Author: Todd Smithline

Todd Smithline will be joining the Copyright Society of Northern California’s panel on “Copyright and Video Game Clones: Battle Royale of the Battles Royale” on Wednesday, December 5, 2018 at Kilpatrick and Townsend at Noon. More information here.

Many of you (or your clients) may be using MongoDB’s open source Community Server database somewhere in your operations or products. A recent announcement and license switch by MongoDB may affect you, so please review the following carefully. Old Reality: MongoDB under AGPL Historically, MongoDB was licensed under the … Read More

Does U.S. copyright law protect data or collections of data in databases? From reviewing fundamental copyright concepts to explaining core caselaw and offering hypotheticals, Guest Instructor Sonali Maitra provides a comprehensive answer in our newest Intellectual Property Course – Copyright in Databases. Try the Course for free until July… Read More

In the last few years, two U.S. district courts found video game mechanics or “rules” to be protectable by copyright. A more recent district court started down the same path before reversing itself. So, are the rules of a video game now copyrightable? It’s our newest Intellectual Property Course – … Read More

Perhaps the two toughest challenges Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors face in negotiating legal terms with their enterprise customers are (1) persuading the customer to use the vendor’s (as opposed to the customer’s terms) and (2) limiting the scope of the vendor’s liability upon a data breach. In … Read More