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Unfortunately, adverse drug reaction reports collected and causality assessments made in the course of post-marketing surveillance have increasingly become fodder for plaintiffs' attorneys attempting to prove causation. Courts, however, properly have precluded plaintiffs from presenting post-marketing surveillance materials, most recently refusing to allow plaintiffs to introduce company causality assessments based on adverse drug reaction reports as evidence of causation and from using these reports and assessments as bases for expert opinions on causation.

Features

Recent news of importance to you and your practice.

Recently, the right of publicity of baseball players featured prominently in a federal appellate decision. <i>C.A.C. Distribution and Marketing, Inc. v. Major League Baseball Advanced Media, L.P.</i> The Eighth Circuit concluded that the First Amendment rights to run a fantasy baseball league by using the names, performance, and biographical data of professional baseball players superseded the players' rights of publicity.

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In a proceeding before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ('TTAB'), if your adversary is a foreign entity with no employees in the United States, can you compel an oral deposition of the entity in this country? 'No,' says the TTAB, through its Manual of Procedure ('TBMP'). 'Yes,' says the Fourth Circuit, relying on '24 of the Patent Act, 35 U.S.C. '24 in <i>Rosenruist-Gestao E Servicos LDA v. Virgin Enterprises Ltd.</i>, 511 F.3d 437 (4th Cir. 2007).

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For the last several sessions, Congress has considered the Design Piracy Prohibition Act, which would expand copyright protection to include the cut and look of fashion designs. This proposed legislation could make many imitative designs illegal and add to the current, although somewhat limited, protections for fashion available under existing U.S. trademark, patent, and copyright laws. This article discusses these currently available protections, provides suggestions for designers for utilizing them, and examines changes to the Copyright Act proposed by the Design Piracy Prohibition Act.

In-depth analysis of recent rulings.

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In years past, a corporation could assume that, when it produced documents in response to a Department of Justice (DOJ) subpoena, there were limited risks that such documents would be disclosed to an entity outside of the investigation unless the government used them as exhibits in court proceedings. Two factors in recent years have changed that set of expectations and significantly raised the likelihood that documents produced to the government could end up in the hands of plaintiffs' lawyers, competitors, the news media, and others.

The defense of white-collar crime increasingly involves the need to obtain evidence from witnesses located abroad. Without careful planning, exculpatory evidence may remain out of the reach of a defendant for whom such evidence is the only thing standing between him and a prison sentence.