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Recent developments in e-commerce law and in the e-commerce industry.

Recent cases in e-commerce law and in the e-commerce industry.

The 2004 American Jobs Creation Act (AJCA) creates several tax breaks for businesses and made some other significant changes. This article highlights the more prominent provisions of the AJCA that affect businesses and individual taxpayers generally, and that to some extent have specific impact on law firms and other professional service providers.

Your marketing specialist approaches you with a great idea for Internet advertising ' purchasing trademarks of your company's competitors and for complimentary products as keywords to match Internet users conducting searches in your product category to an advertisement for your company. Do you advise your company to purchase third-party trademarks as keywords? How have the courts dealt with this scenario? How can you reduce risks associated with purchasing third party trademarks as keywords? What are the international implications? This article addresses these issues.

You've just pulled a steaming pepperoni pizza from the oven and open a kitchen drawer to look for the right tool. Will any tool do? They're all kitchen…

The patent applicant can act pre-emptively, even pending further development of legal doctrines specific to infringement of business and network-related methods, to draft and prosecute claims that will "catch" infringing activity at as many conceivable loci along the network as possible, and thwart competitors' ability to readily avoid infringement by parsing method steps creatively.

A welcome to the Special Issue on Internet jurisdiction from the Managing Editor.

It was a dark and stormy Seattle day 7 years ago. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was in town for its workshop on the proposed revisions to the Franchise Rule (the NPR) on Nov. 6-7, 1997, to discuss whether it should allow franchisors to disclose electronically. Many people testified positively, including yours truly, and the discussion quickly turned to how to do so: floppy disks (but there were so many formats incompatible with the PCs and printers of the day), or the Internet (but there were so few prospects that had access). How much has changed!

Highlights of the latest franchising news from around the country.

Ever since the Medici family of Florence popularized the use of written documents to facilitate trade between city states and nations in the 15th century, letters of credit and their progeny, bills of lading, warehouse receipts and similar instruments of title, have consisted of written documents. Commercially effective and reasonably efficient for hundreds of years, letters of credit and documents of title in tangible form have become increasingly outmoded because of economic and temporal constraints. A recent article in <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> estimated that at least 5% of the cost of all international trade transactions was attributable solely to the cost of documentation [Gabriel Kahn, "Financing Goes Just-in-Time," <i>The Wall Street Journal,</i> June 4, 2004, Section A, p. 10]. With the growth of international trade and the relocation of manufacturing from industrialized nations to countries with cheaper labor costs, international shipments have increased dramatically as cost-conscious businesses search for increased efficiency. The historic standard of a 2-week turnaround for a written letter of credit for a secured bill of lading transaction and the cost of associated paperwork have created a need for a cheaper, faster system. Not surprisingly, merchants have found opportunities to use the Internet and other electronic arrangements to help solve this problem. This article will describe some of the alternative electronic bill of lading arrangements that have arisen since the 1990s for shipping goods internationally and the impetus that their spread provided to a Uniform Commercial Code working group that responded by overhauling and updating Article 7 to make it more reflective of modern trade practice.