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Recent cases in entertainment law.

Recent developments of interest to corporate counsel.

Recent court rulings in e-commerce.

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

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has confirmed that there is no patent infringement liability under 35 U.S.C. 271(g)(1) for the offshore use of a "research tool" patent when only the information gained from such offshore use is introduced into the United States.

Recent rulings of importance to you and your practice.

As the winter months approached, a storm was brewing in the antitrust world. The U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Eleventh circuits have split over the per se illegality of Hatch-Waxman patent-settlement agreements by which a patent-holding drug maker pays a generic drug company to delay its entry into the market. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has harshly criticized these agreements, and now the Supreme Court has an opportunity to calm the fury.

More than 35 states have enacted laws regulating spam in some form or fashion. Legitimate marketers and businesses adapted to these various state laws, gravitating toward a fairly uniform best practices model, which stopped short of the sort of true "opt-in only" model strongly preferred by consumer and anti-spam groups. Mailers could be fairly confident that they would avoid liability under state spam laws and not overly alienate Internet service providers (ISPs) or their own customers by simply including valid contact information, honoring "opt-out" requests, providing accurate headers and routing information, using nondeceptive subject lines and (in a few states) labeling the messages as advertisements. This widely followed compliance strategy became unworkable in September 2003, however, when California instead enacted a true "opt-in" approach to commercial e-mail marketing. Marketers were faced with a January 2004 compliance deadline and sweeping new prohibitions on marketing to or from any California e-mail address unless the sender had the recipient's "direct consent" or had a "pre-existing business relationship" with the recipient (and the recipient had not "opted out" of such mailings). In response, legitimate marketers aggressively lobbied Congress to accelerate final passage of federal legislation to pre-empt at least the more disruptive aspects of California's new law prior to its effective date. Congress responded to the call, and the CAN SPAM Act of 2003 was signed into law by President George W. Bush on Dec. 16, 2003.

Like many financial products, equipment leases can be bought and sold. The lease assignment market has become increasingly active and complex in recent years, despite the economic downturn of the early 21st century. This article highlights the type of documentation that should generally be required when a broker or other originator of leases (the "Originator") assigns leases to a funding bank (the "Funder").

It is well known that the doctrine of strict liability imposes responsibility upon manufacturers without regard to their fault or the degree of care they may have exercised in designing their products. Yet, in some jurisdictions the law of strict liability is stricter than in others, and courts in these "strict-strict liability" jurisdictions may prohibit the employment of certain common defenses to product liability claims. Manufacturers that find themselves on the defense in such jurisdictions may face the unexpected and initially unpleasant news that the trial on the horizon really will be about the product, the whole product and nothing but the product, and that the sole question for the jury may be "can someone given 20/20 hindsight fathom a plausible way to make this product safer?" Such manufacturers will often find that what they were hoping to rely upon for the cornerstone of their defense — explaining who, what, where, when, why and how from the company's perspective — is not only irrelevant but also inadmissible at trial.