Tech Law

In recent months, the pharmaceutical industry has stepped up its fight against online pharmacies on three fronts: First, it is strongly lobbying governments on all sides including those of the U.S. and Canada; second, it is teaming up with companies in other industries to mount indirect campaigns ag...

Reviving a nearly 5-year-old case that has tested the limits of local jurisdictions in the Internet era, Yahoo has won a new hearing on claims that its rights under the U.S. Constitution to sell Nazi memorabilia can't be limited by French courts. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will rehear s...

A week after the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament demanded that the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive be rewritten, the European Union has delayed plans to approve the controversial rules providing for patenting computer software. Observers expected EU ministers to endorse ...

Call it a triple whammy against spam. EarthLink today announced four more lawsuits in its continuing fight against fraudulent and deceptive commercial e-mails. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Pfizer announced parallel lawsuits against two international pharmacy spam rings. It is just the latest barrage of ...

Google today said it has not yet decided whether to appeal Friday's ruling by a French court that ordered it to pay US$260,000 plus costs to luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton for breach of trademark. The high court in central Paris also ordered Google to stop displaying advertisements for Vuitton's r...

The landmark settlement between class action plaintiffs and 10 former WorldCom directors fell apart yesterday after a federal judge rejected a key aspect of the deal. Directors had agreed to pay US$54 million, including $18 million of their own money, to settle the suit. U.S. District Judge Denise C...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will use RFID chips on a trial basis to track the arrival and return of visitors from abroad. The testing phase, which will begin this spring and is expected to last one year, will occur at selected points of entry across the U.S., and it will complemen...

Microsoft and representatives of the European Union (EU) are locked in discussions over exactly how a stripped-down version of Windows that has the controversial Media Player removed will be marketed in Europe. Microsoft previously said it would comply with a ruling that it offer a version of Window...

Travelzoo, which came to be on the strength of dot-com promotional blitz that included stock giveaways and more recently became a rising star among e-commerce stocks, today said the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating stock market activity by some employees for possible insider...

Microsoft today said it will not appeal a European Union court order to immediately implement antitrust sanctions. The defeat forces the company to remove its Media Player and video software from its Windows platform in the 25-nation block and to give interoperability information to rivals. Microsof...

For a technology company, intellectual capital is one of the most important, if not the most important asset. Intellectual capital is more than intellectual property as it is commonly understood in that it also includes a company's trade secrets, know-how, problem-solving methods, customer informati...

On December 27, 2004, President Bush did something that made Microsoft -- and probably every other software maker in the world -- very happy. Bush signed into law the Anti-Counterfeiting Amendments Act of 2003, also known as H.R. 3632. The new law criminalizes the distribution of genuine authenticat...

Business folks reach agreements, lawyers write the contracts. This being the case, often times a business person need not concern him or herself with the details of the final contract or what is commonly referred to as the "legalese" aspects of an agreement. However, there are exceptions in that the...

Samsung has announced that it will set aside US$100 million in case the U.S. government finds it guilty of fixing dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) prices. The U.S. Department of Justice has been looking into allegations of price fixing in the memory industry for more than two years. Infineon Tech...

Dutch authorities have announced that country's first fines against spammers, including one person and two companies who sent unsolicited e-mails and mobile telephone text messages. This marks the first action against spammers since the Netherlands government agreed in May to officially ban unsolici...