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SPSS Inc. v. Nie, No. 08 C 66 (N.D. Ill.) (Darrah, Jr.).

The parties recently settled this trademark dispute shortly before trial.  For more on the parties’ history and the settlement, click here for Chicago Tribune reporter and Chicago Law blogger Ameet Sachdev’s reporting on the case in the Tribune, and click here for more coverage of the case in the Blog’s archives.

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Eric Goldman’s blog

[Post by Venkat]

The government is prosecuting a couple of Bear Stearns hedge fund managers for securities fraud and related offenses. I came across a story that prosecutors obtained evidence from the gmail account of one of the defendants which prosecutors recently disclosed. (”E-Mails Seen as a Flash Point in Bear Stearns Fund Managers’ Fraud Trial“) In some ways I think this illustrates one of the pitfalls of using a service such as gmail. Gmail stores your data forever - or at least doesn’t give you a ton of control over when it is deleted - so it’s much easier for prosecutors to obtain this evidence. If you stored the data on your own servers, you may be able to get by with deleting the data pursuant to a regular document retention/destruction policy. And more importantly, there’s a much higher likelihood of you knowing when the data has been or is about to be seized. (It’s more difficult to obtain email from a service provider in a civil case.)

Interestingly, the defendant whose email was disclosed by the government as evidence in the Bear Stearns case prevailed in a motion to suppress the gmail evidence. (US v. Cioffi, et al., Case No. 08-CR-415 (FB) (E.D.N.Y.; Oct. 26, 2009).) (Access a copy of the ruling at Scribd [pdf] here; see the WSJ story here (”In Setback for Bear Stearns Case, Judge Suppresses Email“).)

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The ease with which information can be spread through the Internet has exacerbated tensions among those who pay for, conduct, and publish scientific research. Many journals still require subscription or per-article payments for access to the research they publish, which often leaves the public, who funds a significant percentage of the research, on the wrong side of a pay wall. So far, however, there’s been little evidence that the public has been interested enough in research to engage in the sort of widespread file-sharing that plague other content industries. But a new study suggests that may just be because nobody’s looked very carefully.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a big fan of naming and shaming. When it launched its patent-busting project a few years back, the activist group put up a “Wanted by EFF marshals” poster; eight of the ten patents on the list have already been narrowed, invalidated, or reexamined.

So when it wanted to highlight the overzealous use of DMCA takedown notices on the Web, the EFF went a similar route with its new “Takedown Hall of Shame.”

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