Paul Jacobson

Please note that our terms of appointment have been updated.  Some of the changes to our terms of appointment included fewer charges and a new advice service.  We’ll publish a full post in due course describing these changes and our thoughts behind them.

Technorati Tags: legal advice, amended terms of appointment

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Paris Hilton goes into a bar … and does a table dance!

Yet another show by Paris Hilton. She must be a little low on the radar. Time for another stunt.

(via Celebrity Gossip)

Technorati Tags: club, paris hilton, strip tease, table dance

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Now here is a fee I’d like to have.  Lawyers representing NTP Inc. in the recent case concerning alleged trademark infringement by Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry devices stand to receive fees in excess of $200 million for their role.  Readers of this blog might recall that the settlement reached involves a payment from RIM to NTP in the amount of $612.5 million.  According to the Detroit News (which published a Washington Post article):

“It’s payday for Washington D.C. law firm Wiley Rein & Fielding LLP, which will collect more than $200 million in fees from representing NTP Inc. in its patent-infringement lawsuit against the maker of BlackBerry wireless e-mail devices.

That payment would be more than the firm’s annual revenue, which according to American Lawyer magazine totaled $140 million in 2004.

The firm took the case on contingency in 2001 and helped litigate successfully against Research in Motion Ltd., a Waterloo, Ontario-based company that makes and has sold the BlackBerry to more than 4 million subscribers.

Wiley Rein’s patent team, led by founding partner James Wallace and Kevin Anderson, won a jury verdict for NTP of McLean, Va., in 2002. But because the firm took the case on contingency, payment was deferred until the conclusion of the case.

RIM then lost the case on appeal and settled it for $612.5 million earlier this month to avert a possible shutdown of the popular service.

The amount of the law firm’s payment was reported this week in Legal Times and was confirmed by a source close to the private deal struck between Wiley and NTP. Donald Stout, the only surviving founder of NTP, was not available for comment. The other founder, Thomas Campana, died of cancer in 2004.

The remainder of the settlement will be distributed among Stout, Campana’s estate and about 20 investors in the company.”

Technorati Tags: blackberry, lawyers, legal services, ntp, fees, research in motion

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Google has been under fire for allegedly breaching copyright for a little while now.  ZDNet has reported that one such case has been thrown out:

“In a legal win for Google, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a writer who claimed the search giant infringed on his copyright by archiving a Usenet posting of his and providing excerpts from his Web site in search results.

The lawsuit was filed by Gordon Roy Parker, also known as Ray Gordon, who publishes his writings under the business name of Snodgrass Publishing Group. Parker, of Philadelphia, also posted a chapter of one of his e-books on the Usenet bulletin board network, a collection of thousands of discussion forums called newsgroups.

In his 2004 lawsuit against Google, Parker alleged that the search giant violated copyright law by automatically archiving a copy of his posting on Usenet and by providing excerpts from his Web site in search results.

However, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled on Friday that under case law, Google’s activities, akin to those of an Internet Service Provider, do not constitute infringement (click for PDF of court documents).

“When an ISP automatically and temporarily stores data without human intervention so that the system can operate and transmit data to its users, the necessary element of volition is missing,” the court said.

The ruling cited a January decision in the Field v. Google case in federal court in Nevada that concluded that cached versions of Web pages Google stores and offers as a part of many search results do not infringe copyright.”

This isn’t quite the end of the road for copyright litigation against Google:

“The ruling comes after a decision last month in which a federal judge in Los Angeles said that portions of Google’s image search feature, which displays thumbnail versions of images found on adult photo site Perfect 10 and others, likely violate U.S. copyright law.

The search engine also faces copyright lawsuits filed last year by authors and publishers groups over its controversial Library Project book-scanning plans, and a lawsuit filed by Agence France-Presse and threat of litigation from the World Association of Newspapers for aggregating headlines and photos without permission or compensation.

In a legal blow to Google earlier this week, a federal judge in San Jose, Calif., said he would grant federal prosecutors at least part of their request for excerpts from Google’s index of Web sites. Google is challenging a subpoena from the Department of Justice for a random sampling of Internet addresses and search queries that the DOJ says it needs to help defend a measure designed to hold Web sites liable if minors can access pornography on them.”

(via Slashdot and Inside Google)

It remains to be seen whether caching by a search engine will qualify as a copyright infringement in South African law.  Section 74 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act (Act 25 of 2002) exempts a service provider from liability for caching in certain instances, namely:

“(1) A service provider that transmits data provided by a recipient of the service via an information system under its control is not liable for the automatic, intermediate and temporary storage of that data, where the purpose of storing such data is to make the onward transmission of the data more efficient to other recipients of the service upon their request, as long as the service provider—­

(a) does not modify the data;

(b) complies with conditions on access to the data;

(c) complies with rules regarding the updating of the data, specified in a manner widely recognised and used by industry;

(d) does not interfere with the lawful use of technology, widely recognised and used by industry, to obtain information on the use of the data; and

(e) removes or disables access to the data it has stored upon receiving a take-down notice referred to in section 77.

(2) Notwithstanding this section, a competent court may order a service provider to terminate or prevent unlawful activity in terms of any other law.”

A similar principle may apply to Google (and other search engines) which essentially copy, index and present links to websites which often contain copyrighted materials.

Technorati Tags: caching, copyright, Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, Google, usenet

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According to Moneyweb, Gold Reef Casino Resorts is suing M-Net and Carte Blanche over a report by the news program warning people about the allegedly questionable safety of Gold Reef City’s theme park rides rides:

‘Gold Reef Casino Resorts (GRCR) is suing M-Net and Carte Blanche for R24m in damages, after the current affairs programme’s questioned the safety of Gold Reef City’s theme park rides. It claims the report was unjustified, and caused revenues to plummet.

CEO Steven Joffe attributed the group’s slightly depressed growth for the year to end-December entirely to the 14,4% drop in the theme park’s revenue that saw the operation only break even for the year.

“Compounding the 21% fewer visitors to the theme park than in 2004, legal and marketing expenses increased to address the damage caused by Carte Blanche’s blatantly inaccurate condemnation of the safety of certain rides,??? he said.

Joffe said considerable amounts have been invested in maintaining the safety of its rides, “which has been affirmed by experts and is regularly subject to government-sanctioned and international expert inspections.???’

The report aired earlier this month painted a very different picture:

“Zaa Nkweta (Carte Blanche presenter): “But just how safe are these rides and what laws are in place to protect the public? Gold Reef City told us that they adhere to the highest safety standards and prescriptions of the law.???

Voice of Dewald van der Walt (Operations Manager, Gold Reef City): “The Occupational Health and Safety Act acts as a guide, yes. So what we do once a year on all our rides…well, most of the rides, depending on the schedule…we perform non-destructive testing. What that means is we dismantle the rides… all the critical parts… and they get tested with ultrasonic tests. If need be, they get X-rayed to make sure that the critical parts are still safe.???

Really?

Just more than three weeks ago Carte Blanche obtained video footage that tells a completely different story.

It showed that several rides at Gold Reef City were in an advanced state of disrepair - with cracks, rust, bad maintenance and neglect visible everywhere.

It could be a life threatening situation, or worse - a pending disaster - according to experts.”

It is likely that the litigation will take some time to finalise and may yet form the basis for a follow up report in due course.  This case will, no doubt, have a bearing on the responsibility news organisations have when it comes to warning the public about possible safety risks.

Technorati Tags: carte blanche, gold reef city, mnet, unsafe rides

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