Category Archives: Business Litigation

The e-book business has seen at least a doubling of its sales year after year in recent memory. In 2008, its sales stood at $78 million. Last year, that figure reached $1.7 billion, and some analysts in the industry expect 2012 sales to reach over $3.5 billion. Although the popularity of e-books continues to spread, a common complaint you often hear is, “why do e-books cost so much?” Since e-books do not require paper, binding or shipping like traditional books, it shocks some newcomers to the e-book world that e-books may cost as much as traditional books. There might be something to this complaint after all. Last week the Justice Department warned Apple and five major publishers (including Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and HarperCollins) that the Department was planning to sue them for colluding to raise the prices of e-books. Investigators both here and in Europe suspect that these companies…
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Facebook was once “one of the worst performing sites for advertising” at least, according to Yahoo, until it started using Yahoo’s technologies. Now the two companies will be squaring off in California federal court over Yahoo’s allegations that Facebook infringed on multiple Yahoo patents. The lawsuit is the latest in a series of patent wars between some of the biggest tech companies in the world. The lawsuit speaks to two concerns of tech companies today. First, the initial public offering (“IPO”) process commonly brings lawsuits out of the woodwork. Facebook filed its IPO papers earlier in the year and will be a publicly-traded company come May. Competitors often see this as a time to capitalize on the forthcoming wealth of the company undergoing the IPO. IPO companies are also more likely to settle a patent dispute in order to avoid the negative press surrounding a courtroom battle around IPO time….
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In the late 1990s we all fell in love with the tech industry a little too much. The “dot-com bubble” introduced the country to the power of computers and internet access, as we learned to shop, research and conduct financial transactions from the comfort of our homes. Nearly any company with a “.com” after its name saw its stock soar, but, by 2000 and 2001, many of those companies were out of business and the stock markets, particularly the NASDAQ, saw a combined loss of trillions of dollars in market value. Have we already forgotten the dot-com bubble?  Are we ready to jump head first into the social media bubble? Continuing a trend that began last year, 2012 will see a number of high profile initial public offerings (“IPOs”) in the tech sector. Over the past year, there were 37 tech IPOs. In the coming year, we are set to…
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