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
Judges Who Blog
Very few judges blog, but Massachusetts Federal District District Court Judge Nancy Gertner is one of the first, if not the very first. An article in the May 27, 2008 Boston Globe discusses her blogging for Slate, one of the best online magazines. If you're interested in reading Judge Gertner's blogs, go to "Convictions: Slate's Blog on Legal Issues" and use the "Search This Blog" field in the upper right corner of the screen to search for "Gertner". Judge Gertner's first blog entry, on March...
The TimesMachine
If you have a home delivery subscription to the New York Times (even only the Sunday Times), check out the TimesMachine -- a collection of full-page image scans of the newspaper from 1851-1922. That's every issue and every page and article, advertisements and all, viewable in their original format. April 16, 1912 To read how this was done, click here. "Using Amazon Web Services, Hadoop and our own code, we ingested 405,000 very large TIFF images, 3.3 million articles in SGML and 405,000 xml...
Rambus Court: "Price Raising Deception" Not Competitive Harm
The "Rambus litigation" in all its many permutations -- Justice Department investigation, FTC proceedings and multiple civil cases -- has been documented and commented upon widely. For a recap see Andy Updegrove's article here. At the heart of the legal controversy is the allegation that during the 1990s Rambus, the owner of key DRAM patents or pending patents that solved the CPU-memory chip "bottleneck" problem, failed to disclose these patents to JEDEC, an important standards-setting...
Interesting Documents: "Order for Discovery of Computer Memory Devices" in ConnectU v. Facebook
Here is an example of just how complex electronic discovery can become when the stakes are high, and the lawyers are prepared to negotiate an extremely detailed discovery protocol. This document is from the ConnectU v. Facebook litigation, in which ConnectU alleges that the founders of Facebook misappropriated ConnectU ideas and technology. The Order is signed by Magistrate Collings, who is known to be one of the most experienced and sophisticated judges in the Federal District of...
Judge Young Pulls No Punches When it Comes to Mandatory Sentencing
You may recall the brouhaha that arose last year when a Massachusetts state district court judge vacated a prior state court conviction in order to mitigate the impact that the conviction would have on the defendant under the federal sentencing guidelines in an upcoming sentencing in federal court. The defendant, Matthew West, was due to be sentenced in federal court by Judge Young later the same day. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, the existence or non-existence of a prior conviction...
Quick Hits: "In Hand" Service and Deceptive Advertising
What does it mean when a contract requires that notice be given "in hand"? Believe it or not, despite over 225 years of Massachusetts jurisprudence, until now no Massachusetts court had ever considered this question. In McMann v. McGowan, 17 Mass. App. Ct. 513 (2008), decided on April 7, 2008, the Appeals Court held that "in hand" means delivery into the hand of an authorized receipient. The Court rejected the argument that "in hand" includes delivery by hand, the position argued by the losing...
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