In the high-bandwidth Internet age, video sharing websites such as YouTube and Yahoo! Video are growing in popularity. The ease with which such sharing is accomplished has aided users in illegally uploading copyrighted movies, TV shows, and music. In a recent lawsuit, Viacom and its copyright-owning affiliates sought one billion dollars in damages against YouTube, …
A preliminary injunction is an incredibly useful and important tool in cases involving the enforcement of environmental statutes and regulations. Parties hoping to protect the environment will often seek preliminary injunctions to prevent environmental harm from occurring while the case is being litigated in court. In Winter v. National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), the Supreme …
Reverse payments, such as the one at issue in Arkansas Carpenters Health & Welfare Fund v. Bayer AG, are controversial because they appear to be nothing more than agreements between competitors not to compete. However, because a patent was involved, the Federal Circuit refused to declare this agreement unlawful—even when the patentee offered to pay …
In March 2008, the Federal Communications Commission auctioned licenses to sizeable tracts of radio frequency spectrum that will be vacated due to the analog-to-digital television conversion to occur in June 2009. The Commission conditioned the license to one portion of this spectrum—the “D Block”—on an unprecedented requirement: for the licensee to work hand-in-hand with public-safety …
This article blends three areas of law: international law, comparative law and intellectual property. Specifically, this article discusses the benefits and problems associated with harmonizing United States patent laws with foreign systems. It does so by analyzing the historical and contemporary ramifications of uniform patent laws. In addition, it highlights recent attempts in Congress—The Patent …
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that Rambus, a developer of computer memory technologies, failed to disclose information about its intellectual property holdings to other participants in the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), a private standard-setting organization, during the period in which JEDEC was developing Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) standards. According to the …
In an effort to reduce the backlog of unexamined patent applications, the United States Patent and Trademark Office created a controversial new set of rules for patent applicants. In Tafas v. Dudas, a Federal District Court judge issued a permanent injunction against the rules, finding their enactment to be outside the Patent Office’s authority. On …
Now that mobile technological devices like camera phones pervade our world, allowing people to capture images and scenes in places and at times never before possible, serious privacy concerns inevitably arise. The fact that users of social networking sites, which are growing rapidly in popularity, frequently and commonly propagate these easily captured images, as well …
Digital video recording has become an indispensable household item. The advent of the remote storage digital video recorder (RS-DVR) allows consumers to expand digital recording capability without the need for a stand-alone DVR box. This new technology raises interesting legal questions regarding copyright infringement including: liability resulting from the need for buffer copies in digital …
The Supreme Court’s recent interpretation of the patent exhaustion doctrine mandates that the transgenic seed industry use contract law instead of patent law to enforce post-sale restrictions. Prior to Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., the federal district courts and the Federal Circuit held that patent exhaustion was not triggered if a sale was …
