thereby resulting in lost revenue to the artist and unrecoverable costs. To protect against this risk, many performance artists elect to obtain event cancellation and/or non-appearance insurance (which may be covered under the same or separate policies) prior to going on tour. This insurance coverage often covers financial losses, including lost guaranteed income, that result from cancellation of the event.
Project management applications for legal operations ' legal project management or LPM ' hold promise for transforming the relationship between General Counsel and outside counsel ...
