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
Supreme Court Weighs in on Patents, Antitrust and Market Power
Patents, Antitrust. Suppose that you live in a small farming community, Village 1, that relies entirely on its own members for food supplies. I have the only farm that grows corn. Whenever you come to me to purchase corn I tell you that I will only sell you my corn if you also buy a pound of cauliflower for every pound of corn you purchase. Cauliflower is plentiful, and you don't want to buy my cauliflower (in fact you don't even like this vegetable), but since you (and your fellow citizens)...
Noncompete Litigation in the Massachusetts Courts: 2005 Year in Review (Part I)
Noncompete Agreements. Our firm used to write "year in review" articles [link], and I decided it was time for a reprise. Here is a year-in-review summary of the most significant Massachsetts state court cases from late 2004 through calender year 2005 involving the attempted enforcement of noncompete or nonsolicitation contracts. Rather than getting bogged down in the detailed facts of the cases I'll provide a quick summary of the key facts and legal issues that led to the outcome in each case....
Google And The Digitization of The Planet's Books
Copyright. "Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible [books] into one vast index, every word of which is search able by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World and Third, en tout langue -- and all, of course, entirely for free." Eric Schmidt, Google CEO "Mr Schmidt fails to mention that Google's intent . . . is to make even more money. . . . Can it be so greedy that it seeks to bolster it profits by freely exploiting the rights of...
American Girl Attempts to Shut Down AmercanGirl.com Porno Site
Trademark. What do you do when someone sets up a web site almost identical to yours, but you can't find the owner of the site in order to sue them? This was the problem faced by American Girl , which sells wholesome girls dolls, clothing and books targeted at pre-adolescent girls, when it discovered that someone was publishing pornography on www.amercangirl.com. (Note the missing letter). American Girl sued the registrar and "John Doe" (legalese for, "I'll name you when I identify you") but...
It’s Hard to Fire the President . . .
. . . of your company, that is. OK, here the facts, minus the legal jargon. You're a businessman with a successful company. You meet someone that wants to go into business with you in a related area. You start a new company, making sure that you hold a majority interest (52.5%). Your new "partner" gets 37.5%, and the rest of the stock goes to a couple of employees. Although your partner is a minority shareholder he's running the business, so you make him president of the company. Almost ten...
Dog Bites Man, Not News
[Update: this case was affirmed by the First Circuit in 2007; link here] Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly reports, on the front page of its October 31, 2005 issue, that Federal District Court Judge Robert Keeton has dismissed, under the Communications Decency Act, claims that Lycos was responsible for third-party defamatory postings on Lycos' Raging Bull website. The case is Universal Communications Systems, Inc. v. Lycos, Inc. Apparently there is no written decision from Judge Keeton. The idea...
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