TechBankruptcy

Back in August, the Judicial Conference for the United States Courts released for comments proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure, including revisions to FRBP 5005 that will effectively limit the types of electronic signatures usable on court pleadings.

Currently, the relevant part of FRBP 5005 reads:

"High up in the pristine White Mountains of Northern Arizona, is a place where...truth and honesty are hard to find, if at all.." [Fair use] So starts Lynnell Levingston's 2008 memoir of politics in Springerville, Arizona. In 2009, Livingston sued a host of defendants asserting, among other things, that one of them violated her copyright in the book by plagiarizing an excerpt from the book in a police incident report.

The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit recently released its decision in the ongoing debate over whether the Qimonda AG bankruptcy estate gets to ruin the world's semiconductor industry. For those unfamiliar with the complex, but important, Qimonda decisions, I'll refer you to California bankruptcy attorney Robert L.

In the bankruptcy world, matching sellers of distressed assets with potential buyers has always caused difficulties - usually resulting in reduced sale prices and relative bargains. For large capital assets - like the Polaroid patent portfolio, or Chrysler, investment bankers satisfy the market gap.

You would think that air should be free, but of course air, or at least the right to send signals through it, has not been free for some time. The FCC controls the right to use air to transmit information, divvying the air up into all sorts of frequencies and selling them off to the highest bidder. From a bankruptcy perspective, the right to use the air is well understood as an asset, and can be transferred or even sold under the right conditions.