Last week, I spoke on a panel with, among others, Trucker Huss’ Joe Faucher, who discussed some aspects of Ninth Circuit ERISA jurisprudence with a mostly East Coast-centric audience. A week later, that circuit has turned out two of the more interesting and potentially significant appellate decisions in ERISA that any court has produced
Intellectual Property Litigation
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Patenting Retirement Plan Features
By Stephen Rosenberg on
You know, you live long enough and you see everything come back around again. Ties get skinny, then they get wide. Standardized testing is seen as the key to everything, then as evil incarnate, then as the key to everything again. Baseball is learning to again look at the quality of the player on the…
Copyright Infringement and Architects (Software and Otherwise)
Riddle me this, Riddler: what does the design of a center entrance colonial house have to do with complex computer software?
A lot, it turns out, if you are interested in the borders that should attach to IP rights so as to best balance the need to encourage the creation of new products against…
Me, Lawyers Weekly and Patent Infringement Litigation
By Stephen Rosenberg on
I am quoted extensively in this week’s Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly in the article “Businesses increasingly assert patents for strategic reasons,” which discusses companies bringing patent infringement claims against their competitors as a business tactic, and whether recent Supreme Court decisions making it theoretically easier to obtain an award of attorney’s fees will reduce the…
Putting Limits on Patent Trolling: An Infringement Litigator’s Perspective
By Stephen Rosenberg on
The whole question of patent trolling, and the concern over it, is an issue that has gnawed at me for some time, having defended small companies against patent infringement claims by competing manufacturers and having prosecuted licensing disputes on behalf of non-manufacturing, but inventive, patent holders. My latest bugaboo on this topic is the massive…
Lessons on Intellectual Property Litigation From the Baltimore Ravens Defense
This is a great story on long running copyright litigation between the Baltimore Ravens football club and a security guard and doodler, over the rights to the Ravens’ emblem. The court bifurcated the case, with liability being tried first. The jury in the liability portion of the case found infringement, but the next jury, in…
Working Backwards From a Closing
This is a very entertaining and interesting piece from AON’s Mark Hermann, leaving aside any qualms about the seriousness of the website that published it. In it, Hermann makes the case for litigation counsel to provide overviews to their clients structured around the question of how they plan to win the case, rather than just…
A Personal Reflection on Iqbal
By Stephen Rosenberg on
When it comes to the law, I am conservative by nature, in the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” meaning of the word. I am not speaking here of substantive legal rules, or case outcomes, and how to view them, but instead of the bread and butter elements of a litigator’s life, evidentiary rules…
On the Patentability of Computer-Generated Inventions
By Stephen Rosenberg on
So, so, so very far behind. Its even creeped onto the blog, and in particular into our serialization of The Genie In the Machine. Oh, well, better late than never. Here is the last and final installment of our semi-serialization of Robert Plotkin’s book on automated inventing, and its impact on patent law. Meanwhile…
The Impact of Automated Inventing on Patent Law – Round 2
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Last week, we commenced our (quasi-) serialization of Robert Plotkin’s book, The Genie in the Machine: How Computer-Automated Inventing is Revolutionizing Law and Business. Here, as promised, is part 2 in the series.
Automated Inventing: The Challenge for Patent Law
As I explained in my previous entry, increasingly powerful computer software is being used…