by Lee Gesmer | May 20, 2011 | Courts
“I’m sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”
— George Bernard Shaw
Non-lawyers see lawyers arguing before judges on television and in the movies, and they get the mistaken impression that oral argument is the heart and soul of lawyering. In fact, it’s not. Most judges based their decision on a careful reading of the legal briefs submitted to them. That’s particularly true of the Supreme Court, where each side to a case may spend hundreds or thousands of hours preparing their written briefs, and get all of 30 minutes per side for oral argument. This wasn’t always the case – until the mid-1800’s the time for argument was unrestricted, and could go for days. In 1849 the time per side was limited to two hours. This was reduced to one hour in 1925, and 30 minutes in 1970. And, as Justice Alito recently noted, half of the words spoken during those 30 minutes are spoken by the Justices themselves, while questioning the lawyers.
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by Lee Gesmer | May 14, 2011 | Trials
One of the oldest, most hoary rules of the trial practice is this: if you have a bad fact, reveal it to the jury before your opponent does. Otherwise, the theory goes, the jury (or judge) will think you are trying to hide it from them, and will count it against you. Worst case, you will lose credibility as an advocate – if this lawyer will try to hide a significant fact from me this time, what else is he or she hiding? Why should I trust this attorney?
Disclosing the bad fact is OK, but even better, figure out some way to turn the “bad” fact to your advantage – “if you can’t fix it, feature it.” For example, “my client was convicted of criminal fraud ten years ago. We want you to know about this, jurors, and to know that he has paid his price to society, and been free of any allegations of wrong doing since. Since then he has married, he is the father of triplets, and he hasn’t gotten into trouble since. We all make mistakes – don’t hold this one against him.”
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by Lee Gesmer | Oct 1, 2010 | Employment, Noncompete Agreements
While the debate over whether Massachusetts should adopt a law restricting the enforceability of non-compete agreements rages on (well, at least among a group of maybe 100 economists, lawyers and business people), California proudly observes that noncompete agreements are unenforceable in that state (except under very limited circumstances). And, economists argue, that is one reason why the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley is more successful than its counterpart Massachusetts.
Now, come to learn, things were not quite what they seemed. I’m sure that 99% of California companies are in fact impacted by the California law — that is, they cannot impose covenants not to compete on their employees. But a few companies — Google, Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Intuit and Intel — figured out an end-run around this law. Apparently, the Federal Trade Commission tumbled to the fact that each of these companies agreed, with one or more of the others, not to solicit that company’s employees. For example, according to the FTC Apple and Google put each others employees on “Do Not Call” lists.
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by Lee Gesmer | Sep 25, 2010 | CFAA, Copyright
A decision in Jagex v. Impulse Software, issued by Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Gorton in August, has some interesting (albeit not nonobvious) lessons for software developers seeking to protect their websites from copying or reverse engineering. The decision arises in the context of a preliminary injunction – a request by Jagex to provide it with legal relief at the outset of the case, before discovery or trial – so Jagex may yet prevail in this case, particularly since most of the reasons the court denied it relief that this stage can be corrected before the case progresses much further.
The plaintiff, Jagex operates an online role-playing game called “Runescape.” Runescape is a “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” (MMORPG for short, but we’ll just call it “the game”).
Impulse offers online cheat tools – software that lets users advance through the levels of the game without actually playing the game. Moving to higher and more challenging levels is the goal of the game, and the Impulse software allows users to reach those hallowed grounds without investing the time and effort the game expects users to endure. And, it is possible to invest a great deal of time and effort with this game – Judge Gorton noted that the top three Runescape players averaged about 20,000 hours of playing time.
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by Lee Gesmer | Sep 17, 2010 | Copyright
You’re out cruising garage sales on a hot summer Sunday morning when you spot an unopened copy of AutoCAD sitting on a card table for $40 – 40 buckeroos for a program people spend $700 for new. Yeah, it’s a couple of versions back, but you figure you can get $340 for it on eBay, and not break a sweat. You buy it from the clearly clueless seller, and the next thing you know you’re watching bids come in at over $300. Except that Autodesk, proud owner of this high-end computer aided design program, objects. You don’t own that program, they say, we licensed it to the original seller, and she had no right to sell it, no right at all. You are infringing our copyright by reselling the software, so take it off eBay right now, Autodesk’s lawyers insist in a hand delivered, “sign-here-to-acknowledge-receipt-sir” letter. In the meantime, they’ve sent eBay a DMCA take-down notice and eBay has killed your sale.
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