From the Mayer Brown website comes an opinion dealing with patent damages.  Authored by Brandon Baum and Sharon Israel.

On September 11, 2009, the Federal Circuit issued an opinion of importance in the area of patent damages in Lucent Technologies, Inc. v. Gateway, Inc. (consolidation of appeals 2008-1485, -1487, and -1495). At issue on appeal was Microsoft’s liability for the alleged infringement of a patent now owned by Lucent, and the award of damages to Lucent. Microsoft appealed from the denial of post-trial motions following a jury verdict that the patent in suit was infringed and not invalid, and that Microsoft was liable for damages based on a lump-sum reasonable royalty of approximately $358 million. The Federal Circuit affirmed the findings of infringement and validity, but vacated the damages award as not supported by substantial evidence and remanded to the district court for further proceedings.

The patent claims at issue are directed to a method for entering data using a graphical interface. The accused product that accounted for the vast majority of the damages award was Microsoft Outlook, which was found to incorporate the claimed method in a feature referred to as the “date picker.” In essence, infringement of the method occurred whenever a user entered a date field by clicking on the date in the Outlook calendar rather than by entering the date by keyboard, which was non-infringing.

With respect to the damages award, the Federal Circuit held that Lucent failed to present substantial evidence to support the jury’s damages award under the Georgia-Pacific factors for determining a reasonable royalty. At trial, Lucent argued that a lump-sum reasonable royalty should be calculated as approximately 8 percent of the sales price of the Outlook software. While Microsoft suggested that the district court had “abdicated” its role as a gatekeeper, the Federal Circuit made clear that “[t]he responsibility for objecting to evidence … remains firmly with the parties.”

Read the full story here on the Mayer Brown website.

A survey released today by Travelers reveals how the use of social media can expose businesses to risk. As the Travelers Global Technology business unit commemorates its 25-year anniversary, it conducted a national online survey of more than 2,000 adults to explore trends in social media and the potential risks to businesses.

A key finding in the survey shows that one out of eight respondents indicated that they post work-related information on social media Web sites. In fact, 30 percent feel it is acceptable to post information online about their employer as long as they believe it is true. Survey results also showed that more than 75 percent of those who post anything personal online said they were “not at all” or “not very concerned” about information posted online causing professional damage.

Read the full story here on the SmartBrief website.

Download the survey here from the Travelers website.

Juries in the Longhorn State have a reputation for being generous with other people's money. But even by Texas standards, the verdict against Illinois drugmaker Abbott Laboratories this June was a whopper. After a four-day trial a jury in the tiny city of Marshall ordered Abbott to pay $1.7 billion.

It wasn't a case of sympathetic jurors socking it to an out-of-state corporation for injuring one of their own. The plaintiff was Johnson & Johnson, of New Brunswick, N.J. The dispute was a technical one over patents on the companies' competing arthritis drugs, J&J's Remicade and Abbott's Humira.

Companies love to complain about liability lawyers who shop around for plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions. But when they have a patent case to prosecute, they do the same thing. Often they go to Marshall or two other federal courts in the Eastern District of Texas. With lightning-fast deadlines and a preference for putting matters before a jury, the judges there have created a patent plaintiff's paradise.

Read the full story here on the Forbes website.

This article, from Jay Westermeier of the Finnegan law firm details strategies for defending against trade-misappropriation claims.

Read the strategies here on the Finnegan website.

With an asthmatic 4-year-old boy at home and a sick father a world away in Australia, she had no room in her life for osteoporosis or early menopause. It was 20 years ago, and when her gynecologist suggested hormone replacement therapy to stave off the effects of aging, she agreed.

"I was having these awful hot flashes," the 62-year-old recalls. "I found it really hard to deal with. There was a lot of stress in my life."

It's a moment she is revisiting now, with news that the company behind her treatment used ghostwriters to promote HRT in academic journals and play down any health threats, including breast cancer and stroke.

Last month, Smith, who was on HRT for 13 years, was told she has breast cancer.

"The hardest part was telling my son," she says, adding that her boy, now living in British Columbia, flew home immediately.

Read the full article here on the HealthZone.CA website.

US New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo plans to sue social networking site Tagged.com for allegedly stealing the identities of its members, raiding their e-mail contact lists and sending out spam in a bid to lure recipients to the site.

Read the full story here on the EWeek Europe website.

When Courtney Love fell into a dispute with a clothing designer this year, she aired her beef on MySpace and Twitter.

The designer sued Love for libel after the rocker claimed on her blog and in tweets that the designer was a thief, liar and drug dealer with a record of prostitution, according to court documents.

Love's case is one of the high-profile libel lawsuits involving comments on social networking sites. But you don't have to be famous to be sued. As more people blog or tweet whatever pops into their minds, they run the risk that someone somewhere may take offense--rightly or wrongly--and sue. They could end up with big legal bills.

If you blog, that's why it may be worth buying insurance to make sure you are covered in case you are accused of making libelous or defamatory statements.

Read the full story here on the Chicago Tribune website.

The court system will ultimately decide if a Derby blogger, who referred to political figures as the “mob” and “klan,” and wrote about people being drunk, chasing children with bats and hiking naked in a park, was on solid legal ground.

As blogging becomes more common, so have lawsuits against bloggers, and debates over the First Amendment, freedom of speech and what crosses the line into defamation.

“There is this misconception that the Internet is the Wild West with no laws and people can get away with anything they want to,” said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Read the full story here on the New Haven Register website.

A former Miss West Virginia has won a US$7.2 million verdict against nine Internet companies and individuals who tried to sell pornographic videos they falsely claimed featured her.

A jury in U.S. District Court in Clarksburg on Wednesday ordered each defendant to pay Allison Williams $800,000 for damaging the 2003 beauty queen's reputation and invading her privacy.

"This had been a very long fight for her so this was a great victory for her," her lawyer, Parween Mascari, said Thursday.

The videos, which surfaced in the fall of 2004, show a woman the Internet porn producers falsely claimed to be Williams engaged in sex in the back of a television news truck.

Williams, now 27, discovered the defamatory videos during her first semester of law school at West Virginia University, while searching the Internet for a favourable newspaper article about herself to save for her scrapbook, Mascari said.

Williams has since graduated from law school and now works for a shipping company in Vienna, Va., while she prepares to pass the bar, Mascari said.

Read the full story here on the Hamilton Spectator website.

Dozens of media firms are questioning a federal appeals court ruling that concluded truth is not an absolute defense against libel in a case concerning an e-mail sent in the firing of an office products salesman.

Fifty-one news organizations last week sought a rehearing of a 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that relied on a 1902 Massachusetts law that says truthful statements can be libelous if there also is malicious intent.

The decision in Alan S. Noonan vs. Staples Inc. exposes a "dusty old corner of libel laws" in Massachusetts that "truth is not an absolute protection" in a libel action, said Jeremy Feigelson, an attorney with Debevoise & Plimpton L.L.P. in New York.

Read the full story here on the Business Insurance website.

Even deleted e-mail messages are public records if they deal with official business, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

In a unanimous ruling, justices ordered commissioners in Seneca County to scour their computer hard drives for e-mail messages requested by a Toledo newspaper last year that had been deleted.

In September, the Ohio Supreme Court denied a Columbus lawyer's request for thousands of messages from two state representatives. Justices did not address the question of whether the lawmakers would need to produce e-mail and text messages from their private accounts that dealt with public business.

In its ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court said e-mail messages dealing with government business are public records regardless of whether they come from a public or private account.

The court also said deleting messages doesn't automatically take them out of the public realm, as long as they can be retrieved. The Seneca County board of commissioners didn't say that the messages couldn't be recovered.

The Blade sought messages that dealt with the possible demolition of an historic courthouse in Tiffin.

Two of the three Seneca County commissioners produced no e-mail messages on the topic, while a third had substantial gaps in the dates of messages, according to evidence presented in the case.

Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, who wrote the Supreme Court's opinion, noted that the commissioners couldn't be ordered to produce records that don't exist -- but the e-mails do exist, if only deep in the recesses of computer drives.

Read the article on the Columbus Dispatch website.

An unhappy guest at a Pembroke Pines resort described the hotel as filthy and bug-infested.

A dissatisfied patient of a Lauderhill cosmetic surgery clinic warned people to "avoid this place like the plague."

The reviews are just two of the thousands posted daily on the Internet about everything from fast-food restaurants to nursery schools. They also have something else in common.

Both have sparked libel lawsuits.

Increasingly, businesses are turning to the courts to combat online reviews they say could cost them customers, legal experts say. In some instances, the businesses get court orders to track down people who posted anonymously.

Read the full article here on the BusinessWeek website.

A group of irked Facebook members filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook Tuesday that said the company's controversial Beacon advertising program violates several laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).

Beacon, which launched in late 2007, basically tracked the activity of Facebook members on certain partner sites and then posted an item in users' news feeds when they purchased something.

Bought movie tickets on Fandango, or new shoes on overstock.com? If you failed to click "no" on a blink-and-you-miss-it notice during checkout, your Facebook newsfeed would soon read "Chloe bought Dark Knight on Fandango."

That might not seem too harmful, but what if you bought tickets to "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" on Fandango or a copy of "He's Just Not That Into You" on overstock.com? Suddenly, all 200 of our closest "friends" are privy to that information.

In the first case of its type that I have seen, a city employee in San Francisco has actually locked up access to a full network and refused to give anyone else access. Here is the story from Yahoo! Tech:

A network administrator has locked up a multimillion dollar computer system for San Francisco that handles sensitive data and is refusing to give police the password, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.

The employee, 43-year-old Terry Childs, was arrested Sunday. He gave some passwords to police, which did not work, and refused to reveal the real code, the paper reported.

The new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network) handles city payroll files, jail bookings, law enforcement documents and official e-mail for San Francisco. The network is functioning but administrators have little or no access.

Childs, who remains in custody, is accused of improperly tampering with computer systems and causing a denial of service, said Kamala Harris, San Francisco's district attorney, on Monday afternoon.

"The bail has been set at $5 million, and the exposure in this case if he were convicted on all counts would be seven years in prison," Harris said.

Harris said it's unknown why Childs tampered with the system. The Chronicle, however, reported that Childs was disciplined recently for poor performance. Childs worked in the Department of Technology for San Francisco, making close to US$150,000 a year, the paper reported.

City officials told the paper that Childs may have caused millions in damage while also rigging the network so that other third parties could monitor traffic, posing a huge data security risk. He is also alleged to have installed a tracing system to monitor communications related to his personnel case.

A $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit over YouTube's ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site threatens how hundreds of millions of people exchange all kinds of information on the Internet, owner Google Inc. said.

In an article from Insurance Journal authored by David Caruso, the current case of the Harry Potter fan with plans to publish his on-line encyclopedia of all things Hogwarts and compete directly with J.K. Rowling’s interests gives an excellent example of the new frontier of copyright liability.

“The Web is awash with fan-produced material that could be the subject of a copyright fight, from remixed pop songs, to new fiction based on existing characters from books and TV shows, to countless tribute videos cut together with clips from TV shows or films.

"There is almost a parallel universe,'' said Alan Behr, an intellectual property lawyer in New York. "On the Internet, people basically do things you would never do in print.''

Sutter Health will greatly improve accessibility and patient care for people with disabilities at its hospitals and other health care facilities under a settlement to a class-action lawsuit announced Friday.

The agreement calls for sweeping changes in hospital policies, architecture, equipment, staff and contractor training and outreach at 28 Sutter Health hospitals located across Northern California. The changes are tailored for patients with mobility, visual, hearing and speech disabilities.

The class-action suit filed in 2005 by the nonprofit Disability Rights Advocates asserted that the Sutter network of hospitals and medical foundations failed to provide access for disabled people as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

TJX Companies have settled with nearly all of the banks and related bank associations over a breach of credit card data.