On June 24, 2019, the United States Supreme Court issued its much-awaited decision in Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media, addressing the intersection of trade secrets law and the Freedom...
Please re-subscribe or "re-follow" us. (If you don't, your notifications of new posts may stop going forward.) Sorry for any inconvenience! After 7 years with blog designs that I have never liked,...
Although I am away (and posting from the Muir Woods - which are quite remarkable), I wanted to post a quick update on the status of the Massachusetts noncompete and UTSA bill. More details later. In t...
As regular readers of this blog know, several years ago, I became curious to see how many reported trade secret / noncompete decisions were issued each year in all federal and state courts around the...
I am thrilled to announce that I have been given the opportunity to work with two of my favorite (though far more prolific) bloggers, Ken Vanko and John Marsh, to create a brand new podcast: Fairly Co...
There are basically four types of intellectual property: patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. Here is a very brief summary of each: A patent is the right “to exclude others fro...
This post is a bit unusual for me. It is not about substantive law. It's not about Fair Competition Law issues in the news. It's not even my own analysis. Rather, it is a list - by a different blog (T...
We spend lots of time on this blog discussing trade secret protection. To give some context, I thought it might be helpful to have a few statistics: Trade secret and related noncompete cases have m...
We need your help... We are pleased to announce that we were selected by the ABA for inclusion in its top 100 Blawgs. The list was compiled by the editors based on their personal favorites. Now,...
Earlier this month, I tried something a bit different. Doing a take-off on what I do in the last class of the Trade Secrets and Restrictive Covenants course that I teach at Boston University School o...
I am trying something a bit different. It's a take-off on what I do in my last class in the Trade Secrets and Restrictive Covenants course I teach at Boston University School of Law. So, here it goes....
In October 2009, Computerworld published an article of mine entitled, "No-poach agreements: A new generation of restriction." The article discussed a no-poach agreement used by several large high tech...
There is an endless variety of types of trade secrets and confidential information. (On the question of the significance of the distinction, see Trade Secret or Confidential Information?, posted on J...
Each time a new technology rolls out, legal decisions follow. Social media is the latest. Remember the cyberstalker? How about Facebook's lawsuit against Power.com? Or the class action against Face...
Lawsuits over trade secrets typically involve things like customer lists, formulas, manufacturing processes, etc. Can the location of houses for use as movie sets be a trade secret? Yep. Well, at leas...
We're now fully operational here and at Beck Reed Riden LLP! With that, we are able to bring all of the basic services to full capacity. Toward that end, I have updated the links on the right sid...
Thinking about whether "Fair Competition" is a nice play on "Unfair Competition," insofar as FAIR competition is the ultimate goal of unfair competition laws. What do you think?...