Tech Law: eBay Wins, No Apt Cable Exclusives, Psystar Files Bankruptcy, More
A look at highlights of the past week in the high tech legal world: courts, regulation, and lawsuits.
UK Court takes eBay side over L’Oréal — French cosmetics company L’Oréal has undertaken a hundred lawsuits against eBay in Europe over sales of its products and of alleged counterfeits. The UK’s High Court has said that eBay has “no legal duty” to protect the trademarks of others. [Source: OUT-LAW News]
Court rules against cable exclusive rights in building — In a blow to the cable industry, the Court of Appeals upheld an FCC ruling banning exclusive agreements between carriers and apartment buildings as anticompetitive. [Source: Associated Press]
Psystar declares bankruptcy — Mac clone maker Psystar has filed for bankruptcy, possibly delaying the suit that Apple brought against the company for alleged copyright infringement. [Source: AppleInsider]
User drops $70.50 suit against Facebook — Theodore Karantsalis has dropped his suit for $70.50 against Facebook. The suit had alleged that the company had inadequately protected users against viruses. Apparently all is resolved and the Florida librarian and Facebook have “agreed to add each other as ‘friends’ and ‘poke’ each other periodically.” [Source: CNET]
Former EMC exec gets to work for HP — A Massachusetts court has said that former EMC executive David Donatelli will be able to work for HP after all, even though he had signed a non-compete with the storage company. However, he will have to stay clear of storage technology development for a year under the agreement, which will be an interesting task as he was hired to be vice-president of enterprise servers, storage, and networking. [Source: Computerworld]
Gavel image via Flickr user Thomas Roche, CC 2.0.
Erik Sherman is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, Technology Review, the Financial Times, Chief Executive, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter.
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