Most software vendors cap liability at fees paid. In a 2025 Eighth Circuit decision, that language barred an Omaha vendor from recovering a dollar of the $1,884,000 its enterprise customer walked away from. Here is what to change in your own agreement.
Short answer: the Oracle v. Google API case told software companies that APIs and even functional code can be copyrightable, that these disputes are intensely fact-specific, and that proving copyrightability is far easier than proving infringement. On May 9, 2014, the appellate court handed down its 69-page decision in the
Short answer: a SaaS confidentiality agreement (NDA) is not boilerplate. In the Techforward v. Best Buy case, a startup disclosed its trade secrets to a prospect that walked away and built a copycat, and the NDA is what turned that into a $27 million judgment. Use one, disclose in layers,
Short answer: three lessons from the HyperQuest case for an exclusive software license: use copyright language in the grant, do not retain so many rights that the “exclusive” license is not actually exclusive, and scope exclusivity to a territory, field of use, or medium. It is not often that a
Short answer: a statistical study of 358 trade secret cases shows the people who steal your secrets are almost always insiders, employees and business partners, and the one thing that decides whether you can stop them is whether you took “reasonable measures” to keep the information secret. For a software
Short answer: the FTC’s Endorsement Guides require that any paid or incentivized endorsement be disclosed, and that both the advertiser and the sponsored endorser can be liable for false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims and for failing to disclose the connection. If your software company pays bloggers, influencers, or affiliates to
Short answer: a well drafted EULA can end a lawsuit before it ever reaches a jury. In Hayes v. SpectorSoft Corporation (E.D. Tenn., November 3, 2009), the software maker won summary judgment and walked away from the case, and the way the end user agreement was written was a big
Short answer: Yes. The 2007 Leegin decision changed resale price maintenance software rules, overturning 96 years of law so that vendors can now influence what their distributors and resellers charge, in certain situations and within antitrust limits. Did you know the US Supreme Court changed software and SaaS distributor and
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