The Warshak decision is a long-overdue federal case extending Fourth Amendment protection to electronic communications stored with third parties. In holding that citizens have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” for stored e-mail messages, the Sixth Circuit decision represents a shift towards a stricter interpretation of the Fourth Amendment as it applies to modern forms of …
The first sale doctrine, simply put, is the principle that after the copyright owner has transferred a copy of the work, the new owner is free to do almost anything with the copy without the copyright owner’s consent. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in Costco v. Omega that the …
Entering into a contract containing a carefully crafted arbitration clause provides a level of predictability with respect to the investment and liability associated with patent license and/or research agreements, thereby providing the respective companies a better estimation of the risk factors associated therewith. Specifically, when parties enter into an agreement to arbitrate they have the …
Design patents are an under-utilized tool in the protection of the work of fashion designers. Although the fashion industry annually generates billions of dollars in sales in the United States alone, many designers do not adequately protect their intellectual property. Multiple efforts to create a sui generis 1 statute specifically for fashion designs have stalled …
The exercise of personal jurisdiction is proper when someone has directed minimum contacts at a specific forum. Business conducted over the Internet complicates personal jurisdiction considerations because the boundaries of where one’s conduct reaches are not always clear. In Chloe v. Queen Bee of Beverly Hills, LLC, the Second Circuit held that business activities directed …
In July of 2010, the Copyright Office issued a ruling that allowed owners of iPhones and other cell phones to reprogram their devices to allow the use of lawfully-obtained programs not approved by their phone manufacturers. Despite the ruling, however, the Copyright Office was unable to determine whether the copies of the programs loaded onto …
The Federal Circuit, the Patent Office, and several regional circuits apply the trademark law doctrine of foreign equivalents. Under the doctrine, marks in foreign languages are translated into English and tested for the statutory bars to registration, instead of being tested in their original form. The doctrine is applied even in cases where only a …
Due to newer clinical utility study results and the recent availability of warfarin pharmacogenetic testing, the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) has modified warfarin’s prescription labeling twice in the past three years. Yet, despite numerous warfarin dosing adverse events resulting from trial and error dosing, many clinicians have been reluctant to prescribe warfarin pharmacogenetic testing …
Currently the most widely-used file-sharing technology, the BitTorrent protocol, enables its users to transmit and receive much larger digital files with even greater ease than its popular predecessors such as the centralized and decentralized peer-topeer networks of Napster, Kazaa, and Grokster. It did not take long before BitTorrent Web sites hosted in the United States …
Adolescent brain imaging technology is an evolving area of science that reveals levels of maturity in the adolescent brain. Its potential effect on criminally culpable behavior is the source of extensive debate. The technology can inform judges and jurors on essential differences between how adults make decisions regarding their conduct as distinct from adolescents. United …
