As if the recent attacks on the tax-exempt status of Internet transactions were not enough for e-commerce vendors to worry about, a new problem has come to light for companies that sell goods or services via an Internet Web site. PanIP, LLC (PanIP), a company based in San Diego, has initiated lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California against over 50 companies transacting business over their Internet Web sites, alleging that such activity constitutes infringement of two patents owned by PanIP.1 The patents asserted by PanIP are generally directed to "data processing systems designed to facilitate commercial, financial and educational transactions between multimedia terminals"2 and to "a system for filing applications with an institution from a plurality of remote sites, and for automatically processing said applications in response to each applicant's credit rating obtained from a credit reporting service."3
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.
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.
This article discusses the practical and policy reasons for the use of DPAs and NPAs in white-collar criminal investigations, and considers the NDAA's new reporting provision and its relationship with other efforts to enhance transparency in DOJ decision-making.
While the DOJ Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative is still in its early stages and cybersecurity regulations are evolving, whistleblower plaintiffs have already begun leveraging the FCA to pursue alleged noncompliance with government cybersecurity requirements.
