Via Viente Taiwan, L.P. v. United Parcel Service, Inc., 2009 WL 398729 (E.D. Tex. February 17, 2009) A federal court in Texas held the clickwrap agreement between United Parcel Service and one of its customers was binding. After plaintiff Via Viente sued UPS in Texas, UPS moved to transfer venue to the Northern District of [...]
Archive for February, 2009
I was a guest on On Digital Media last night
February 20th, 2009
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Had a great time as a guest in Episode 82 of On Digital Media last night with John Federico, Steve Hatch, Chia-Lin Simmons and Ken Gellman. We talked in depth about the recent Facebook terms of service bruhaha and the announcement of the Kindle2. Please listen below (or click through if you’re seeing this in [...]
Open source software and the covenant-condition dichotomy
February 20th, 2009
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[Note: This is a short essay I have written in conjunction with an upcoming presentation I will give at John Marshall Law School here in Chicago next week. I invite your feedback in the comments to this post. For formatting purposes, footnotes (which are mainly to case citations) have been omitted.] Some of the peculiarities [...]
My law firm’s newest blog: Practical Ediscovery
February 19th, 2009
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Please take a moment to visit Practical Ediscovery, a new blog written by a team of attorneys at my law firm, Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP. I’ve already contributed one post, and plan on generating as much content for the blog as I reasonably can. The focus of the blog is, as its name suggests, practical [...]
Retrospective: Graham v. James
February 18th, 2009
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I’m speaking about open source at John Marshall Law School’s 53rd Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference on February 27. More info here (warning – PDF!). To prepare, I’m going over some important cases dealing with copyright licensing in general, that is, cases that deal with copyright licensing but not open source. In case you’re interested, [...]
Shame on you, Facebook, for overreaching
February 17th, 2009
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Facebook, I hereby grant to you an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use the following content: “Go jump in a lake.” The past few days people have been talking about how scandalous it is that Facebook changed its terms of service to grab up a very [...]
RIAA’s need for discovery was not so urgent
February 13th, 2009
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Elektra Entertainment Group, Inc. v. Does 1-6, No. 08-444 (S.D. Ohio February 5, 2009) The RIAA’s de-emphasis on lawsuits against individual file sharers may underlie the result in a recent case from a federal court in Ohio. The music industry plaintiffs had sought expedited discovery so they could learn which members in a household (either [...]
Does the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech feature violate copyright law?
February 11th, 2009
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The executive director of the Author’s Guild apparently objects to a feature of Amazon’s new Kindle 2 that would permit the vision impaired to hear the book’s text read in a computer generated voice. The Wall Street Journal quoted Paul Aiken yesterday as saying “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. [...]
Probable cause existed to arrest employee for criminal data tampering
February 5th, 2009
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Deng v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 552 F.3d 574 (7th Cir. January 5, 2009). Employee Deng got a bad review from his employer Sears, Roebuck & Co. Disaffected, he took disability leave but continued to come into the office. On one of these visits, he deleted a bunch of data relating to work he had [...]
