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The Recorder
05-14-2008
What began as a boardroom tiff between two leading Internet companies has erupted into a spirited litigation battle. Two weeks after eBay sued Craigslist for diluting its stake in the privately held company, Craigslist has fired back with a suit of its own. The dispute centers around eBay's Kijiji, an online classified site that competes with Craigslist. The complaint claims that, inside eBay, Kijiji was called "craigslist killer" and that eBay put a Kijiji insider on Craigslist's board as a spy.
The Associated Press
05-15-2008
Nintendo of America Inc. was ordered to pay a small East Texas gaming company $21 million May 15 for infringing on a patent while designing controllers for its popular Wii and GameCube systems. A federal jury found in favor of Anascape Ltd. in the lawsuit that was originally filed in 2006. Nintendo spokesman Charlie Scibetta said the company will seek an appeal and expects the court to reduce the award "significantly." The jury found that Nintendo infringed on Anascape's patent while designing its Wii Classic, WaveBird and Gamecube controllers.
The Recorder
05-14-2008
What began as a boardroom tiff between two leading Internet companies has erupted into a spirited litigation battle. Two weeks after eBay sued Craigslist for diluting its stake in the privately held company, Craigslist has fired back with a suit of its own. The dispute centers around eBay's Kijiji, an online classified site that competes with Craigslist. The complaint claims that, inside eBay, Kijiji was called "craigslist killer" and that eBay put a Kijiji insider on Craigslist's board as a spy.
The Recorder
05-13-2008
"Damage apportionment," and "post-grant review" probably won't capture the hearts and minds of voters in a presidential election the way "a chicken in every pot" did. But that doesn't mean that the vagaries of patent reform -- and other equally obscure legal issues near and dear to Silicon Valley -- are being entirely ignored by the presidential hopefuls. In fact, the campaigns have reached into the Valley, calling on some of the local legal luminaries -- not just for money, but for advice -- as they hammer out their positions.
The Associated Press
05-13-2008
Candidates for the top post at the U.N. patent agency arrived in Geneva on May 13 to make their case for the job. Diplomats and patent experts from 14 countries are in the race to head the troubled World Intellectual Property Organization after the resignation of its current director-general over questions about his integrity.
The National Law Journal
05-12-2008
A Washington lawyer's novel strategy of suing companies for allegedly falsely marking products as patented has raised legal questions about whether noncompetitors should have standing to bring such cases to recover fines for themselves and the government. Matthew A. Pequignot, a partner at Washington-based intellectual property boutique Pequignot + Myers, filed two false patent marking lawsuits as a plaintiff in the Eastern District of Virginia. One of those was against disposable product maker Solo Cup Co. last September, and the other against Gillette and its parent company, The Procter & Gamble Co., in January.
The Recorder
05-09-2008
Software pirates beware. Ross Nadel, the former criminal chief of the San Francisco U.S. Attorney's Office, has joined Adobe Systems Inc. as senior legal counsel of worldwide anti-piracy. Nadel -- who founded and led the highly-regarded Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property unit -- retired from the office and joined Cooley Godward Kronish two years ago. He said he liked Cooley, but the gig at Adobe, with its distinct flavor of enforcement and cybercrime, was too appealing.
The Legal Intelligencer
04-02-2008
The advances in technology allow individuals and companies to access public, company and personal information available through the Internet or private networks regardless of the time of day. With all of this increased access to information and people, it is no surprise that new and unheard of abuses based on that access are becoming more common. Commercial spam, hacking, fraud and identity theft are just a few examples of the abuses. The question raised by all of this technology is, are there any remedies?
6th Cir.
03-25-2008
Despite objective reasonableness of copyright infringement plaintiff's novel royalty-receipt theory of recovery, plaintiff's continued, vigorous pursuit of discernibly doomed claim warranted award of attorney fees and costs in favor of defendant.
3rd Cir.
12-24-2007
District court did not clearly err in rejecting manufacturer's request for preliminary injunction against alleged trade dress infringement on ground that store-brand packaging was not confusingly similar, especially where packaging prominently displayed store brands' well-known marks; as to certain other store-brand packaging, however, district court gave undue weight to fact that products were store brands, effectively holding store-brand producer to lower standard of infringing behavior.
Fed. Cir.
12-21-2007
The Federal Circuit vacated and remanded a limited exclusion order of the International Trade Commission based on a finding that the appellant infringed four method claims of patents owned by the intervenor, Flexsys America, by producing in China and selling for importation to the United States a rubber anti-degradant. The court ruled that the commission's determination of infringement was based on an erroneous construction of the term "controlled amount" in the claims at issue.
