When NDAs Attack! Protecting Your Trade Secrets in Negotiations
A Bad NDA Can Be Worse Than None at All In business, one of the most routine legal documents you’re likely to run into is a non-disclosure agreement, better known as an “NDA.” They’re super handy because they let you disclose secret stuff to business partners and...
Willfully to Power in Criminal Copyright Law
Ninth Circuit Clarifies that “Willfully” Means “Willfully” I think most people know that there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement, i.e., copyright infringement so heinous that the U.S. government will take time from investigating drug deals to...
The Vimeo Case and the DMCA: What Your Employees Know Can Hurt You
Oh, Those Pesky, Pesky Employees! From a legal* point of view, hardly anything good ever comes out of the employer-employee relationship**, when you think about it. Wrongful termination suits, reams of paperwork to create a “paper trail” to counter wrongful...
Practical Guide Series No. 2 – When to File For a Trademark
You bolted up in bed at 3 a.m. last night and grabbed the notepad on your dresser that you keep for just these kinds of occasions, do scribble down the absolutely genius, brilliant, one-of-a-kind, bet-the-company, ineffable NAME that just popped into your head for...
Rick Sanders is quoted in The Washington Post on Trademark Dispute
Our local Lipscomb University was recently required to stop using the abbreviation "LU" because Liberty University, owner of a registration in the same mark, complained. Rick talks about the law behind the dispute in an article appearing on The Washington Post site...
Trademark Confusion, Texas® style
The state of Texas is looking more and more like it’s forgotten that there’s a world outside of itself. Cue the weird article from Time this week that reads like it was written by Rick Perry himself, about how everyone’s moving there, buying hats and being...
Hotfile on the Internet- What You Don't Know Can Hurt Your DMCA Safe Harbor
On the Importance of Knowing Just Enough As we all know by now (quick primer here), the DMCA safe harbor is a marvelous, marvelous thing for internet-related system operators—not just YouTube, but any website that interacts much with its users—but that marvelous...
Hotfile on the Internet- What You Don’t Know Can Hurt Your DMCA Safe Harbor
On the Importance of Knowing Just Enough As we all know by now (quick primer here), the DMCA safe harbor is a marvelous, marvelous thing for internet-related system operators—not just YouTube, but any website that interacts much with its users—but that marvelous...
I Need a Copyright License for My Personal Virtual Island?
Yes, if You Hired Someone to Design it for You. Remember when Second Life was all the rage? I’ll admit that my memory is a little hazy, but I swear it was a huge deal a few years ago. Anyway, it’s still around, with a new slogan: YOUR IMAGINATION, YOUR WORLD.* If...
Who Owns the Goldmine? Bob Marley’s Missing Copyright
The Mysteries of Copyright Ownership If there were a goldmine in your town—one that produced a worthwhile amount of gold every year and wouldn’t run out for many, many years—you’d probably expect any dispute about who owns it to have long since been resolved. It’s...
Who Owns the Goldmine? Bob Marley's Missing Copyright
The Mysteries of Copyright Ownership If there were a goldmine in your town—one that produced a worthwhile amount of gold every year and wouldn’t run out for many, many years—you’d probably expect any dispute about who owns it to have long since been resolved. It’s...
(Almost) Anything But Elementary: Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Public Domain
We hardly ever do this at Aaron | Sanders, that is, talk about cases that have just been filed and for which there is no actual judicial opinion yet. We refrain from talking about newly-filed cases for two main reasons: 1) There are too darn many of them and 2) It...
