Free for a Fee

One of the primary arguments for enacting the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) in 2016 was the perceived need for the protection of the trade secrets of U.S. companies abroad.  These issues received significant media attention with the focus far and away on China; by way of example, 60 Minutes cited the Justice Department as saying “the scale of China’s corporate espionage is so vast it constitutes a national security emergency, with China targeting virtually every sector of the U.S. economy, and costing American companies hundreds of billions of dollars in losses — and more than two million jobs.”  A consensus emerged that existing civil trade secret remedies at the state court level were inadequate.  These concerns led to calls for a robust federal statute that would provide a civil remedy empowering federal courts to assert their jurisdiction over parties outside the United States.  An important decision issued by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois last year, Motorola Solutions v. Hytera Communications Corp.,  2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 35942 (N.D. Ill. Jan. 31, 2020), paved the way for other federal courts over the past year to exercise jurisdiction over international actors and international conduct under the DTSA.  This blog post summarizes these recent decisions.

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Takeaway:  As these cases over the past 18 months illustrate, federal courts are willing to apply the DTSA to foreign parties who have taken actions that further acts of misappropriation.  These decisions are an important first step in furthering the DTSA’s goal of protecting U.S. companies’ trade secrets that are misappropriated abroad.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.lexblog.com/2021/09/27/trade-secrets-without-borders-the-defend-trade-secret-acts-promise-as-an-extra-territorial-statute-finally-comes-to-pass/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

LexBlog/99 Park Row
J. Alexander Lawrence & Lily Smith
July 21, 2020
Foreign websites that use geotargeted advertising may be subject to personal jurisdiction in the United States, even if they have no physical presence in the United States and do not specifically target their services to the United States, according to a new ruling from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Kurbanov, twelve record companies sued Tofig Kurbanov, who owns and operates the websites: flvto.biz and 2conv.com. These websites enable visitors to rip audio tracks from videos on various platforms, like YouTube, and convert the audio tracks into downloadable files.

The record companies sued Kurbanov for copyright infringement and argued that a federal district court in Virginia had specific personal jurisdiction over Kurbanov because of his contacts with Virginia and with the United States more generally. Kurbanov moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, and the district court granted his motion.

The district court found that both flvto.biz and 2conv.com were semi-interactive, that the visitors’ interactions with them were non-commercial, and that Kurbanov did not purposefully target either Virginia or the United States. As a result, the court ruled that no federal court in the United States had personal jurisdiction over Kurbanov and to exert such jurisdiction would violate due process. On appeal, however, the Fourth Circuit reversed the district court’s ruling and remanded the case.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.lexblog.com/2020/07/21/stretching-the-bounds-of-personal-jurisdiction-4th-circuit-finds-geotargeted-advertising-may-subject-foreign-website-owner-to-personal-jurisdiction-in-the-u-s Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

IP Watchdog
Nouvelle Gonzalo & Nyja Brown & Eleanor LeBeau & Brittany George
April 13, 2020

One of a company’s most valuable assets is its trademark – its name, logo, color or slogan. A trademark or service mark establishes your company as the source of certain products (trademark) or services (service mark). This helps establish your company brand so consumers can easily recognize it. As we consider international trademark registration, there are some important lessons we can learn from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who tried to register a SUSSEX ROYAL trademark.

The content in this post was found at https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2020/04/13/international-trademark-registration-nine-lessons-learned-harry-meghan/id=120530/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

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The content in this post was found at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/french-regulator-says-google-must-pay-news-sites-to-send-them-traffic/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

LexBlog
Thomas Hubert & Jacob Pritt
March 18, 2020

In a high-profile trade secret case, a federal court in Chicago ruled that the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) extends beyond the U.S. and covers actions and damages that occur in other countries.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.lexblog.com/2020/03/18/federal-court-rules-trade-secret-damages-can-extend-beyond-the-u-s-border/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

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Mike Masnick
Tech Dirt
July 17, 2019

Every few years this kind of thing pops up. Some ignorant organization or policymaker thinks “oh, hey, the easy way to ‘solve’ piracy is just to create a giant blacklist.” This sounds like a simple solution… if you have no idea how any of this works. Remember, advertising giant GroupM tried just such an approach a decade ago, working with Universal Music to put together a list of “pirate sites” for which it would block all advertising. Of course, who ended up on that list? A bunch of hip hop news sites and blogs. And even the personal site of one of Universal Music’s own stars was suddenly deemed an “infringing site.”

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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190712/00090542575/wipo-now-gets-into-extrajudicial-zero-due-process-censorship-act-over-sites-it-declares-infringing.shtml

Zhen Feng, Suyu Yuan & Helen Xia
LexBlog
October 16, 2018

On 9 August and 28 September 2018, the new Cyberspace Courts in Beijing and Guangzhou were officially opened. These new specialised courts, along with their equivalent one that was formed in Hangzhou in August 2017, are meant to tackle the quickly swelling stream of internet-related court procedures in China. The establishment of these specialised courts is an encouraging step for the Chinese internet sector as well as for IP owners: it promises a more flexible procedure, less bureaucracy in obtaining evidence and higher quality judgments, handed down by specialist judges.

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The content in this post was found at https://www.lexblog.com/2018/10/16/three-cyberspace-courts-now-online-and-open-for-business/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com

JetLaw

Guest post by Mark Edward Blankenship Jr.

Sept. 19, 2018

In creating the album “Hip-Hop Is Dead”, Nasir Jones, better known by his stage name Nas, postulated that hip-hop artists can help rebuild America by having more control in their music in response to a dying culture and a decline in innovation and political outreach. Yet, in subsequent interviews leading up to the album’s release, the title’s meaning began to shift and change as he responded differently at various junctures, eventually concluding in 2016 that “hip-hop is in a “better” place than it was a decade prior. Yet during that same year, the United States would end up facing a circuit split regarding the legality of digital sampling, which is still currently up for debate.

Back in 2005, the Sixth Circuit in Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films applied a per se infringement standard for sound recordings and digital sampling which many scholars criticized as being the death of hip-hop.  . . .

The de minimis defense is neither a novel nor recondite concept of copyright law, especially outside of the United States. In Kraftwerk v. Pelham (also known as Metall auf Metall), Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court [hereinafter BverfG] applied a similar standard for sound recordings two days before VMG Salsoul. . . .

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The content in this post was found at http://www.jetlaw.org/2018/09/19/guest-post-hip-hop-is-dead-understanding-the-issues-regarding-digital-sampling-in-the-u-s-and-germany-and-the-potential-demise-of-an-“american”-genre/ Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post. and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com