LJN Newsletters

What's at issue is control, obviously, and the great lengths to which some will go to maintain, it even as they benefit from the wide-open, free-flowing viral information torrent of the Internet. These copyright acquisitions are not primarily motivated by the desire to exploit the works and make money, but rather by the desire to stop the public circulation of texts and images the new owners do not like.

Remember U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart's famous line about hardcore pornography? Stewart said it was tough to define, "but I know it when I see it." The quip came to mind after a ruling last month by the U.S Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a trademark infringement case involving Internet advertising keywords. In essence, the Ninth Circuit concluded that there's no strict standard for determining infringement in the Internet age, so judges have to know it when they see it.

The use of new technology makes peoples' efforts to keep Internet behavior private more difficult, has given rise to renewed claims from consumers of unlawful intrusiveness by Internet data-collectors, and has revived the argument that such behavior unlawfully violates privacy expectations.

Highlights of the latest intellectual property news from around the country.

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.