Employee covenants not to disclose and not to use confidential information without authorization are widely used to protect employer trade secrets and other confidential information. However, the covenants are not as routinely enforced as many believe. At a minimum,...
Stealing music is legal again. On June 2, 2016, in VMG Salsoul, LLC v. Ciccone, the Ninth Circuit held that a sampled horn hit in Madonna’s “Vogue” was de minimis, infringing on neither the composition nor the recording of its source. The Ninth thus...
Patents are notoriously complex. Unsurprisingly, litigation involving patents shares its subject matter’s innate intricacies. In the face of rising patent filings and increasingly complicated patent infringement lawsuits, Congress created the Patent Pilot...
Legally, libraries and archives may make and distribute copies of works in the last twenty years of their copyright, as long as there is no normal commercial exploitation of the work(s) and no reasonably priced copy available. 17 U.S.C. § 108(h). Unfortunately, §...
Determining which patents are valuable can seem a lot like picking winning lottery numbers. There were, as of 2014, approximately 2.5 million U.S. patents in force. The number of new patent applications has risen steadily to more than 411,728 each year, and if the...
