LJN Newsletters

Mold growth has existed for centuries; litigation involving mold growth, however, has come into vogue only recently. Such litigation, despite its relative infancy, has proven costly to a variety of parties involved in the real estate industry — builders, property management companies, product manufacturers, commercial property owners, and insurers, among others. Verdicts in mold damage cases have occasionally reached multimillion dollar levels, while additional cases undoubtedly have settled for significant amounts. Landlords potentially could face major damage claims resulting from mold growth, and therefore it is recommended that landlords address mold-related issues by including in most leases specific provisions regarding mold growth.

Restriction practice (ie, the restriction of a patent application to prosecution of a single claimed invention (per filing fee)) has been around since the mid-1800s. In recent years, hyperproliferation of restriction requirements, especially in the biotechnology, chemical and software arts, has occurred. It has not been uncommon for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to assert that a patent application contains 10, 20, even 100 distinct inventions. In fact, the PTO itself recently stated that there had been an application in which the PTO had determined that there were 400,000 distinct inventions. Excessive use of restriction requirements has the potential to stagger a corporate patent budget, because multiple divisional applications must be filed to prosecute all claims, and hence, all "inventions" of the original application. If a company has budgeted for one patent application, it is then faced with filing multiple applications to receive the complete patent coverage that was envisioned. This leads to increased costs of the filing, prosecution and maintenance; multiplication of patents with overlapping subject matter and related claims; shortened statutory patent terms (depending on the timing of filing of the divisional applications), and a question of whether complete patent coverage is truly achieved by compartmentalizing the "invention" into many patents.

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

Online digital file sharing enjoys massive popularity. Its wide use, however, threatens to destroy the interests of copyright owners. Yet, its broad consumer support and touted technological potential have raised questions about who should bear the risks of such activity, and who — ie, Congress or the courts — should make such determinations.

Recent rulings of importance to you and your practice.

We have in recent months discussed advising clients on choosing which state in which to file their divorce actions when they maintain sufficient ties to states other than New York such that those states may exercise jurisdiction. Some of the consequences of making these choices may not be immediately obvious, however, as illustrated by the recent decision rendered by the Court of Appeals in Connelly v. Corcoran, N.Y.L.J. 11/21/03, DOI p. 18, col. 4 (Ciparick, J.).

Money is not seen by these people as the commodity it should be. Instead, it is fraught with feelings, messages and beliefs from family, society and personal experience. If money were seen as a commodity, your job would be much clearer.

In an attempt to bring New York State up to speed with practices in many other states, Judge Judith Kaye recently promulgated a plan for judges to more frequently order parents to complete psycho-educational training related to post-separation parenting. The order essentially establishes guidelines for judges as they make such orders and sets out criteria that must be met by the programs themselves if they are to receive approval for accepting court-ordered families.