Ninth Circuit Strikes Down Contract Amendment Without Notice–Douglas v. Talk America
By Eric Goldman Douglas v. US District Court ex rel Talk America, No. 06-75424 (9th Cir. July 18, 2007) In this case, the plaintiff initially procured telephony services from AOL, which subsequently sold its telephony business to Talk America. Talk…
Patent Contingency Fee Agreements
By Eric Goldman Patent litigation is hot, but I rarely see much discussion about the fee agreements used by patent litigants. So I was very interested to hear Stephen Susman (from the well-known Susman Godfrey firm) speak at the May…
SAP Has Bad News in Oracle Lawsuit, But Tries to Bury It
By Eric Goldman Oracle Corp. v. SAP AG, Case No. 07-CV-1658 MJJ (N.D. Cal. answer filed July 2, 2007) You’re an international corporate giant with some bad news in a high-profile case that you want to bury. What do you…
June 2007 Quick Links
By Eric Goldman Email * Spam cases are coming at a regular clip, and it’s tricky divining the latest state of the law. Two recent cases that caught my attention: – US v. Impulse Media Group, 2007 WL 1725560 (W.D….
Cavazos Presentation on Open Source
By Eric Goldman At the UT Austin Technology Law Conference in May, Ed Cavazos spoke about open source issues. He proffered seven common myths about open source: #1: the phrase “open source” is meaningful, or developers understand all this so…
May 2007 Quick Links
By Eric Goldman Spam * MySpace Inc. v. The Globe.com Inc., No. CV 06-3391 RGK (C.D. Cal. Feb. 27, 2007). This case has some personal interest because theglobe.com was one of my flagship clients before I left the law firm…
“Last Call” Draft of GPL3 is Posted
By John Ottaviani The Free Software Foundation posted the “last call” draft of version 3 of the GPL on its website yesterday for comment. The General Public License (GPL) is one of the most widely used open source licenses. Version…
UCC 2B/UCITA Resurrected–ALI’s Principles of the Law of Software Contracts
By Eric Goldman Let me start with two relatively uncontroversial propositions: 1) UCC Article 2, drafted principally in the 1950s, was designed to govern the sale of tangible items, not software 2) Accordingly, Article 2 fits awkwardly when applied to…
Zango’s Busy Litigation Docket
By Eric Goldman I got a tip that Zango’s lawsuit against PC Tools had been removed to federal court, which prompted me to search for “Zango” in PACER for the Western District of Washington. I learned that Zango has a…
At the Intersection of Copyright and Contract
By John Ottaviani A long simmering debate among museums and other visual archivists is whether (and how) one can charge for digital images of works in a collection that may or may not be covered by copyright any longer. The…