The significance of this particular case lies in its scope, however: apparently, the Chinese government mandated that Green Dam Youth Escort be included with all computers sold in the country, thereby forcing several prominent computer manufacturers, including Acer, Lenovo and Sony to include this software with its computers. According to the lawsuit, these manufacturers continued to market and sell their computers with the software even after they were made aware that the software was indeed pirated.

The lawsuit seeks more than $2 billion in damages, representing the amount of money Cybersitter would have earned had all of these users paid for their software.

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And therein lies the danger: the Copyright Act tends to favor (in terms of ownership) the one who actually created the work rather than the one who may have commissioned the work.

An article published in today’s New York Times, which notes the legal difficulties faced by Disney in its intended acquisition of Marvel Superheroes highlights these problems. In that case, Marvel’s ownership of the intellectual property rights to some of their superheroes has been challenged by the creators’ heirs, who claim that they are entitled to at least partial rights to selected characters. On the other hand, Sony apparently has undisputed movie rights to X-Men – forever.

Here’s the bottom line: if the creative business is worth anything significant (and if it isn’t, you’d better find one that is worth something),  it should be worth the modest investment necessary to prepare a written agreement that protects it.

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In a story that was published earlier today, a former Goldman Sachs vice president was arrested by the FBI based upon this employee’s alleged trade secret theft, more particularly, claims that he stole Goldman’s proprietary automated trading codes and uploaded them to a remotely located computer server.

According to the FBI, this employee downloaded and then transferred this proprietary information from his work computer after accepting a job offer at a different company, and then tried to conceal his actions by deleting the history of his actions from his desktop computer.

He is currently out on bail.

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The answer is relatively straightforward: since we believed that our position was especially strong under New York law, particularly given the language in the parties’ contract which gave sole and exclusive ownership of all intellectual property to the LLC, we simply showed the other side a draft of the papers we intended to file with the Court, and gave them a day to mull it over. In response, the other side’s attorney contacted me, and began open and frank discussions about how we could resolve our clients’ differences.

Consider two alternative scenarios:

Scenario #1: we could have merely threatened suit, but as you probably know, most threats of lawsuits are not taken very seriously, and therefore, I’ve found, usually is just a waste of time.

Scenario #2: : we could have immediately filed suit and sought injunctive relief from the Court, and thereby not only incurred thousands of dollars in Court filing and attorneys’ fees for both sides, but this would have almost certainly poisoned the atmosphere between the parties, and made the resolution of this particular issue far more costly and difficult than necessary.

The moral of the story is obvious: if you have a strong and well-reasoned position, it is definitely worthwhile to spend the time and money to prepare legal papers that reflect this, and to let the other side know it. Everyone knows that’s the heavy lifting, and that it takes virtually no effort to walk (or electronically file) those papers over to the court. Taking this important first step may just save you loads of time, aggravation and money.

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In its initial suit papers, Price Chopper claims that competitor Giant Market would have someone consistently and surreptitiously obtain copies of Price Choppers’ fliers that would announce their special sale items, and then undercut those specific sales items in their own advertisements, thereby depriving Price Choppers’ sales of any measurable impact, and giving Giant Market an unfair competitive advantage.

If true, the details set forth in Price Choppers’ complaint are indeed tantalizing, and if this case were ever to go to trial, would certainly have a great deal of jury appeal. For example, Price Chopper apparently has videotape of someone sneaking into the warehouse where their pre-publication fliers were stored, and then handing them to a Giant Market employee. And it appears that they have videotape of this occurring on several occasions.

One important tidbit to glean from this story is this: trade secret protection is not limited to proprietary technology and formulae; if your product marketing and pricing took time, effort, research and expense to develop, and is not readily available to the general public, it can be applied to that as well.

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Perhaps there’s a lesson for small businesses here: if you’ve been wronged by a much bigger company, don’t be afraid to stand up and protect your own turf. The other company’s deeper pockets do not – by any means – guarantee their victory.

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