It seems like just yesterday a kid’s birthday party could be put over the top by the appearance of a regular old birthday clown. Some of the kids would be entertained, most would be petrified, and the party would be a success regardless. These days, writes Katherine Rosman of the Wall Street Journal, the perfect…
Federal agents are stepping up efforts to curb the proliferation of counterfeit purses. Designer knock-offs have become so ubiquitous that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (“ICE”) is concerned that their sale is a key revenue source for organized crime syndicates. In a news story here, Nebraska TV station KETV7 says it snuck hidden cameras…
Florida corporation Psystar Corp., owned by brothers Rudy and Robert Pedraza, has been sued by Apple Inc. for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and breach of contract. Psystar builds and sells so-called “cloned” computers which run on Apple’s most recent operation system, Mac OS X “Leopard.” In the complaint, filed last month in U.S. District Court…
A federal court ruling last week absolved EBay, Inc. of any liability for contributory infringement of Tiffany & Co.’s registered trademarks. The lawsuit, in which Tiffany alleged that most of the supposedly genuine Tiffany jewelry appearing for sale on eBay were in fact fakes, was initiated in 2004. Judge Richard Sullivan, a U.S. District Judge…
Atul Malhotra, 42, faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine after pleading guilty to one count of theft of trade secrets. Malhotra was a director of sales and business development in IBM’s Global Services Division for nearly a decade, from 1997-2006. He obtained confidential pricing info regarding IBM’s products and materials,…
An earlier post detailed foam footwear manufacturer Crocs Inc.’s subsidiary’s legal defense of its intellectual property. This time, the parent company is alleging illicit mimicry of its designs and logo by Skechers USA, Inc. in its new Nano Lite foam shoes. In a complaint filed July 10 in U.S. District Court in Denver, Crocs alleges…
Rosetta Stone Ltd provides software programs which help people learn new languages. Courses of varying difficulty are available, in numerous languages, and are marketed to consumers in bright yellow boxes via print ads (who could forget the plight of the hardworking farm boy, who must quickly learn Italian to impress a supermodel?), and of course…
Thursday, June 27, Canadian software-holding company Pan-Afric Holdings Ltd. sued Ernst & Young LLP in U.S. District Court in Maryland for over $10 million in damages, claiming the accounting giant made mathematical errors in preparing a software valuation report on which Pan-Afric detrimentally relied. In 1993, for $5 million, Pan-Afric purchased an interest (including all…
One of the biggest mistakes we see clients make when they are negotiating a software license agreement with SAP is that they focus solely on pricing and discounts to the exclusion of other important issues contained in the SAP software license agreement. Focusing solely on pricing while ignoring the other terms and conditions contained in…