-
-
Case Review
-
Recent Posts
Categories
Archives
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
Tag Archives: los angeles business litigation attorney
“A lot of companies will tell you, ‘We’ve never used a patent in an offensive lawsuit.’ But no one ever put any legal muscle behind it. We wanted to close that gap. We want to be a place where engineers like to work.” So spoke Twitter’s VP of engineering in conjunction with an unprecedented move by Twitter last week to give control of patents to the people behind them in the first place – engineers. The move comes in the wake of several high profile patent lawsuits that we have discussed in recent posts – Oracle v. Google, Apple v. Samsung, and Yahoo v. Facebook, to name a few. So how is Twitter hoping to stop the intellectual property bickering? It announced that patents would stay with the inventors and not Twitter. This is a big announcement, since companies almost always make employees sign agreements stating that everything they create…
Read More »
Intellectual property comprises some of the more valuable assets that a company owns. Although not perfect, the US and other developed companies have legal protections in place to protect your valuable trademarks, patents, business methods, client lists, software and other varieties of intellectual property. A problem that American companies increasingly face is with intellectual property protections overseas, and the biggest developing economy of them all, China, seems to pose the biggest intellectual property problems for American companies. Consider the case of tech company American Superconductor (“AMSC”). With over $300 million in revenue each year, AMSC is a leading designer and manufacturer of energy systems, including green energy like wind turbines. AMSC entered into a deal with Chinese wind turbine manufacturer Sinovel. AMSC sold Sinovel the equipment and technological know-how to design and build wind turbines. But, according to AMSC’s lawsuits, things took a turn for the worse. Armed with all…
Read More »
In many ways, California tends to err on the side of workers. Non-compete agreements are generally invalid altogether in the state. When it comes to trade secrets cases, California courts have rejected the “inevitable disclosure” doctrine, which claims that employees who go to work for a competitor inevitably disclose trade secrets to their new employer. Last week, though, California’s Supreme Court issued a ruling that, at least partially, is more favorable to employers. The ruling comes after eight years of legal wrangling over employee breaks. The Supreme Court ruled that employees must provide lunch breaks to their employees, but that the employers were not responsible for ensuring that employees actually take a break. In other words, if an employee uses the break to do work instead of eat and rest, employees cannot sue their employers. The ruling does not change the fact that employers still have to offer breaks. The…
Read More »