LJN Newsletters

Summit Entertainment's $1 billion movie financing deal ' which created a new production and distribution studio ' all started with a group of bankers and lawyers sitting around and talking about how to get more money from movie-financing deals. In recent years, investors have invested in films that are distributed by studios, which take a distribution fee of about 10% to 15%. With the Summit deal, the investors for the first time cut the middleman in this process.

Digital Downloading/No Public Performance; Management Agreements/Tortious Interference.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided that a Florida federal district court, rather than a Mexican court, should hear a suit by one Spanish-language broadcaster against another for tortious interference with a soap-opera actor's contract.

On April 30, 2007, Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered a unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., reversing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ('Federal Circuit') and, in effect, re-invigorating obviousness under 35 U.S.C. §103 as an available defense to a patent.

Few issues in trademark and advertising law can compete in importance with this: whether a competitor can use another's trademark in advertising its products or services. With the battle for consumer attention growing increasingly aggressive as the number of products and services proliferate, and the means for advertising and promoting them expanding at an even more alarming rate, the importance of brands and their recognition by consumers ' and the surrounding legal issues ' have never been more significant.

Construing claims that use the process by which a product is created to define the invention ' that is, product-by-process claims ' was not made any easier by the Federal Circuit's recent decision in SmithKline Beecham Corp. v. Apotex Corp., 439 F.3d 1312 (Fed. Cir. 2006). The Federal Circuit again declined to resolve the long-standing conflict between two decisions ' the 1991 decision in Scripps Clinic & Res. Foun. v. Genentech Corp., 927 F.2d 1565 (Fed. Cir. 1991), which held that product-by-process claims should not be limited by the process steps in the claims, (i.e., such claims cover an identical end-product regardless of the steps used) and the 1992 decision in Atlantic Thermoplastics Co. v. Faytex Corp., 970 F.2d 834 (Fed. Cir. 1992), which held that product-by-process claims should be construed to only cover the end-product if produced by the specifically claimed process steps. As explained below, this state of affairs warrants that patent applicants and litigants stay tuned to the case law and adjust their respective claim drafting and analysis strategies accordingly.

The Supreme Court on May 29 made it significantly easier for employers to defend against Title VII workplace discrimination claims that are based on long-ago decisions about salary and raises.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court's effort to restrict and clarify the Alien Tort Claims Act ('ATCA'), the divergence between judicial interpretations of the law, and the number of ATCA lawsuits continues to grow. Some courts have construed the ATCA narrowly, as the Supreme Court urged, limiting the cases that can be brought. Others have interpreted the Act broadly, recognizing novel claims and theories of liability. Emblematic of that schism are two cases decided last year, one filed in New York involving an energy company's role in oil development in Sudan, and one in California involving Papua New Guinea mining operations. These ATCA cases and others like them are part of a rising wave of high-stakes litigation against corporations and their executive officers, and necessitate especially careful attention by in-house counsel regarding overseas operations.