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Tag Archives: los angeles business litigation attorney
Video game controllers that vibrate enhance the game playing experience – when your player gets tackled in an NFL video game, you feel the hit in your controller; when your car crashes in a spectacular wreck, your controller shakes to indicate the damage. These sorts of video game improvements, particularly those that pertain to hardware advances, are available for patent protection, and the inventors behind these innovations should not hesitate to file for protection. The vibrating controller is a lucrative business for Immersion, which owns 150 patents on its so-called haptic feedback technology. Immersion is a smaller company (relatively speaking, that is, with a market cap of just over $180 million), but that did not prevent the company from prevailing in lawsuits against two video game and technology giants, Microsoft and Sony. In the early 2000s, the two began using vibration technology built in to their controllers. Without verifying whether…
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The video game “cheat system” known as the Game Genie played an important role in the development of intellectual property law. It became the target of a lawsuit in the early 1990s from Nintendo, with the case receiving a hearing in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court that covers California. At issue was a software concern we continue to see today – to what extent can consumers modify copyrighted works for their own purposes? The Game Genie was a device that consumers would plug into their home video game consoles; then they would plug their games into the Game Genie (back when consoles used cartridges rather than optical discs). Consumers could then enter codes to get things like unlimited lives or powerful weapons that changed the gameplay. How the Game Genie did these things is what led to the legal dispute with Nintendo. By entering a…
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According to e-mails unearthed during a Justice Department investigation, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs may have been at the center of a series of “gentlemen’s agreements” to keep top executives from jumping ship and going to rival technology firms. A federal class-action lawsuit claims that executives from some of California’s most influential tech firms – Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar – agreed not to hire each other’s top workers. The companies claim that they did nothing wrong and simply entered into common agreements with each other to collaborate and not take each other’s talent. Executives who would have been recruited argue otherwise. They say that the agreements kept executives from receiving better offers, since the agreements prevented bidding wars between the companies. Competition to hire top employees at tech companies in California is fierce, as our state’s tech workers earn the most in their industry out of…
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