Presuming harm
For a long time, federal courts presumed that misuse of someone's intellectual property — things like patents, copyrights, and trademarks — would cause the owner "irreparable harm". The bad acts, the courts believed, would ipso facto injure the IP owner in ways that mere money could not fix.
Change in the air
But
Boy, the Federal Circuit's sure lowered the boom on Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner in Apple Inc. v. Motorola, Inc., No. 12-1548 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 25, 2014).
Smartphone warfare.
The appeal dealt with Judge Posner's rulings as a trial court judge in the Northern District of Illinois phase of the titanic smartphone struggle between Apple and Motorola
Herb Reed Enterprises (HRE) claimed that Larry Marshak infringed HRE's trademark rights in "The Platters", a name and mark that relate to a singing group whose hey-day spanned the second half of the 1950s.
The band split up in the 1960s. But nostalgia for "The Great Pretender", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", and "Only You"
On Aug. 12, the AAntitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice joined with the attorneys-general of six states and the District of Columbia to file a lawsuit to stop the merger of AMR, which owns American Airlines, into U.S. Airways. You can see the complaint here.
The filing took Blawgletter by surprise. Living in DFW, which
Last September, a panel of the Second Circuit tossed a preliminary injunction that barred any action, anywhere, to collect on an Ecuardoran court's $17.2 billion judgment against Chevron for polluting part of the Amazon. Last week, the court got around to saying why.
[Blawgletter describes some of the dispute's facts, claims, and decades-long history here.]
The
You convince the trial judge that your side will likely win on the merits and that in the time between now and trial your client will suffer harm that money can't fix. The judge enjoins the other side — under Rule 65 — from doing the hurtful stuff pending trial. But the court of appeals vacates
Fresh from firing its CEO Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard has now sued him for going to work for Oracle.
So reports The Bottom Line blog. The post includes a link to the Civil Complaint for Breach of Contract and Threatened Misappropriation of Trade Secrets.
Something about inevitable disclosure of trade secrets. Paragraph 46 of
The law gives its strivers an odd sense of reality. That goes double for those who work the courtroom.
You may put blood, sweat, and tears into a case for years, pressing to show and persuade the trier of fact that Thing A happened and that Fact A exists — and contrarily that Thing B didn't occur