posted: January 29, 2009
Intellectual property is divided into four generally accepted categories: copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. Given …read more
Category: Copyright | Patent | Trademark
Tags: Copyright | copyright Office | Intellectual property | Patent | patent and trademark office | servicemark | trade secret | Trademark | uniform trade secret act
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posted: January 26, 2009
Courts have frequently held that e-mail correspondence can qualify as an enforceable agreement, assuming the legal requirements for a valid offer and acceptance are met. For example, in …read more
Category: General Business
Tags: "Meeting of the Minds" | Contract Amendments | Contracts | Electronic Signatures | Offer and Acceptance | Settlement Agreements
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posted: January 22, 2009
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (the “EFF”), a non-profit advocacy and legal group based in San Francisco, CA, is contemplating filing a lawsuit against Michigan State University. It seems MSU disciplined a student for being a “spammer” when the student sent an email to about 900 professors without prior school approval. The student was a member of the MSU student government and, in her personal capacity, was trying to garner professor support to protest a change in the school year that the Provost had put forth.
The EFF wrote a blog post on the matter late last year. From the EFF blog:
MSU’s email policy prohibits the sending of unsolicited e-mail “for personal purposes, advertising or solicitations, …read more
Category: Uncategorized
Tags: First Amendment | Free Speech | Michigan State University | pro bono | Spam | Spammer
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posted: January 20, 2009
I’ve written previously about the so-called “Battle of the Forms” both here and here. Yesterday’s post concerned a case, Taurus Mold, Inc. v. TRW Automotive US, LLC, in which the Court of Appeals assumed, without discussion, that purchase orders or invoices that incorporated standard terms and conditions by reference to a website were legal as a matter of law. Randy Safford in my office noticed another important lesson from the case (one that is often repeated but sadly overlooked): Get. It. In. Writing.
Some time ago I wrote about the “battle of the forms” — the legal dispute that arises between buyers and sellers when each parties’ “standard terms and conditions,” contained in their respective purchase orders and invoices, are in conflict. The full post can be read here. Typically, those standard terms and conditions are found on the back of the purchase orders and invoices in small print. Recently, however, some buyers and sellers are foregoing the small type on the back of their forms and merely referencing a website where their terms and conditions can be found. Such a provision may look something like this:
The Terms and Conditions, which are incorporated into this Purchase Order by reference, are …read more
Category: General Business
Tags: Battle of the Forms | invoice | purchase order | standard terms and conditions
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