IT projects: It’s a team game 28 September 2010 IT projects have a knack of over-running for significant periods, requiring ‘out-of-scope’ changes half way through, and consequently going over budget. Although any project will develop and evolve over time, such problems can be minimised through sensible project management methods. It is not uncommon for IT projects to last several months, if not years, from conception to completion ...
Interest about the relevance of buyer power for competition has been growing in the last decades, as the markets of retail distribution were subject to a process of consolidation, if at different speed, in most European countries ...
Getting the Deal Through - e-Commerce 2011 Getting the Deal Through published a fully revised and updated seventh edition of e-Commerce, a volume in GTDT's series of annual reports published by Law Business Research. This publication provides international analysis in key areas of law and policy for corporate counsel, cross-border legal practitioners and business people ...
Social networks: Hype and its legal consequences published in: WirtschaftsBlatt,Author: Dr. Axel Anderl, LL.m., Mag. Martina Schmid Social networking platforms like Facebook, MySpace or XING are an increasing popularity. It has never been so easy to operate social networking ...
On June 28, 2010, the United States Supreme Court announced its decision on Bilski v. Kappos regarding what inventions are eligible for patent protection. The decision affirms that business methods are patentable, although the specific business methods at the center of the case are not. While stating that no single test governs the issue, the Court approved of the use of the “machine-or-transformation test” that the Federal Circuit had distilled from earlier Supreme Court cases ...
Just one day after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit indicated that it would consider the current state of the inequitable conduct doctrine en banc in Therasense, Inc. v. Becton Dickinson and Co., a split panel of the Federal Circuit issued a decision in the case of Avid Identification Systems, Inc. v. Crystal Import Corp. affirming a lower court’s finding of inequitable conduct ...
The answer is that they were both the subject of two recent decisions which shed further light on the ability to register three-dimensional shapes as trade marks. On the face of it, a three dimensional shape may be registered as a trade mark provided it meets the usual criteria (distinctive, non-descriptive, capable of distinguishing goods of one business from another etc) ...
The High Court has ruled that contractual interest will form part of any agreed liability cap, but that statutory interest arising from the exercise of the court's discretion will not. In Markerstudy Insurance Co Ltd and others v Endsleigh Insurance Services Ltd, the claimants alleged widespread breaches by the defendant of a number of agreements, causing the claimant to suffer loss of approximately £14m ...
2009 Prediction: Further penetration of Software as a Service (SaaS) Australia will see a proliferation of businesses adopting SaaS in 2009. With no hardware, maintenance or upfront capital costs, SaaS will be seen as ideal for companies looking to control their costs in an uncertain economic environment. Some analysts predict that the global SaaS industry may be worth as much as A$10.7 billion during 2009 ...
At the end of January, the 468-page judgement of BSkyB v EDS was published, nearly eighteen months after the court hearing closed. Many, varied and worrying predictions as to the potential impact of this judgement had been made, but ultimately the judgement is unlikely to lead to radical changes in the relationship between IT and other suppliers and their customers ...
The verdict has finally arrived in the long-running IT dispute between EDS and BSkyB, for which the trial ended over a year ago. With legal fees of around £70m and an anticipated damages award of £200m (against a contract reportedly worth only £48m), the case will change the landscape of supplying IT products and services forever. EDS supplied a customer relationship management system to BSkyB ...
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is modifying the computer program it uses to calculate Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) in light of the recent decision in Wyeth v. Kappos, No. 2009-1120 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 7, 2010). In Wyeth, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that the USPTO has been improperly calculating patent term adjustment under 35 U.S.C. § 154(b). The Federal Circuit’s decision will result in additional patent term for many U.S ...
In what may be a new opportunity for cybersquatters, the Colombian .CO registry will soon allow for registration of domain names ending in simply .CO. Such domain names may be a prime platform for social networking sites and brand owners. As the registry explains, the acronym .CO can be associated with terms that include company, corporation, commerce, communities, content, connect, communication, collaborate, and consumers ...
A costly mistake by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has highlighted the importance of careful drafting to ensure access to a software program’s source code. The source code is the line of code in which the software is written, in language intelligible to a suitably trained software developer. Through the use of a compiler, the source code is converted to object code which forms the software program ...
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has launched the new Privacy Notices Code of Practice. It is the most recent step in the ICO's continuing battle to ensure consumers are kept informed about how and why their personal data will be processed. Months of ICO research has revealed that over half of consumers do not understand what they are signing up to when they fill in online and paper forms ...
The Bill requires online retailers to take 'all reasonable steps' to avoid selling age-restricted products to those underage. It also requires annual advice from government to retailers setting out what constitutes 'all reasonable steps' ...
Customs has changed, with immediate effect, the way in which they deal with goods suspected of infringing brand owners' intellectual property rights. The changes are bad news for brand owners who now have to initiate court proceedings each and every time they wish Customs to seize a consignment of infringing goods ...
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that luxury brand owners can use their trade mark rights to prevent licensees selling goods to discount stores in breach of licence. Facts In 2000, Dior entered into a trade mark licence with Societe Industrielle Lingerie (SIL) for the manufacture and distribution of corseted clothing bearing the 'Christian Dior' trade mark ...
In early 2008, 'green computing' and the idea that companies were going to need to implement new measures to improve their green credentials was one of the hot topics in IT. You might have been forgiven for thinking that environmental concern would be among the first casualties of the credit crunch and the resulting recession ...
Virtually every business has some sort of website or presence on the internet, and it is often an integral part of the business. At the same time, many organisations use bespoke or customised software internally on a day-to-day basis, and undoubtedly attribute significant value to these assets, not least because the development of them probably required a significant investment via a third party developer providing the software ...
Software is part of the day-to-day fabric for most companies. And almost everyone who uses it does so with little or no thought about what happens should it fail, or if it is no longer available. However, the prudent software buyer will consider how to protect against failure of critical or bespoke software, which is where escrow may come in. Be warned, though ...
The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) expressed her opinion in respect of a reference for a preliminary ruling from a German court. The main proceedings before the German court concern a German distance retailer who tried to charge the customer of a second-hand laptop for the eight months of use she had ...
With the credit crunch likely to affect every aspect of the global economy, the prospect of declining revenue threatens to erode the profitability of many businesses. So the challenge is to preserve cash and cut costs. But how does this affect IT? Cutting back on IT projects is not necessarily an option. Software is the engine of the modern enterprise. Indeed, for many organisations it is their primary source of competitive advantage ...
What is spamdexing? The Internet contains a lot of information. In 2002, the total number of web pages was estimated at 2.024 million; by 2005 this estimate had risen to 11.5 billion2. The ever- increasing amount of information found on the Internet also has disadvantages. In this jungle of information, it is getting harder and harder to see the wood for the trees ...
