Trade Secrets Archives - Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.

Supreme Court Fights Abuses of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2022-06-28T15:03:21-04:00June 29th, 2021|Contracts, Intellectual Property, Privacy, Trade Secrets|

For 35 years, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) has been a powerful weapon in law enforcement's arsenal against computer hackers. Essentially, it criminalized the standard definition of hacking - accessing information on a computer, where the user lacks authorization to do so. But what happens when someone is authorized to access the information, but then misuses the information? For example, a police officer who accepted a bribe and then accessed a vehicle database for non-law-enforcement purposes? This was the situation in Van Buren v. United States, which was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 3, 2021. [...Read More...]

Cease and Desist Letters – What Would Bill Murray Do?

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2020-09-30T10:49:03-04:00September 29th, 2020|Contracts, Copyright, Intellectual Property, Patent, Trade Secrets, Trademark|

In the world of intellectual property, the "Cease and Desist" letter is king. These are letters from attorneys for the owner of a work or invention, sent to an alleged infringer of the owner's intellectual property rights. The letters cite the legal basis for their claim, may threaten doom, destruction, and huge financial damages, and are often quite stern. Overly aggressive cease and desist letters can backfire. The Lumen Database website (originally chillingeffects.org) began as a project to track overzealous use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's enforcement mechanisms, spotlighting the most egregious examples of cease and desist letters. Such [...Read More...]

Tales of unclean hands and stolen trade secrets

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2021-08-31T17:58:02-04:00November 1st, 2019|Intellectual Property, Trade Secrets|

How far can businesses go to protect their intellectual property, and what is the minimum that they need to do to protect it? Two cases highlight the boundaries of trade secret law. This past February, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals held that the trade secret owner's own lack of trade secret policies did not prevent it from prevailing in trade secrets litigation against a former employee. In Scherer Design Group v. Ahead Engineering LLC, there was a question as to whether the employer secretly monitored the employee's Facebook Messenger conversations, or whether the employee had just coincidentally not logged [...Read More...]