Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe has agreed to settle a suit charging that the firm drove a now-defunct dot-com into the ground by making a first-year associate its lead attorney.
Recent developments of note in the Internet industry.<br>This month:<br>First Suit Filed Against Internet 'Spyware' <br>House Passes Second Anti-Spyware Bill <br>Grokster Officals Settle Separate Copyright Case <br>AOL Files First 'Spim' Suit <br>RIAA Sues 750 More <br>U.S. Teen Soccer Prodigy Adu Wins Cybersquatter Case <br>U.S. Declares War on Intellectual Property Theft <br>
We've covered the CAN SPAM Act fairly extensively from a "what is it" type of perspective. In this article, Board of Editors member Jonathan Bick provides some practical advice on how to advise those clients who want to send marketing e-mails lawfully (it just doesn't seem right to say "spam lawfully.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a New York-based plaintiff properly filed suit in Manhattan federal court alleging unjust enrichment and misappropriation of idea by the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC). <i>Gross v. British Broadcasting Corp.</i> Plaintiff Pat Gross claimed that the BBC had without permission used her idea for a documentary about militant animal-rights activists that was broadcast in the United Kingdom. The district court dismissed the complaint for forum non conveniens.
In the superheated competition of reality television programming, ownership of ideas is increasingly being disputed.<br>Allegations of idea theft will likely increase as the number of reality TV shows expands and the realm of truly novel ideas shrinks. Resolution of these cases could set new standards for ownership of ideas and the best ways of protecting those rights.
Legitimate online music services have struggled to provide content from the fragmented independent music world. Until recently, independent artists were not very present on the legitimate online music services. This is partly because the major labels control the best-known recordings, partly because the major labels usually support online distribution with significant marketing budgets and partly because it is not very efficient for an online service to negotiate agreements with thousands of independent artists. <br> But after securing licenses from the major labels, the major online services sought to differentiate their offerings by adding independent artists. This created opportunities for a few companies to enter into "middleman" distribution agreements with many independent artists, and then enter into a licensing agreement with an online service for the artists' content. (Aggregators may also represent smaller independent labels, but this article will focus on independent artists who are also copyright owners.)
As a companion to his feature article on online content aggregators, Chris Castle discusses some of the new hardware that is available for downloading and playing online music ' and its possible effect on online music subscription rates.
“Baseball arbitration” refers to the process used in Major League Baseball in which if an eligible player's representative and the club ownership cannot reach a compensation agreement through negotiation, each party enters a final submission and during a formal hearing each side — player and management — presents its case and then the designated panel of arbitrators chooses one of the salary bids with no other result being allowed. This method has become increasingly popular even beyond the sport of baseball.
Insiders (and others) in the private equity business are accustomed to seeing a good deal of discussion ' academic and trade ' on the question of the appropriate methods of valuing private equity positions and securities which are otherwise illiquid. An interesting recent decision in the Southern District has been brought to our attention. The case is <i>In Re Allied Capital Corp.</i>, CCH Fed. SEC L. Rep. 92411 (US DC, S.D.N.Y., Apr. 25, 2003). Judge Lynch's decision is well written, the Judge reviewing a motion to dismiss by a business development company, Allied Capital, against a strike suit claiming that Allied's method of valuing its portfolio failed adequately to account for i) conditions at the companies themselves and ii) market conditions. The complaint appears to be, as is often the case, slap dash, content to point out that Allied revalued some of its positions, marking them down for a variety of reasons, and the stock price went down - all this, in the view of plaintiff's counsel, amounting to violations of Rule 10b-5.
The DOJ's Criminal Division issued three declinations since the issuance of the revised CEP a year ago. Review of these cases gives insight into DOJ's implementation of the new policy in practice.
There is no efficient market for the sale of bankruptcy assets. Inefficient markets yield a transactional drag, potentially dampening the ability of debtors and trustees to maximize value for creditors. This article identifies ways in which investors may more easily discover bankruptcy asset sales.
With trillions of dollars to keep watch over, the last thing we need is the distraction of costly litigation brought on by patent assertion entities (PAEs or "patent trolls"), companies that don't make any products but instead seek royalties by asserting their patents against those who do make products.
