Passage of Defend Trade Secrets Act Provides Silicon Valley Companies New Trade Secret Enforcement Tools

When Congress passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act last week, legislators significantly expanded the tools available to Silicon Valley companies for addressing acts of trade secret misappropriation.  Previously, trade secrets law had been largely a matter of state law, and U.S. companies seeking to file a claim for trade secrets misappropriation had been limited to…

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Pitfalls in Negotiating and Drafting Exclusive Licensing Deals: Lessons from Macy’s Dispute with JcPenney’s Over its Martha Stewart Product Line

When a new client contacts me for assistance in negotiating a licensing deal, the client almost always informs me that the deal is going to be an exclusive licensing arrangement.  However, when I engage the client further to tell me more about the proposed exclusivity deal, in most cases the proposed terms on the table…

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Practical Tips on Choosing your Start-Up’s Name

Given my Silicon Valley location, I often am consulted by entrepreneurs and start-ups who have just started a business and are seeking advice on how to protect their trademarks.  However, more often than not, I quickly determine that the name that the entrepreneur or start-up has selected is a poor mark and my advice ends…

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Challenges of Negotiating a Licensing Deal with a Start-Up

I recently gave a webinar on Negotiating License Agreements with Start-Ups, and wanted to follow up on that program with some comments for Silicon Valley IP Licensing Law Blog readers on some of the challenges that companies may face when negotiating an IP licensing deal with a start-up. In the years that I have worked…

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Getty Images Copyright Dispute Against Microsoft to Challenge Legality of Recently Released Widget

Getty Images made news in the copyright world this week by filing a complaint against Microsoft Corporation in the Southern District of New York for “infringing and facilitating the massive infringement of [its] copyrights” through its release of the new Bing Image Widget service. To review the full complaint, click here. The case is significant…

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Technology Transfer Tactics Interviews Kristie Prinz on Tech Transfer Commercialization Dilemma

I wanted to share with blog readers an interview that I recently had with Technology Transfer Tactics on the issue of whether poster presentations jeopardize a tech transfer office’s commercialization offices. While the issue does not have much application to the business world and is really very specific to the intellectual property which is developed…

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Cutting Legal Costs by Investing in Good Templates

In a recent blog post, AdamsDrafting suggested that the recession should prompt companies to look at overhauling their contract template process. AdamsDrafting wrote A recession should provide a greater incentive for a company to do something about the considerable amounts of time and money that it’s wasting due to its mediocre templates and primitive contract…

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Open Source Licensing: Is it a Viable Business Model?

Open Source Software Licensing in its “pure” form is not a viable business model, reported CMS Wire on a study recently conducted by the 451 Group. According to the CMS Wire report, the 451 Group study looked at the business strategies of some 114 open source vendors, and found as follows: -The majority of open…

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Blog Content Licensing: Is there a market for it?

PlagiarismToday raised an interesting question today when it asked if blog content licensing was dead. I have given several presentations on blog law issues now, but I must say that I had never really given thought to the issue of whether or not there was really a market for blog content licensing–beyond, of course, thinking…

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