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

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

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

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

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

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

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