Posts in Business

At present, there is no statutory penalty for not providing the required Notice. However, if an employer fails to provide the required Notice, the employer cannot recover punitive damages or attorneys’ fees under the DTSA from an employee to whom the required Notice was not provided. (The employer could nevertheless obtain such punitive damages and attorneys’ fees under state law in nearly every state.) There may also be adverse consequences from a contractual perspective, or in a government audit, if the required Notice is not provided.

There has been a recent trend by insurance companies to change their policy forms and use language that provides substantially less coverage for these kinds of claims. Buyers of insurance might still see that the policies they’re buying have “Advertising Injury” coverage that includes “copyright” claims. Nevertheless, these subtle changes to the actual language in the forms (which few policyholders ever actually read before buying their policy) eliminate most, if not all, of the benefits of the coverage. Careful companies buying insurance and concerned about the risk of copyright infringement lawsuits need to watch out for these two changes that could leave them exposed to costly lawsuits.

A recent Barron’s editorial, however, has raised some eyebrows among those who are familiar with the effect of proper patent enforcement on financial fortunes. Published May 14th, “Patents Can Be Dangerous to Inventors’ Welfare” is a perfect example of how a rather odious point-of-view can be freshened and sweetened when some of the inconvenient truths are laid by the wayside.

Everyone in the world today has habits that hinder some part of their everyday life. From personal relationships to the work place, bad habits are formed every day. In the professional world, however, it is important for employees to understand how their bad habits are affecting those around them. Bad habits in the work place can lead to a bad reputation, being overlooked for promotion or even loss of employment. It is important to be conscience of bad habits and work hard to break them before they negatively impact your career. Of course, as with so much in life, identification of a problem, or in this case a bad habit, is the first step. Below a list of 7 particularly bad personal habits that can ruin your professional life.

There are two main business strategies of offshoring, called the captive form model and independent contractor model. The captive firm model is when a company hires their own employees and managers in the foreign country, train the local people and have exclusion control and responsibility over those people. The foreign entity works for the single firm and requires a very large investment and the liability falls on that firm to open the office. As a result, the firm has greater control over the people and personnel, training, and confidentiality.

Having an attorney draft a licensing agreement, or a licensing expert negotiate a licensing agreement, from start to finish is obviously the best way to proceed. But there will always be some who will choose to proceed on their own to negotiate a licensing and/or draft an agreement. This can certainly be dangerous, but sometimes there is no alternative given financial constraints. Whether you are going to represent yourself or work with an attorney or licensing professional, it is a worthwhile endeavor to engage in some strategic thinking, which absolutely must be the precursor to any memorialized deal.

As the world continues to grow and international trade on a multi-continent level has become the norm, protecting a company’s name is one of the most important things a company can do, regardless of their size or international standing. Due to what has become almost “organic” international growth for most companies, the use of trademarks owned by U.S. Companies within Europe has grown exponentially in the last 5 years. Consequently, the use of distribution licenses across Europe has also expanded massively.

I present ten scenarios for dealing with what is usually the most contested issue in pre-collaboration agreement negotiations – the ownership of foreground IP. These scenarios range from preferably avoiding joint IP ownership altogether to more complex situations involving joint IP ownership with both nonexclusive and exclusives licenses, as well as nonexclusive and exclusive cross-licenses, and even scenarios based on defining the parties’ respective fields of endeavor.

A trade secret is defined as any valuable business information that is not generally known and is subject to reasonable efforts to preserve confidentiality. Generally speaking, a trade secret will be protected from exploitation by those who either obtain access through improper means, those who obtain the information from one who they know or should have known gained access through improper means, or those who breach a promise to keep the information confidential. While virtually every business has at least some trade secrets, they are quite fragile because they protect information and resources that are secret, which necessarily means that protection is lost if and when the secret becomes publicly known. For that reason, when other forms of intellectual property protection are available, such as copyright or patent protection, one should carefully consider the wisdom of relying only on trade secret protection.

The popular media’s reports of the demise of IP rights (especially patents) are premature and greatly exaggerated. IP remains valuable to enterprises of all sizes and types. Further, the notion of open innovation, which reflects not only the social nature of man but today’s technological reality, is here to stay. As a result, IP law practitioners will continue to be called draft, review and negotiate collaboration-type agreements where business, engineering and other legal personnel will continue to insist on the “fairness” of joint IP ownership. Such insistence should always be met with skepticism for its need. And, when such joint IP ownership is unavoidable, its consequences and mechanics must be addressed. In sum: If you must do it, don’t half-a$$ it!

It seems the since-kindergarten, ingrained notion of sharing supersedes our B.S., M.S., J.D., Ph.D. and/or M.B.A. training in this respect! Pressures to “get the deal done” by our business and engineering clients, as well as the corporate lawyers who may be supporting the deal and always think it’s a good idea, result in IP law practitioners’ capitulation into drafting joint IP ownership clauses. We should have learned long ago, however, that while splitting the baby (i.e., joint IP ownership in this case) may sound “fair” and give us psychological comfort, in reality it is usually undesirable, unwieldy and perhaps unworkable.

A well-developed patent portfolio offers you the ability to defend your R&D investments against competitors, creates freedom to move into new markets, deters corporate asserters and can eliminate licensing fees. How do you produce such a portfolio? Start by identifying potential threats, then balancing reasonable patent portfolio investment with revenue retention, and finally calculating your risks. This post presents an approach for modelling the value of a strategic patent portfolio for companies in the high-tech market (eg, cloud computing, semiconductors, mobile and networking). The biotech and chemical models are similar, but require modification for their specific patent risk challenges.

Last month CPA Global announced the acquisition of the Austin, Texas based search and analytics software provider Innography. While some in the industry have been quick to judge what on the surface appears to be an unlikely partnership, even suggesting that it spells the demise of Innography, the exact opposite seems to be the case, with Innography set to launch new offerings and enhancements over the next several months.

North Castle Partners announced the sale of Octane Fitness, LLC, a leading manufacturer of zero-impact cardiovascular fitness equipment, to Nautilus, Inc. (NYSE: NLS) for a purchase price of $115 million. Those familiar with the patent industry will readily recognize the name Octane Fitness. It was Octane Fitness, the much smaller company that successfully sued and prevailed in a patent infringement lawsuit against ICON Health & Fitness. The case would go all the way to the United States Supreme Court on the issue of attorneys’ fees.

As card-present transactions become less susceptible to fraud because of the shift to EMV chip card technologies, it’s expected that more fraud will shift to online platforms where it’s still relatively easy to input fraudulent financial information without being noticed; some reports indicate that online retail fraud in the U.S. alone is expected to rise by 106 percent in three years after October’s EMV liability shift from banks to business owners. One way that businesses conducting sales online can get themselves ready to respond quickly to fraud is through effective planning prior to major sales events like Black Friday or, perhaps more important when thinking about e-commerce, Cyber Monday. If those workers handling fulfillment of online orders are more aware of expected sales projections, it will help them be more aware of clues that the business might be a target for fraud if actual sales figures differ wildly.