Mass Law Blog
Intellectual property and business litigation, Massachusetts and nationallyWritten by humans
Lee Gesmer’s Mass Law Blog began in 2005, and contains almost 600 posts. The site initially focused on Massachusetts law, but today it follows business and intellectual property law nation-wide. The site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm represents startup and established companies in the areas of litigation, transactions (including financings, mergers and acquisitions), IP rights, taxation, employment law, standards consortia, business counseling and open source development projects and foundations. You can find a summary of the firm’s services here. To learn how Gesmer Updegrove can help you, contact: Lee Gesmer
Of iPods, Lock-Ins and the DMCA
As an ambivalent owner of an Apple iPod I've given a lot of thought to the fact that songs I download from Apple's iTunes will not play on a portable device other than an Apple iPod. If I want to play my iTunes music collection on another manufacturer's MP3 player, today or five years from now, I'll be unable to play the tunes downloaded from iTunes. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prevents competitors from reverse engineering the protection Apple embeds in these files, and therefore...
An Update on Google Book Search
University of California joins in. The University of California is joining Google's book-scanning project, throwing the weight of another 100 academic libraries behind an ambitious venture that's under legal attack for alleged copyright infringement. Link here for full story. For an earlier and in depth discussion of this issue click here.
"Fantasy Baseball" Decision
[Update:] Matt Mattari sent me a link to his article on this topic, which was published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology before the publication of the decision. Click here to read the article (pdf file). Here is a link (pdf file) to the federal district court decision in the C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing Inc. v. Major League Baseball Advanced Media and Major League Baseball Players' Association case, issued on August 8, 2006. Quoting from the decision: The court finds that the...
Son of Rambus
Foundry Networks, Inc. has filed suit against Alcatel in federal court in Delaware. The claims are very similar to the claims in the Rambus litigations. A copy of the complaint is here (pdf file). Andy Updegrove discusses this case and its similarities to Rambus in his "Son of Rambus" post, here.