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
Online Contracts – When Is the Last Time You Read the Terms and Conditions?
When you sign up for an online service do you read the terms and conditions? Few people do, not even the lawyers that are hired to write these things. While online agreements are ridiculed for their length and complexity they are important to the online service companies - companies like Uber, Airbnb and countless others that have to deal with the risk of customer lawsuits. Companies use online agreements to protect themselves in a variety of ways - against jury trials (often by requiring...
Biden Administration Signals Reversal Of Delrahim Position on Standard Essential Patents
Nestled within the Biden administration’s recent, sweeping Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is a small, rather oblique paragraph that has garnered little attention to date. Appearing as Section 5(d), it urges the Attorney General and the Secretary of Commerce to “consider whether to revise their position on the intersection of the intellectual property and antitrust laws,” in order to “avoid the potential for anticompetitive extension of market power beyond the...
Trump v. Facebook, Twitter and Google
I don’t know how much money Trump’s lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (and their CEOs) will help him raise, or whether it will gain him political support, but I do know one thing about these cases - they have no basis in current law. Of course it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Republican judges in Florida will see it his way, but it seems very unlikely. At issue is the infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) - 47 USC Section 230. The relevant...
Final Thoughts On Google v. Oracle
At long last - after more than ten years, two trials and three appeals - the copyright lawsuit in Google v. Oracle has come to a close. In a surprise ending (given the emphasis on copyrightability for much of the case) on April 5, 2021 the Supreme Court held that Google's copying of 11,500 lines of code from Oracle's Java SE Application Programming Interface (the “Java API") and its use in Google’s Android mobile operating system was copyright fair use. A deeply disappointing ending for...
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