Balough
December 14, 2013
A city violated a police officer’s privacy rights when it retrieved and reviewed text messages on a city-issued pager in spite of a written policy that the messages were public. The police officer, as well as the recipients and senders of other text messages on the officer’s account, sued the City of Ontario, Calif., after […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A plaintiff must show that his computer was actually damaged in order to properly allege a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a federal judge found. The issue arose in a case where a former employee was accused of unauthorized copying and emailing of computer files so that he could use the […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A trademark owner who seeks statutory damages for counterfeit goods cannot also recover attorney’s fees, the Ninth Circuit said. Under the trademark law, a trademark owner who sues in a case involving counterfeit goods may elect to recover either three times the actual damages or statutory damages. The court found that the statute allows for […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Telling a future employer why your former employer fired you does not create a claim for compelled self-defamation. The plaintiff in the case, an attorney, argued that she was compelled to tell future employers that her previous employer had told her she was fired because she mishandled cases, violated the attorney code of ethics, and […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Freelancers who failed to register their works cannot be awarded damages in a proposed class action settlement, a federal appeals court ruled. The Second Circuit affirmed the long-standing rule that before an author can recover damages for copyright infringement, the work must be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. As a result, the court threw […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A Florida-based website that targeted the Chicago market and received payment based on the number of clicks on each hyperlink can be sued in Illinois. U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Norgle found Domain Magic, LLC’s website www.chicagoarchitecturefoundation.org misappropriated the website of an Illinois corporation for its own gain. “By purposefully reaching out to the […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
The estate of the late singer-songwriter James Brown may be feeling so good right now. An Illinois appellate court agreed that a website that displays pictures of the singer for licensing may violate Brown’s right of publicity because the stock images can be purchased by private and commercial users, not only the media. In addition, […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A person who had Circuit City install a new DVD drive on his computer waived any right to privacy when the store found child pornography during a test of the new system, a Pennsylvania appellate court found. The ruling reversed the trial court’s suppression of the results of a search of Kenneth Sodomsky’s computer that […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A divided California Supreme Court found that a defendant can be enjoined from repeating certain statements after a trial court found the statements were defamatory. The court concluded that the injunction was not prohibited by either the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment or California’s state constitution. The majority opinion found that “an injunction issued following a trial […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Even though a maker of custom vans obtained a trademark registration for “Work-N-Play,” the fact that the company made only one sale that didn’t even use the trademark prevented it from claiming infringement by another van maker using the term “Work and Play.” The Seventh Circuit found that the term “Work-N-Play” was a “descriptive mark,” […]
