November 24, 2009 by thomason.

A recently-filed copyright case pleads that one of defendant’s employees called and reported that the single-user license for a subscription was being exceeded.  The plaintiff in Energy Intelligence Partners v. Fitch, publishes reports on the oil & gas markets.  Fitch, or someone there, subscribed to the reports.  The complaint, recently filed in Chicago, but earlier-filed in NYC, pleads the following:

…Plaintiff received a telephone call from an individual working in Defendant’s office informing Plaintiff of past, current and ongoing infringement of some of Plaintiff’s publications.

Ouch!  This sort of whistleblowing in copyright cases is not uncommon where single-user software is being used on multiple machines.  Seeing it pleaded in a case involving published and printed material suggests some interesting proof problems.  The complaint attaches specimens and registrations, but not a copy of the alleged single-user license.  Unless the reports were being copied wholesale and re-distributed, then what would prove infringment?  Whatever else is disovered, deposing the mystery telephone reporter should be interesting.

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November 24, 2009 by thomason.

Your USPTO needs copy paper, and it solicits bids in a notice in FedBizOpps.  But, it is not a lowest, when-opened bid solicitation.  Rather, the Commerce Dept. uses a reverse auction method, as stated in the solicitation:                                            ”United States Patent and Trademark Office intends to conduct an online competitive reverse auction to be facilitated by the third-party reverse auction provider, [which] has developed an online, anonymous, browser based application to conduct the reverse auction. An Offeror may submit a series of pricing bids, which descend in price during the specified period of time for the aforementioned reverse auction. The United States Patent and Trademark Office is taking this action in an effort to improve both vendor access and awareness of requests and the agency’s ability to gather multiple, competed, real-time bids.”                                             With its ‘other hand’ the USPTO has been issuing patents on methods for conducting online competitive reverse auctios, such as USP 7,376,593 or 7,571,131 or 7,412,412.  Perhaps the copy paper is needed for office actions on these sorts of business methods.

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