Happy Holidays from Fastcase

We wish you a very happy, healthy and joyous holiday season.


cc licensed flickr photo shared by P_R_

Lawsuit of the Day: Michael Jordan Has Beef with Chicagoland Grocery Chain

We hope that by this point in the week you have pried yourselves away from your computers, Blackberrys, or iPhones, and you are wrapped tightly in your Snuggies or Slankets in front of the fireplace with your nearest and dearest. But for those of you who are still plugged in, we have a juicy little tid-bit of a lawsuit for your entertainment.

NBA legend Michael Jordan filed a pair of $5 million lawsuits against two Chicago-area grocery stores -- Dominick's Finer Foods and Jewel Food Stores -- for using his identity without permission in ads that were published in a commemorative Sports Illustrated issue lauding Jordan's achievements. Each of the ads -- which featured Jordan's name and jersey number (23!) -- also promoted Dominick's and Jewel. The Dominick's ad and resulting lawsuit are particularly meaty -- this particular ad included a $2 coupon for Rancher's Reserve Steak -- a trademarked brand of Dominick's parent company, Safeway.


cc licensed flickr photo shared by arnold | inuyaki

Where's the beef, you ask? Why would a celebrity of Jordan's stature be worrying his pretty little head about the one-time misuse of his image and identity to hawk $2 coupons for grocery-store steaks? It's not as if his image is being used to promote something unsavory or embarrassing. Helpfully, Jordan's complaint against Dominick's (available here) explains:

"Jordan has . . . had enormous success as an endorser of products and services" and "[b]y carefully controlling the nature and frequency of his product endorsement . . . Jordan has enhanced and maintained the value of his endorsements." Indeed, the complaint goes on to reveal that "[t]he majority of Jordan's income, and his income potential, is now derived from his ability to license his name and persona to commerical sponsors. . . As a business, the licensing of Jordan's identity is just as important to him now as his professional basketball playing career once was."

So basically, Jordan's image and identity are just too darn valuable to allow even the most minor of infringements. And as it turns out, His Airness has already lent his identify to an eponymous line of steakhouses and mail-order steaks, creating the possibility that consumers could be confused about which steak products he is endorsing. So maybe Jordan's lawsuit isn't so silly after all. Read more about the lawsuit here, here, and here.

Our friendly advice to Dominick's and Jewel? Go out and get a legitimate celebrity endorsement for your products. We can think of one charismatic athlete whose endorsement might be available for quite a bargain.

Sources: Yahoo Sports, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and The Business Insider.

Fastcase Holiday Reading List

Whether you are a library card-carrying book-worm or dedicated techie itching to try out the Kindle, iphone, Nook, iRex, or Sony Reader that Santa left under your tree, the holidays are a great time to relax, refresh, and curl up in front of the fireplace with a few good books. To help you get into the holiday reading spirit, we humbly share with you some recommendations from our team. Happy Holidays from Fastcase!

ED: The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services by Richard Susskind. From The AmLaw Daily: "Susskind's The End of Lawyers? is a dry, sometimes boring, often infuriating, small-print book

written by a supercilious academic who thinks 'the law is not there to provide a livelihood for lawyers,' but rather that our incomes are, at best, a by-product that society must incur as the price of the rule of law. But you should still read it. Why? Because Susskind understands the dynamics of change, and how to manage rather than be blindsided by them."

PHIL: The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan. From the Guardian: "One of the many frank admissions Greenspan makes in this eminently readable book - part-autobiography, part-history, part-attempt to make sense of the universe - is that his powers as Fed chairman from 1987 to 2006 were decidedly limited. For all his technical expertise, he made his most important decisions about interest rates on the basis of his own judgment and anecdotal observation."

ANDY: Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting by Aviel D. Rubin. From Bloomberg.com: "For three years, Aviel Rubin and his team of computer-security specialists at Johns Hopkins studied the software for the controversial paper-free voting system that will be widely used tomorrow. In his new book, 'Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting,' Rubin argues that not only can the system be manipulated, but worse, we would never know."

JEN: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die . . . by Dan Heath & Chip Heath. From Time Magazine: "The Heaths trumpet the notion that certain ideas are 'sticky'--a term plucked from The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's tome about how ideas and behaviors catch on in society. Gladwell, whom the Heath brothers revere, writes about "the stickiness factor" but never fully fleshes out what makes an idea sticky. That's where Chip and Dan come in."

RICHA: Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. From the New York Times: "Lethem’s eighth novel unfolds in an alternative-reality Manhattan. The crowded canvas includes a wantonly destructive escaped tiger (or is it a subway excavator?) prowling the streets, a cruel gray fog engulfing Wall Street, a 'war free' edition of The New York Times, a character stranded on the dying International Space Station, strange and valuable vaselike objects called chaldrons, colossal cheeseburgers and some extremely potent marijuana."

KEITH: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. From Webster.edu: "A touching and sad novel, at once a compelling love story, philosophical text, and dialogue with Frederich Nietzsche -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being is all of these and more, perhaps most importantly a manifesto of embracing nihilism. Milan Kundera opens the novel with a discourse on Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence. He rejects any view of the recurrence as being real or metaphysical. It is metaphorical he assures us."

RUPESH: Rails for .NET Developers by Jeff Cohen and Brian Eng. From Bitwise Magazine: "Learning a new language can be tough enough but learning a new framework can be even tougher. So while some .NET developers may be tempted to try out Ruby On Rails, learning both a new language, Ruby, and a new framework, Rails, may prove to be a daunting prospect. For some people, the sheer unfamiliarity of everything may prove to be an insurmountable barrier. Now Jeff Cohen and Brian Eng’s book comes to the rescue . . ."

TIM: Rigged: The True Story of Any Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, From Wall Street to Dubai by Ben Mezrich. From the publisher: "From the author who brought you the massive NY Times bestseller Bringing Down The House, this is the startling, rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange."

NINA: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel. For more on this American classic, check out this segment of Morning Edition from NPR.

JELENA: Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. From The New Yorker: "Audaciously combining memoir, essay, and what has to be fiction... this fourth collection of short pieces offers pleasures normally to be found only in the best novels and the rare standup act that is actually funny...."

AARON: Sailor Song by Ken Kesey. From The New York Times: "The time of 'Sailor Song' is some three decades from now, when America has begun to fragment into religious cults, and the ecological crisis has begun to spin out of control. The setting is the Alaskan fishing village of Kuinak, which is populated by DEAP's (Descendants of Early Aboriginal Peoples) and assorted refugees from the lower 48 states. Into this benighted setting cruises a Hollywood movie company aboard an ultramodern yacht called Silver Fox. The plan is to turn Kuinak into the setting for a film of a children's classic called "Shoola and the Sea Lion," by a presumably DEAP writer named Isabella Anootka."

Law & Tech Roundup

Our RSS readers are exploding with law and technology news this week. Here are some of the highlights:

Microsoft (and its European customers) are having a good day. European regulators finally dropped their antitrust suit against Microsoft in exchange for the software giant's agreement to give European Windows users a choice of 11 rival web browsers rather than limiting them to Internet Explorer. Unfortunately for domestic Windows users, Microsoft apparently has no plans to extend this offer beyond the European Union. Many are heralding this as a huge victory for EU Windows users, but given how easy it is to install competing browsers on a PC these days, it is a little tough to see what all the fuss is about. For an interesting analysis of the issues, check out this article from the Seattle PI.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by jeffwilcox

Intel's day is not going quite so well. The blogosphere is exploding with reports about the FTC's commencement of an antitrust suit against the chip0maker today accusing it of "stifl[ing] competition" by systematically blocking its rivals access to the market. What does that mean? According to the FTC's complaint, Intel "threatened to and did increase prices, terminate product and technology collaborations, shut off supply, and reduce marketing support to OEMs that purchased too many products from Intel's competitors." Read about it here, here, here, and here.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by logan_x

Texters take heed: On Monday the Supreme Court granted certiorari on City of Ontario v. Quon, 08-1332. Quon presents the issue of whether government employers can read text messages that their employees send and receive on workplace texting devices. In this case, a police officer from California frequently sent personal and sexually explicit text messages from a pager provided by the police department. The department's wireless provider turned over the transcripts of the messages to the department - a move that the civil-rights friendly Ninth Circuit called an unreasonable search. The Supreme Court will review the Ninth Circuit's decision and decide whether the officer had a legitimate expectation of privacy in his text messages. Although this case arose in the context of government employment, it is sure to have implications for private companies as well. Oral arguments are likely to take place this spring, so stay tuned. And regardless of which way the high court comes out, it is probably wise to keep your private messages off of an employer-owned device.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by moriza

Sources: NY Times, WSJ, PC World, CNN, Seattle PI, and ScotusWiki.

Important Info for Members of the State Bar of Wisconsin

At Fastcase, we are constantly striving to improve our product in order to serve you better. We recently made some adjustments to the back end of our site that may require members of the State Bar of Wisconsin who use Internet Explorer to adjust their browser settings. In order to ensure uninterrupted access to Fastcase, please follow these simple steps:

(1) Select Internet Options from the Tools menu in your browser.

(2) Then select the Security tab and click on the icon for Trusted Sites.

(3) Click the Sites button and add "https://apps.fastcase.com/" as a trusted site.

(4) Close the dialog boxes, close your browser and then re-open it. Attempt to login to Fastcase again.

As always, feel free to contact Fastcase Customer Support (1-866-773-2782, support@fastcase.com) with any questions.

Why Aren't NFL Instant Replays Reviewed De Novo?

Duke Law professor Joseph Blocher asks a great question: Why Aren't Instant Replays Reviewed De Novo?

He argues that unlike trial courts, umpires and referees operating in real time are not in the best place to make the correct call.  After all, in sports, the reviewing decision-maker is viewing the play multiple times, from many angles, and in slow motion.

Cited in the blog post is a forthcoming Indiana Law Review article by Chad M. Oldfather and Matthew M Fernholz of Marquette University Law School: Comparative Procedure on a Sunday Afternoon: Instant Replay in the NFL as a Process of Appellate Review.

Check out the comments to Blocher's post for extra entertainment. Pretty good.

Source: PrawfsBlawg

USPTO Announces "Green" Initiative

The USPTO announced on Monday that it would begin a pilot program to accellerate the examination of patent applications for "green" technologies. According to the USPTO "The new initiative, coming days before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, will accelerate the development and deployment of green technology, create green jobs, and promote U.S. competitiveness in this vital sector."

If all goes well, the average time it takes to patent a qualifying "green" technology will be reduced by about a year. That may not sound like much, but imagine what one-year head start in the market could mean for consumer technologies like automobiles.

What types of technologies will qualify for expedited treatment? You can find the full list of eligible classfications in the Federal Register. Some notable entries include: human-powered vehicles, hybrid-powered vehicles, wind-powered ships, alternative irrigation techniques, and water conservation systems. Although the list of classifications is suprisingly detailed, with so much at stake, you can be assured that this is a question that will be the soon be the subject of litigation.

Did you know: This move -- providing regulatory incentives to entice the industry to focus research and development -- is not without precedent. Back in 1997, Congress enacted a law that provided marketing incentives -- specifically 6 months of marketing exclusivity -- to drug manufacturers who conduct studies of drugs in children. This law, commonly known as the pediatric exclusivity provision, was part of the Food and Drug Modernization Act. Congress felt that incentives were needed to produce safe and effective pediatric drugs because pharmaceutical firms were reluctant to perform clinical trials on children because the pediatric market is often small relative to the adult market as well as the difficulty of obtaining informed consent for pediatric testing.

by AGeekMom

Is it working? Well, the answer to that question depends on what you think of the 172 drugs that have been granted exclusivity under this program.

Sources: USPTO, FDA

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Business Intelligence and People Finder Now Available on Fastcase!

We are delighted to announce our partnership with ReferenceLegal, the leading provider of business and consumer intelligence to the legal profession. ReferenceLegal's database contains information on more than 14 million U.S. businesses, 210 million U.S. residents, and 855,000 U.S. health care providers.

Fastcase subscribers can now harness the power of ReferenceLegal's vast public records database to run conflict checks, perform corporate due diligence, screen potential clients, opponents, and business partners, locate consulting experts and expert witnesses, and much more.

Access ReferenceLegal Through Fastcase

You can find ReferenceLegal under our Public Records search link. Simply select Public Records from the Search menu and click on the ReferenceLegal logo. (Alternatively, you can choose the Search Public Records link on the Quick Case Law Search page.) From here, you can subscribe to ReferenceLegal online on an annual or a monthly basis and instantly start researching. You can even take ReferenceLegal for a test drive by signing up for a free trial.

Fastcase is Hiring

Fastcase is a ten-year leader in the online search industry, and we are seeking a friendly, highly motivated, detail-oriented person to join our Customer Outreach team. Job duties include training customers on how to use our online legal research system, assisting customers with legal research inquiries, creating online content for newsletters and blogs, and assisting with quality assurance work.

Requirements: Strong organization, writing, and interpersonal skills. The ideal candidate will be an enthusiastic and professional team player with the ability to multi-task and meet project deadlines. Experience in social media, marketing, or legal research is a must. College degree required.

Salary is commensurate with experience. Benefits include complete health care, dental, vision benefit, a relaxed work environment, and paid vacation. Office is in terrific location in Farragut North downtown.

To apply, please send a resume, cover letter, and references to Richa Dasgupta, Director of Customer Outreach, at RDasgupta[at]fastcase[dot]com.