From the monthly archives:

August 2003

Former Morgan Stanley Exec Should Have Purged His Blackberry Before Selling it on eBay

August 26, 2003

Wired magazine has a story about an (unidentified) former Morgan Stanley executive who, some time after leaving the firm, sold his Blackberry email pager on eBay. He didn’t seem to realize that he had left a great deal of confidential information on the pager. Some of that information conceivably could have gotten him in trouble [...]

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Doctors Have to Explain Joke Chart Notations on Witness Stand

August 25, 2003

The BBC’s Web site reports that many doctors are being more cautious about the notes they write in their patients’ medical records. Why is that? Because the doctors are starting to realize that someday, on the witness stand, they might have to explain their abbreviations and slang. Here’s a sampling: CTD: Circling the Drain [i.e., [...]

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NY Times: Some Dot-Com Refugees Learned Career-Enhancing Lessons

August 24, 2003

There’s a very interesting article in today’s New York Times (free subscription required). It explores some of the practical business lessons learned by former “corporate types” who defected to dot-com companies but then later returned, chastened, to the corporate world.

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Someone’s Parodying Your Slogan? You May Just Have to Get Used to It

August 24, 2003

A Fox News Network business strategy backfired last week when Fox was literally laughed out of court. Fox News tried to stop Al Franken, the alleged comedian and satirist, from using its trademarked phrase “fair and balanced” in the subtitle of his new book. Fox News got something of a black eye in the press [...]

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Backdating Contracts Leads to Prison Term — But It Can Be Entirely Proper

August 23, 2003

From the notes I took while getting ready to start this blog: A former public-company CFO was recently sentenced to three and a half years in federal prison. His company, Media Vision Technology, had inflated its reported revenues, in part by backdating sales contracts. Because of the inflated revenue reports, the company’s stock price went [...]

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Article: When Your Company Gets Hit With a Search Warrant

August 22, 2003

An article by some lawyers at Latham & Watkins (a big L.A. firm), posted on law.com (paid subscription required), lists the immediate actions the authors say you should take if The Law shows up with a search warrant. I found what appears to be another version of the same article in HTML and PDF formats [...]

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Insider Trader Convicted –And He Wasn’t Even an Insider

August 22, 2003

Today’s National Law Journal has a story that illustrates yet again how vigorously the SEC goes after people it thinks are trading on on “inside” information. This one involves a stock broker who was convicted by a jury of insider trading. The broker had learned that certain companies were about to be mentioned in the [...]

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Watch Out for State Spam Laws

August 21, 2003

There’s been a lot of debate lately about whether Congress should enact anti-spam legislation. No matter what side of the debate you’re on, if your company does email blasts, it’s important to remember that numerous states have anti-spam laws that conceivably might apply to your company. See http://www.spamlaws.com/state/summary.html for what appears to be a useful [...]

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Music Industry Could Go After Your Company for File-Swapping

August 19, 2003

You’ve probably heard about the controversy over the music industry’s battle against Internet song-swappers. In a recent letter to a U.S. senator, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America pledged that “RIAA is gathering evidence and preparing lawsuits only against individual computer users who are illegally distributing a substantial amount of copyrighted music.” [...]

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Deliberate Copying of Patented Technology Leads to Doubling of Damage Award

August 18, 2003

Last Friday, chipmaker Microtune announced that “On August 12, 2003, a federal judge awarded Microtune double its compensatory damages and all of its attorney’s fees against Broadcom Corporation in Microtune’s patent infringement lawsuit against Broadcom. Microtune estimates that the total judgment against Broadcom will be between $7 and $10 million.” See also CNET news story. [...]

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Cheating on Educational Discount Results in Damage Award, Mail-Fraud Conviction

August 15, 2003

Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that it had recovered some $1.8 million from a company that bought computers using an educational discount but then resold them to commercial customers. See story. (Perhaps of greater interest to corporate managers, the company’s owner reportedly pleaded guilty to related federal mail-fraud charges.) Lesson: Don’t lie about being eligible for discounts [...]

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