Monday, February 27, 2006

Morgan Stanley offers $15m to make up for missing emails

Investment bank Morgan Stanley has offered to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) $15m to settle an investigation by the regulator into an alleged failure by the firm to produce email evidence during a legal dispute.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Metatags and Trademark Infringement

Any business with an Internet presence wants to increase its website traffic. And one of the best ways to do this is to rely on something web surfers never see -- a bit of HTML coding called a "metatag" that describes the content of a website. Search engines use these small pieces of hidden coding to index web pages according to content so web surfers can be directed to web pages with the content they request. Where things can get problematic, though, is when businesses manipulate hidden metatags to draw more eyes to their websites. One way to do this, for instance, is to use the trademark of a competitor in your metatags to attract that competitor’s customers. But that clever tactic just ran into a roadblock, when a federal court in Ohio ruled that the use of a competitor's mark in metatags to pull consumers to a website constitutes trademark infringement, even if consumers eventually realized that the site was not that of the competitor. This decision could have major -- and negative -- ramifications for Google and other search engines that allow companies to use competitors' marks as keyword search terms, so that their own paid ads (and links) are displayed when someone searches for the competitor's name

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

How to avoid Open Source Licensing pitfalls

Open Source software can offer users greatcommercial advantages when care is taken to address the intellectual property issues andminimise contractual risks.

Open source has long held an imprtant place in fulfilling