Below are a couple of interesting opinions our Daily Summary writers have picked out for you this week. Newton v. LePage, US 1st Cir. (11/28/12) Civil Rights, Constitutional Law At issue in this case was whether the governor of Maine violated the First Amendment by removing a large state-owned mural, commissioned by the former administration, from its location on the…
Massachusetts company Lexington Luminance LLC (“Lexington”) filed a lawsuit against Google, Inc. yesterday, November 29, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. It its complaint, Lexington alleges that Google’s Nexus 7 and other similar products infringe on a patent the company owns. According to the complaint, the patent at issue, U.S. Patent No. 6,936,851, is entitled “Semiconductor…
Yesterday, November 29, Brent Matthew Scott filed a class action lawsuit against Google, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. The lawsuit alleges that through its Gmail product, Google violated state laws against wiretapping. Specifically, the complaint alleges that Google intercepts the plaintiff’s emails (and those of the entire class of plaintiffs) before they reach…
California Watch, part of the Center for Investigative Reporting, has a post this week about the relative costs and revenue of PACER. We’ve talked about the problems with PACER fees and the impediments to access before, and it is certainly a familiar topic to those of us in the free law community, but it hasn’t gotten much attention outside of…
Apple acquired partial European trademark rights to the word “lightning” from motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson’s intellectual property unit, H-D Michigan, LLC, according to public filings with the European Union’s trademark and design unit (see below), and a blog post by Patently Apple. Apple uses the term Lightning to describe its proprietary connection interface for iPhone, iPad, iPod, and iTouch devices that…
Happy Thanksgiving from the Justia team — we are thankful for all our readers and free law friends! The legal establishment of Thanksgiving began with a resolution from the U.S. Congress. The resolution put forth a request that President George Washington recommend a day of thanksgiving, which he did, via proclamation, by declaring Thursday, November 26th, 1789, a day of…
Samsung’s lawyers want a copy of Apple’s patent licensing agreement with HTC, according to emails filed in federal court on Friday (highlighted below). After a federal jury returned a $1.05 billion verdict for Apple in August — just one of the two companies’ hotly contested global patent disputes — U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh scheduled a December 6 hearing…
Check out the latest crop of featured cases from Justia’s Dockets. Hank Azaria v. Craig Bierko et al., (US District Court, C.D. California) Actor Hank Azaria, well-known for his voice actor roles in “The Simpsons” television show, filed a copyright lawsuit seeking declaratory relief against actor Craig Bierko in a dispute over the voice and other rights of ’Jim Brockmire,’ a baseball…
On Friday, a California company called Innovative Automation LLC filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the complaint alleges that Apple’s iCloud product infringes on a patent owned by Innovative Automation. The first patent at issue, U.S. Patent No. 7,174,362, is entitled “Method and System for Supplying Products from…
Yesterday, Google was named in a class action lawsuit by a plaintiff identified only as “A.K., as next friend of minor child J.K.” Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, the lawsuit alleges that Google has violated (and continues to violate) the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (the “Act”) and various state privacy laws…