Intellectual Property Law

LimitNone filed a trade secret suit against Google Inc. in Illinois, alleging that Google misappropriated software

Posted on June 28, 2008
Yesterday software developer LimitNone filed a trade secret suit against Google Inc. in Illinois, alleging that Google misappropriated software for migrating information from Microsoft Office to Google Apps. The developer says it was a member of an authorized Google developer program and was promised that Google would not build a similar tool itself...

CA : statute of limitations began to run when owner had reason to suspect that buyer knew or should know that software contained trade secrets

Posted on June 28, 2008
Background: Owner of trade secrets brought trade secret misappropriation action against buyer of its competitor's software. The Superior Court, Santa Clara County, No. CV019992, Marc B. Poche, J., granted owner's motion in limine to exclude evidence relating to statute of limitations...

PATENT--SECRET MIX IN COMPLEX PRODUCT FIRMS

Posted on June 27, 2008
Elisabetta Ottoz, Franco Cugno University of Turin Copyright © 2008 by American Law and Economics Association; Elisabetta Ottoz, Franco Cugno Different protection mechanisms may be employed at the same time when an innovation is comprised of separately protectable components...

START-UP SUES GOOGLE OVER E-MAIL SWITCHING TOOL

Posted on June 27, 2008
Google has been named in a trade secrets lawsuit alleging that the company's business software unit copied a tiny start-up's tool for moving customers off of Microsoft software onto Google's. LimitNone filed a complaint in an Illinois circuit court alleging that Google at first began promoting the smaller firm's tool for migrating Microsoft Outlook customers to Gmail, then copied the idea and went into competition with it...

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ED Pa - Party failed to prove the existence of a trade secret.

Posted on June 27, 2008
Fishkin v. Susquehanna Partners, G.P. The court found for counterclaim defendants on Susquehanna's misappropriation of trade secrets claim, as Susquehanna had failed to meet its burden of proving the existence of a protected trade secret. In short, the Dow Fair Value concept, formula, and spreadsheet were too widely known and too easily ascertainable to constitute protected trade secrets...

Salesman Fired for Not Signing Confidentiality Agreement : jury returned a unanimous verdict on countersuit, awarding $3,911,552.66.

Posted on June 27, 2008
Montrenes Financial sought unspecified damages for the violation of its trade secrets. In 2004, plaintiff Montrenes Financial Services, a credit card processing sales company, claimed that four of its salespersons, Calvin Lim, Jerry Vigil, Kirk Moore and Michael Littell, intended to set up a competing business and that Montrenes Financial's way of doing business was proprietary...

Why We Have Trade Secrets Video

Posted on June 25, 2008
View this 45 minute primer...

Causes of Action Relating to Misuse of Confidential Information

Posted on June 22, 2008
Visit our friends at IPFrontline to read the full story... Edward T. Fan The Duty of Confidence A duty of confidence arises when a person acquires knowledge of confidential information, including trade secrets, under circumstances in which the person has notice or agreed that the information is confidential...

U.S. v. Williams : conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets.

Posted on June 22, 2008
Background: Defendants were convicted in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Nos. 06-00313-CR-3-1 and 06- 00313-CR-1-1, J. Owen Forrester, J., of conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets. Defendants appealed. Holdings: The Court of Appeals held that: (1) limitation of cross-examination of government's witness did not violate defendant's Sixth Amendment cross-examination rights; (2) imposition of 96-month sentence was not unreasonable; and (3) imposition of 60-Month sentence on codefendant was not unreasonable...

Injunction denied in insulin meter trade secrets case

Posted on June 22, 2008
Ropes & Gray LLP Bradford Badke, Sona De, Matt Traupman, Moriah Agovino, and Julie Cadatal Ropes & Gray team has obtained a victory for client Nova Biomedical Corporation in a suit brought by rival Medtronic MiniMed, Inc. alleging misappropriation of trade secrets, unfair competition and several other related claims...

U.S. Patent Reforms Might Force Firms to Rely on Trade Secrets

Posted on June 22, 2008
6/23/08 BIOWORLD Volume 19; Issue 121 Nuala Moran, BioWorld Today Correspondent SAN DIEGO - Recent Supreme Court rulings and reform at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), coupled with activity in the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, are weakening patents and tipping the scales toward keeping innovation in biotech as trade secrets rather than risking patent disclosure...

AMERICAN FAMILY MUTUAL INSURANCE COMPANY, Plaintiff-Appellee v. ROTH et al

Posted on June 20, 2008
886 N.E.2d 1149 (Appellate Court of Illinois, 2008) An insurer that sued two of its former agents for breach of contract and tortious interference, arising out of agents' solicitation of former customers after termination of the agency using confidential information extracted from insurer's computers, filed declaratory judgment action seeking to establish whether it had a duty to defend agents pursuant to personal and advertising injury coverage in a businessowners liability policy...

GOSSIP BLOGS DELIVER THE DIRT AND TRADE SECRETS

Posted on June 20, 2008
Leigh Jones Many of the nation's most renowned law firms have felt the public relations wallop delivered by law gossip blogs, those online tabloids that can turn an interoffice memo into a virtual billboard of bad news for partners or associates. Whether the topic is layoffs or love affairs, it seems no subject is too edgy for sites such as Above the Law, Greedy Associates, AutoAdmit and a few others that dig up the legal profession's dirt...

Jury Verdict : National Oilwell Vargo, LP v. A&B Bolt & Supply Inc. et al

Posted on June 20, 2008
NOV initially sought $33 million for misappropriated trade secrets, breach of fiduciary duty and tortious interference with a confidentiality agreement. The plaintiff also sought punitive damages and attorney fees. Plaintiff National Oilwell Vargo, LP claimed that A&B Bolt & Supply Inc...

Salesman gets 2 years for industrial spying

Posted on June 19, 2008
John Coté, Chronicle Staff Writer A former Chinese citizen living in Cupertino was sentenced Wednesday to two years in federal prison for stealing military software from a Silicon Valley defense contractor and trying to sell it to the Chinese military, prosecutors said...

Chinese engineer sentenced for economic espionage

Posted on June 18, 2008
Jordan RobertsonAssociated PressSAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — An engineer who admitted he tried to sell fighter-pilot training software to the Chinese Navy has been sentenced to 24 months in federal prison.Forty-four-year-old Xiaodong Sheldon Meng is the first person sentenced on the rare charge of committing economic espionage against the U...

Second Round of Sanctions May Cost Motorola

Posted on June 17, 2008
Jordana MishoryDaily Business ReviewJune 17, 2008In 2007, the company was hit with nearly $23 million in sanctions for willfully violating a court order after a trial ended in 2006 with a deadlocked jury.A Broward Circuit judge has ruled Motorola could be forced to pay more money in a second round of sanctions to a defunct company suing in a $10 billion trade secrets case...

Subpoenas Seeking E-Mails Meet Resistance

Posted on June 17, 2008
Tresa BaldasCivil litigants are increasingly trying to get their hands on e-mails to prove their cases, but Internet service providers are starting to challenge their subpoenas -- and courts are starting to rule in their favor.The range of litigants seeking e-mail content include divorcing couples, defamation victims and those involved in trade secrets disputes, say Internet and data-protection attorneys...

Inside the Insider

Posted on June 17, 2008
Carlo Minassian, Founder & CEO, Earthwave Three Coca-Cola employees were charged with stealing confidential information and samples of a new drink in hope of selling them to competitor PepsiCo Inc. Pepsi reported the incident and worked with Coca-Cola and authorities to investigate it...

Travelling professionals leak calls and documents

Posted on June 17, 2008
Antony SavvasMore than two-thirds of Britons travelling on business have eavesdropped on someone else's confidential business conversation, and more than a third have caught sight of sensitive documents or information on laptops, according to a survey commissioned by flexible wokplace provider Regus...

From the INTA list : Stolen TM Case

Posted on June 16, 2008
Party A comes up with business idea, creates some samples, and meets with Party B for financing. Well, as you know, ownership of a pending ITU is not a basis for a demand against another party. In addition, if A's talks with B were circumstances giving rise to a duty of confidentiality (which they probably were, even if not memorialized in a written NDA), A could have a misappropriation of trade secret action against B...

Brokers feel mobility is still threatened

Posted on June 16, 2008
Dan JamiesonDespite continued efforts to curtail litigation when brokers change firms, departing reps are still being sued, and some say that recent developments suggest the harassment won't stop anytime soon.A recruitment protocol signed by the major brokerage firms in 2004, which let departing brokers take limited customer contact information, isn't always being honored, according to some attorneys familiar with the situation...

Update on Trade Secret Law

Posted on June 14, 2008
James Pooley I. Introduction Despite the widespread adoption of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, trade secret principles continue to develop primarily through the common law. It is this reliance on a few broadly stated rules, whether from the Uniform Act or from the Restatement (of Torts or, since 1995, of Unfair Competition), that distinguishes trade secret law from the other three main forms of intellectual property, each of which is based on a federal statute...

Commentary: Patent or trade secret? Changing times call for re-evaluation of IP strategies.

Posted on June 14, 2008
Michigan Lawyers Weekly Kelly Burris Recent events have caused drastic changes in the legal landscape for patents, with yet additional threats looming. First, a United States Supreme Court ruling in April 2007 (KSR International Co. v. Teleflex, Inc...

Under California law, the statute of limitations begins to run on a trade secret misappropriation claim when plaintiff has any reason to suspect that a third party knows they have a trade secret in their possession

Posted on June 13, 2008
Cypress Semiconductor Corp. v. Superior Court of Santa Clara County (Cal Rptr 3d 2008)

Internet: Summary judgment was barred for claim of misappropriation of trade secrets regarding voice over internet protocol (VoIP).

Posted on June 13, 2008
Covad Communications Co. v. Revonet, Inc. (D.D.C.) Summary judgment was precluded in a communications company's suit claiming breach of contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, and conversion of customer lead information, pursuant to contracts with a customer lead generation services provider...

YADKIN VALLEY BANK AND TRUST COMPANY : employer's allegations were insufficient to state a claim for misappropriation of trade secrets.

Posted on June 13, 2008
Background: Former employees brought separate actions against employer, alleging breach of contract and violation of the Wage and Hour Act, and sought declaratory judgment that they were not bound by non-competition agreement. Employer counterclaimed for breach of contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, and unfair competition...

Through research, advocacy,

Posted on June 11, 2008
Through research, advocacy, and public education,the FAS Project on Government Secrecy works to challenge excessive government secrecy and to promote public oversight. Go to their Library for a collection of juicy files and links.

DOD Report: Changes in Espionage by Americans: 1947-2007

Posted on June 09, 2008
Technical Report 08-05 March 2008 - Changes in Espionage by Americans: 1947-2007, by Katherine L. Herbig, Northrop Grumman Technical Services. Released By ? James A. Riedel [via FAS] "Since 1987, the Defense Personnel Security Research Center (PERSEREC) has maintained a database on espionage by American citizens based largely on open sources, and has collected files on each of the 173 individuals in the database...

DOJ's Economic-Spy Strategy Emerges

Posted on June 09, 2008
The Recorder Federal prosecutors' tactics are under fire as defendants in one Silicon Valley economic espionage case are used against defendants in another. For the government to succeed in its apparent strategy of trading sentencing leniency for one pair of defendants in order to help convict another pair on higher-profile charges, they'll have to first persuade Judge James Ware to turn aside defense challenges to the FBI's tactics, which were aired in his courtroom last week.

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