- Yielding to pressure from state AGs, Craigslist will close “erotic services” section and replace with more highly moderated “adult services”; New York’s Cuomo is furious the site took unilateral action “in the middle of the night” rather than negotiating with him [NY Times, Hartford Courant, office of Connecticut AG (and longtime Overlawyered bete noire) Richard Blumenthal, Citizen Media Law, Above the Law] More: Ambrogi.
- Or they could absorb it and move on: “Bounty sues Brawny in paper towel tilt” [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
- Was granting patents relating to diagnostic analysis of human genes a mistake? Should courts undo it? Via constitutional law? Three different questions there [Ars Technica, Doc Gurley/San Francisco Chronicle]
- Canadian Human Rights Commission wants new ban on discrimination based on “social condition” (with concomitant penalties for hurtful speech premised on such condition) [Ken at Popehat]
- Luxury-goods makers’ suits against eBay over sale of counterfeits may be petering out [Frankel, American Lawyer]
- Today must be exotic-dancer-litigation day at Overlawyered: Trademark Trial and Appeal Board denies trademark protection for “Cuffs and Collar Mark” of Chippendales male exotic dancers [TTA Blog via Lowering the Bar, Ron Coleman, opinion in PDF]
- Allegations fail to stick: “Judge drops class-action suit on Teflon cookware” [AP/Des Moines Register, WSJ, American Lawyer; earlier here and here]
- Asbestos litigation ramps up against Detroit automakers after bankruptcy of many earlier defendants [five years ago on Overlawyered; up-to-the-minute report from Kirk Hartley]
Tagged as:
asbestos,
attorneys general,
autos,
bankruptcy,
Chrysler,
competition through litigation,
constitutional law,
Craigslist,
discrimination law,
eBay,
EEOC,
free speech in Canada,
patent law,
Richard Blumenthal,
strippers and exotic dancers,
trademarks
In Patent Application No. WO/2006/068863 (h/t The Browser), McDonald’s claims:
A method of making a sandwich composed of at least a bread component and sandwich garnish comprising: placing sandwich garnish material on a sandwich assembly tool, the sandwich assembly tool comprising a region for holding sandwich garnish material to be applied to a bread component of a sandwich, the member comprising at least one cavity; placing the bread component over and adjacent the cavity; and thereafter inverting the sandwich assembly tool and the bread component while the bread is adjacent and covering the cavity to cause the sandwich garnish to be deposited from the cavity to the bread component.
Tagged as:
McDonald's,
patent law,
patent quality
I’m very pleased to announce that this year, as last, the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal has named Overlawyered as one of its “100 best Web sites by lawyers, for lawyers”, and I’m not going to quibble about that wording, even though I’m not a lawyer nor (I believe) are the majority of the site’s readers. 
So much for the introductory pleasantries. Now for the main task at hand, which is to win.
Readers may remember that last year Overlawyered lost its run for first place in its category by only a handful of votes, perhaps because we were relatively shy and diffident about urging people to go vote for us. This year the ABA Journal has placed us among ten blogs in the “niche” category, where we face competition from some very high-quality blogs, but, with all due respect, not from any whose readership levels and outside recognition we think exceed ours.
If you go there to vote, you will notice that the popular patent-law blog Patently-O has evidently been whipping its supporters to go cast their votes immediately, and is, for the moment, far in the lead. The ABA Journal says that last time it checked, “Patently-O’s Facebook group had more than 800 members,” which is very nearly the number of votes that blog has received so far. The other possible reason for Patently-O’s huge overnight vote surge, of course, is that they’ve invented some sort of bot to stuff the ballot box by impersonating real voters. But that couldn’t be the right explanation. These are patent lawyers we’re talking about. No way could they invent something.
Anyway, go there and vote for Overlawyered and your favorites in the other categories.
Tagged as:
accolades,
on other blogs,
patent law
