Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘technology’

The Graphing Calculator Story

It’s heart-warming enough to be a Christmas tale:

Greg and I still had to sneak into the building. The people in charge of the PowerPC project, upon which [Apple’s] future depended, couldn’t get us badges without a purchase order. They couldn’t get a purchase order without a signed contract. They couldn’t get a contract without approval from Legal, and if Legal heard the truth, we’d be escorted out of the building.

Ron Avitzur tells the Graphing Calculator Story: engineers conspire to evade the lawyers and suits and create killer app software (via McIrvin); related Slashdot thread.

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Update: SCO and its lawyers

The SCO Group is famous for its business strategy, which in large measure consists of filing a barrage of suits against IBM, Novell and other makers and users of Linux-based and other software products based on purported infringements of its intellectual property rights in Unix (see Nov. 6, 2003). On Oct. 31 SCO signed an agreement with Boies, Schiller & Flexner and a second law firm that will cap (at $31 million) the legal bill it will owe over and above a generous contingency share of any recoveries. (Stephen Shankland, “SCO seals deal for legal expense cap”, CNET News, Nov. 5). For more on the controversy, see Jim Kerstetter, “The Most Hated Company In Tech”, Business Week, Feb. 2; “SCO’s Suit: A Match Made in Redmond?”, Mar. 11. While to date it seems SCO has been unable to produce much hard evidence of IBM’s having infringed, SCO says that’s because the larger company has been unwilling to provide a helpful “road map” to its code to help in identifying violations (Nick Farrell, “IBM says SCO has no evidence”, The Inquirer, Sept. 17). SCO’s side of the controversy may be found at its website, while GrokLaw provides a wealth of items and links from a standpoint critical of the SCO claims.

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Lerach to Google: cough up bettor bucks

“Lerach Coughlin Stoia & Robbins …filed a class action against Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and 10 other Internet search engines that claims they have been promoting illegal gambling on their Web sites and requests that they fork over the ad revenue. The complaint, filed Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court, requests that the search engines put revenue from advertising Internet gambling into a fund that would provide restitution to California Indian Tribes or other licensed gambling businesses in California. The complaint says money in the fund would also go to the spouses of gamblers who have had community property taken away as a result of illegal gambling and to the state treasury.” (Brenda Sandburg, “Casino Come-Ons Return Bad Result for Search Sites”, The Recorder, Aug. 5; David Legard, “Gambling lawsuit filed against top Web content sites”, IDG/Computerworld, Aug. 4). For questions about the legality of accepting advertising from offshore casinos, see Apr. 21. Earlier lawsuits have gone after credit card companies for facilitating offshore gambling transactions (see Dec. 7, 1999), but a Lerach attorney said this was the first suit against search engines.

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Induce alarm

“When the lawyers at EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] first sat down and asked ‘Whom could we sue under the Induce Act [the Inducing Infringements of Copyright Act (PDF), proposed by Sens. Hatch, Daschle, Leahy, Boxer and others] if we were an abusive copyright holder?’ the answer was clear: pretty much everybody. Playing the devil’s advocates, we knew we could draft a legal complaint against any number of the major computer or electronics manufacturers for selling everyday devices we all know and love — CD burners, MP3 players, cell phones — and that with that complaint, we could file a lawsuit that would survive any attempt to dismiss it before trial, costing the targeted company up to $1,000,000 per month in legal fees alone. The Induce Act is a nasty, brutish stick in the hands of the wrong plaintiff.” (“Prelude to a Fake Complaint”, EFF website, Jun. 24). See Bryan Chaffin, “EFF Demonstrates How To Use New Law Against Apple, iPod”, Mac Observer, Jun. 25. For more on the bill, see Legal Reader, Jun. 10.

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Exporting s. 17200

Have you been skipping past items about California’s abuse-ridden s. 17200 business practices act (see Jun. 30, Apr. 22, Mar. 12, Feb. 16 and links from there) just because you don’t happen to live or do business in California? Then read on. Under a case currently on appeal to the state’s supreme court, a business located anywhere else in the country, perhaps even the world, can be sued under s. 17200 if it advertises for customers in California — and such advertising may take the form of maintaining a website accessible to California customers. In the case at issue, a Los Angeles appeals court ruled this March that several Nevada casino hotels “could be sued by a man seeking class action status on behalf of all California residents hit with a $3-per-night energy surcharge while staying in Las Vegas, Reno or other gambling towns.” The court held “that hotel advertisements, toll-free numbers and interactive Web sites provided sufficient contact to give Los Angeles-area resident Frank Snowney jurisdiction to sue in California” under the ultra-liberal state law. According to a Fulbright & Jaworski lawyer who is representing the casinos on appeal, the ruling “may affect any hotel, cruise ship, club, theater, museum, sporting venue, rental car company, restaurant, etc., operating exclusively outside of California, but accepting online reservations.” (Mike McKee, “Businesses Quake Over California Case”, The Recorder, Jul. 2). More: There turns out to be a whole blog dedicated to s. 17200, and it takes exception to the Recorder article’s slant, interpreting the pending case as primarily about the scope of state jurisdiction generally and only incidentally about s. 17200 (via Legal Reader).

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Yoga postures copyrightable?

Beverly Hills yoga master Bikram Choudhury copyrighted a series of 26 yoga postures, exercises, breathing techniques and dialogues and is now seeking to enforce his intellectual property in them. His series of legal actions has roused controversy among yoga buffs, some of whom “say that yoga is a 5,000-year- old tradition that cannot be owned” and are fighting back in court. (Julian Guthrie, “Yogis go to court over poses”, San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 5; “Yoga master’s lawsuit? Bad karma”, Reuters/CNN, Feb. 9; Martin Hodgson and agencies, “New twist to yoga positions as guru sues”, The Guardian (UK), Feb. 9). For efforts to enforce intellectual property in quilt designs, see Dec. 18-19, 2000. Update Apr. 17, 2005: judge rules Choudhury’s claims not necessarily barred under copyright law.

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Submarine patents run aground

Big news from federal court in Nevada: U.S. District Judge Philip Pro ruled that the estate of deceased inventor Jerome Lemelson “can’t enforce 14 patents relating to machine vision and bar-code technologies because the prolific inventor and his estate waited too long to pursue the alleged infringers. The so-called ‘submarine patents’ are invalid, Pro ruled, and are not infringed by products made by Symbol Technologies Inc. and Cognex Corp.” (Brenda Sandburg, “Judge Torpedoes Dead Inventor’s Patent Claims”, The Recorder, Jan. 27; Cognex press release, Jan. 26). Jesse Jenner, a Fish & Neave attorney who represents Symbol and Cognex, told The Reporter that defendant companies have paid Lemelson interests an estimated $1.5 billion in the face of threatened or actual litigation. “This is probably the most substantial licensing program of any individual patentee in history,” Jenner said. “It’s now essentially terminated.” For more on the fabulous Lemelson patent litigation machine, see May 10, 2001 and links from there; Feb. 11-12, 2002.

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California’s antispam law

I’ve got an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning on the remarkably bad legislation that California passed this year ostensibly banning spam, which in fact creates a right to sue unwary businesses for $1000 per email over all sorts of communications that aren’t regarded as spam by most recipients. Fortunately, the pending federal SPAM-CON bill, whatever its other merits or demerits, would override the California law, which otherwise is due to go into effect Jan. 1. (Walter Olson, “Spamifornia”, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 3) (sub). I’ll probably be returning to this subject in print again, since the space available in the WSJ didn’t permit me to explore some of the pertinent litigation precedents that make the California bill so scary, notably the antispam law passed by Utah last year and the record of class action suits under the federal “junk fax” law (Jul. 19 and links from there).

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