Lawsuits

Erom the perspective of the Hcensee, a nonexclusive Hcense can be viewed as either a tax on the Hcensee s use of the patent or insurance against a patent infringement lawsuit. The Hcensor may want to make the technology broadly available to many parties in order to allow many parties to better exploit the technology. 

Anyone who violates the exclusive rights of a copyright owner is Hable for infringement in a lawsuit brought in federal court. There is a three-year statute of limitations on copyright infringement actions. 

It is also becoming necessaiy to insure against factors not normally considered until recently. These include possible lawsuits for polluting the environment. The cost of insurance increases the annual total expense Af . Thus, overinsurance can lead to an unnecessaiy decrease in profitability. The management of a company must ultimately judge its own risks. 

Check to see whether there are lawsuits, liens or judgements, which may be material to ABC Co. s interests, for example, product liability. 

There are at least a couple of conclusions we should draw from this example. If you are going to use safety alerts, even though your intentions are honorable, you may offend the injured party, the folks who took part in the investigation, and others. Be prepared for the fall-out. Also, keep in mind that you need to talk the talk and walk the walk. If an incident occurs and a corrective action is indicated, it behooves you to implement some level of corrective action. If you do not implement a sound corrective action, your company likely has an ineffective safety program to go along with a variety of outstanding lawsuits. 

It should be noted that non-compliance with safety rules would be held strongly against a laboratory should there be a lawsuit as a result of an accident. 

Each entry must be dated. This not only makes it easier to retrieve information in the future, but it makes it possible to reconstruct the chronology of work performed and correlate it with other activities. In an analytical laboratory where a customer alleged that a sodium thiosulfate reagent solution used in a titration had been improperly prepared, the date reference made it possible one year later to tie the sample in question to a specific batch of reagent. This careful record prevented a threatened lawsuit. 

Experiments may need to be viewed or presented 30 or 40 years after they are saved in a database. For instance, a lawyer may ask for experimental documents to defend a company in a product liability lawsuit. An important requirement here is that the document format should be independent of the application used to create the information, and that ideally the long-term archive format should not be based on a proprietary technology. This is a... 

Type III Costs Contingent costs Liabilities (e.g., clean up) Lawsuits Damage to resources Accidents... 

The Ethyl Corporation survived. EPA s phase-out and a series of lawsuits gave Ethyl five years before the full impact of tetraethyl lead s demise went into effect, and Ethyl used the time to diversify. During the 1980s, Ethyl ranked among the 200 largest corporations in America. The company no longer makes tetraethyl lead but contended, as late as February 2001, that research has failed to show that leaded gasoline poses a threat to human health or the environment. 

Mundy, Alicia. Weight-loss Wars A Spate of Deaths and a Raft of Lawsuits Over Diet Drugs. U.S. News World Report. February 15,1999, pp. 42—44. 

Suppose — Morris conceded in the best of humor — Farben did have file power to control Dynamit A.G. They could still have given the power to somebody else to use. "I think in this lawsuit we have wasted months on questions involving the power when the ultimate question is whether control was exercised."... 

The plaintiffs are not claiming that the patent is invalid. Rather, relying on theories implicit in Moore, they seek to use informed consent liability doctrines to ensure low-cost genetic screening and testing for Canavan disease. The lawsuit is based on what I will call a breach of covenant, not a breach of promise. The term breach of covenant is appropriate, despite the contractual view in some of the literature (Schuck, 1994), because the relationship between the parties was not contractual. Breach of promise implies that their agreement was contractual in nature, which creates doctrinal problems (Palmer, 1989). 

At first blush, the increased risk of harm suit against a drug manufacturer on a negligence theory that pharmacogenomics could have been used to determine the increased risks to a portion of the population appears to be a logical extension of the doctrinal shifts in liability law signaled by Moore. The likelihood of success of this particular lawsuit is in fact small because of the nature of existing medical liability doctrine in Pennsylvania. 

In addition to appealing through the UN s internal system, I have started a lawsuit against the building owner and the Canadian government. Two years on they are still challenging my right to sue,... 

Victims accepted ConAgra s payment of medical expenses, also agreed not to file lawsuits against the company... 

---