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
Whitey Bulger and Gorky Park
"The FBI is an unindicted coconspirator in the massive racketeering case against Whitey." - Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe, June 14, 2013 _______________ I wonder if Martin Cruz Smith had Bulger in mind when he wrote this in 1981: The FBI doesn't conduct investigations, they pay informers. … Their informers are mental cases and hit men. Where the bureau touches the real world, suddenly you get all these freaks who know how to kill people with piano wire. Say a freak gets caught … he tells the...
93A Opinion in Baker v. Goldman Sachs: What Happens When You Mix In Equal Parts A Start-Up, a Fraudulent Purchaser, a Tech Bubble and a New York Investment Banker?
Earlier this year, on the eve of trial in Baker v. Goldman Sachs in federal district court in Boston, I published a blog post describing the facts behind this unusual case, which involved the acquisition of Dragon Systems by Lernout & Hauspie in a $600 million all-stock deal. Soon after the acquisition closed the market discovered that Lernout had fabricated its Asian sales figures. This was quickly followed by Lernout's bankruptcy, which left Dragon (owned by the Bakers, husband and wife...
Rent-A-PC Fails to Enforce Restrictive Covenants Against Former Employees
In this May 28th, 2013 decision by Massachusetts Federal District Court Judge George O'Toole, Rent-A-PC unsuccessfully sought to obtain a preliminary injunction against two former employees, and to enforce a confidentiality agreement against a third. As to two of the employees, Rent-A-PC attempted to enforce a one year covenant not to compete. Judge O'Toole denied that motion, finding that the employees underwent several material changes to their employment, making it likely that their...
Aereo, Antenna Farms and Copyright Law: Creative Destruction Comes to Broadcast TV (Part 3)
Click here for Part 1 in this series of posts, here for Part 2. In Parts 1 and 2 of this series of posts I discussed how Aereo designed its broadcast-TV-to-Internet system to fit within the ruling established by the Second Circuit in the Cablevision case anticipating that it would be sued for copyright infringement by a group of broadcasters. The broadcasters did file suit against Aereo, and in the Second Circuit, the very circuit in which Cablevision is controlling law and the circuit in...
This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find a summary of our services here. To learn how GU can help you, contact:
Lee Gesmer