I really dislike non-disclosure agreements, but NDAs are a fact of life in the IT industry. Even folks like me that actively avoid NDAs sometimes have to sign the paperwork to gain access to people or information, and employers regularly require such an agreement as a condition of employment. I suspect most folks try to respect and uphold the agreements they do sign, but this doesn't stop slip-ups. So let me take a few minutes of your time to pass along my top five tips to avoid violating NDAs! 1 - Avoid signing NDAs The best way to avoid breaking an NDA is simply not to agree to one in the first place. Asking for a non-disclosure agreement is part of standard practice in business, but it's not always necessary. Politely ask if the NDA i

The big news of the morning is that Facebook was granted a patent (7,669,123) on their News Feed. Few people, though, have really analyzed what is covered by this patent.  To highlight the ridiculousness that I believe this patent to be (because we all know that Facebook was not the first to do this, nor should this patent have ever been approved), I’d like to go down the list and talk a bit about what it is they’re trying to say they came up with. As the patent, what is claimed to be original Facebook IP, and therefore not obviously implemented anywhere else is: “A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment…” Yes. No one has a news feed like this. Except they do.  Rather than list every feed o

Update: Just after I hit publish Betanews put out yet another flawed post on a Google monopoly, this time on search.  I understand it’s about grabbing pageviews or whatnot, but a quick looksee at a dictionary would really help out when you start bandying about terms you don’t understand. It seems about once a year, I have to take some pundit behind the woodshed and school them on the definition of “monopoly” as it relates to Google’s business in advertising or search.  The first time I virtually met my buddy Steven Hodson was in response to a post he had done on Google’s “monopoly” on search. In it, he contended that Google was dangerously close to monopoly, if not already there, in the search market: For years; right

Google today said that it had received a notice from the European Commission that it had received complaints from three European companies about its business practices. Julia Holtz, Senior Competition Counsel at Google, wrote: Google Public Policy Blog: Committed to competing fairly Foundem - a member of an organisation called ICOMPwhich is funded partly by Microsoft - arguesthat our algorithms demote their site in our results because they are a vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google. ejustice.fr's complaint seems to echo these concerns. ...Regarding Ciao!, they were a long-time AdSense partner of Google's, with whom we always had a good relationship. However, after Microsoft acquired Ciao! in 2008 (renaming

Each year at CES, queues for taxis, coffee, and lunch always seem to take a month, particularly during the first two days of the show. Pretend it’s still CES…it’s been a long month.  As Editor Rizzn says, you don’t read us for quick snippets, you read us for analysis.  Maybe even insight, at least occasionally. When we left off four weeks ago, I’d just broken the news that magicJack was stirring up the telecom market once again, with the announcement of their forthcoming femtocell, which I (and now most others) call the “femtojack”.  After Dan’s team published their release on the femtojack, I was inundated with a ton of technical and regulatory questions.  I’m not going to attempt to answer them here

[Editor’s Note: Glenn brought to our attention last month a Supreme Court first regarding social media. We now have more judicial news regarding social media in the courts. –mrh] Well, it took a little bit of time, but the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has issued revised jury instructions, recommended for all federal cases, updated for today’s social media age. It’s “old wine in new bottles” — i.e., traditional rules adapted to new social networking communications — which illustrates that some things really should not (and do not) change at all where social media are concerned. Federal Court Officials Issue Guidance on Jury Use of Blackberries, iPhones, Twitter, LinkedIn Etc. [TechLaw]. You may not communic

It is hard to understand how “conference reports” from Congress on pending legislation can have fallen from 200 per year to just 11 over the past three decades. Secret Bill Writing On the Rise [Washington Post]. But it indicates, sadly, that laws in America are increasingly being made in back rooms, not the public forums our system of politics has traditionally used. That may be mere window-dressing, but it is IMPORTANT symbolically, in my view. In a letter to C-SPAN Chairman Brian Lamb, House Republican leader John Boehner wrote, “Unfortunately, the president, Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader (Harry) Reid now intend to shut out the American people at the most critical hour by skipping a bipartisan conference com

There has been much discussion recently about the movie industry’s efforts to maintain its product release “windows,” so that theatrical performances precede pay-per-view, followed by DVD sales, pay TV (HBO, etc.) and finally advertiser-supported television. My view is that these folks are shooting themselves in the foot, because DVD sales actually declined in 2009 for the first time. The lesson is not that DVDs are being sold OR rented “too early,” rather that technological convergence is making more and more options available to consumers, so building a library of physical DVDs is relatively unimportant, and certainly no longer a priority. But as usual — see their opposition to the VCR — Hollywood has this all backwards. A

The US Federal Trade Commission today finally issued a statement regarding their ongoing investigation of alleged anticompetitive practices over at Intel, on the claim that they are stifling innovation: The Federal Trade Commission today sued Intel Corp., the world’s leading computer chip maker, charging that the company has illegally used its dominant market position for a decade to stifle competition and strengthen its monopoly. …the FTC alleges that Intel has waged a systematic campaign to shut out rivals’ competing microchips by cutting off their access to the marketplace. In the process, Intel deprived consumers of choice and innovation in the microchips that comprise the computers’ central processing unit, or CPU. Thes

I was honored this week to become the 50th lawyer interviewed via Twitter by Lance Godard of 22 Tweets. The edited transcript is below – for the unedited transcript, see my personal blog. Today we’re tweeting with @glennm, biglaw antitrust / telecom / technology litigator turned Web 2.0 legal guru. Glen, thank you for joining us today on Twitter. Tell us: who is Glenn Manishin? Good morning. Thanks for inviting me. I’m a technology attorney, focused on company policy, intellectual property and complex litigation. I help to shape the rules for new technologies, like social media. Tell us about your law practice. My practice has broadened over the years as technology has developed, from telecom to software an