A new layer of federal oversight should help protect consumers and ethical e-commerce companies against misleading and name-tarnishing activities of outlaw e-tailers who have ripped off thousands of U.S. consumers. On Dec. 29, President Obama signed the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, introduced in the Senate early last year by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
A long-simmering copyright dispute between Hollywood and the Web has hit the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ' and the outcome could set a national precedent regarding the scope of potential liability for nearly every business on the Internet that posts infringing content.
The explosion of information about judges now available online has enabled researchers to uncover indications of possible bias, prejudice and other relevant tidbits.
In collecting and analyzing massive amounts of legal helpdesk ticketing data, including more than 600,000 helpdesk tickets within a recent nine-month time frame, legal-specific outsourcers and internal helpdesks alike pinpointed a noticeable, albeit predictable trend: More than 50% of all tickets resolved by the helpdesk relate to Microsoft Office products, with Word and Outlook leading the charge.
In almost every respect, e-discovery falls squarely in the domain of attorneys ' inside counsel, outside counsel and experts. Essentially, it is the business process for litigation, regulatory matters and internal investigations. So why is IT involved in almost every situation? The answer is quite simple: because IT must be involved.
In Tiffany v. eBay, the Second Circuit affirmed the District Court's ruling in favor of eBay on the key issue of contributory trademark infringement, as well as direct infringement and dilution, but remanded on the issue of false advertising. The upshot of the holding is that despite a general knowledge that a significant percentage of Tiffany goods sold on eBay were counterfeit, eBay did not have a duty to prevent any such sales unless and until a specific instance of fraud was brought to its attention.
Are Americans taking to heart the talk of politicians and some private-sector observers that the long-punishing economic and financial crisis that has put businesses into scrapbooks and people on the street is on the wane? The Census Bureau said recently that preliminary estimated U.S. retail e-commerce sales shot up 4% from the second quarter, tallying $41.5 billion.
Little was virtual beyond a typical conversational reference to this holiday season's once-again record-setting Cyber Monday and other online-holiday shopping excursions. The retail-industry dubbed day for online shopping and incentives for consumers to cybershop hit the jackpot with an echoing boom Nov. 29, racking up the biggest day of online shopping in history and breaking the billion-dollar mark
A threshold question for each patent filing is the speed at which a patent is desired.
There are many discussions going on about the use of social media among attorneys. Surely there are folks who don't understand the value of these mediums, mostly because of inexperience in using them. "Why should I go on Twitter and tell someone what I'm doing? Who is going to care?" they ask. To those people, I would suggest turning that question around: "When I have just heard a piece of important and timely information that would benefit some of my colleagues, how can I tell them all at once ' easily and quickly?" Now that's the question to be asking.
