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
A startup shared its trade secrets with a prospect that walked away and built a copycat. The NDA is what turned that into a $27 million judgment. Here is what to take from it.
Short answer: telling your customers to back up their data, in the contract, in the product, and in your documentation, is a cheap and genuinely effective legal defense. A Utah Supreme Court case shows that those customer data backup warnings, combined with a disclaimer of indirect damages, can get a
Short answer: the CarrierIQ takeaways for software vendors come down to two things. In a vendor-plus-platform stack, the party that decides what data to collect and whether to disclose it carries the privacy responsibility. And a too-broad indemnity can put the software vendor on the hook for the platform’s mistakes.
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: yes, an instant-message exchange can change a written contract. In one case, a vendor typed “NO LIMIT” and the other side replied “awesome,” and a federal court treated that as a binding modification, with no signature anywhere. IM contract modification is real, and it should change how your
What a study of 358 state trade secret cases shows about who takes your secrets, what they take, and the reasonable measures that keep the law on your side.
Short answer: the Oracle v. SAP case (a $1.3 billion jury verdict, later reduced to about $356.7 million) is a list of what not to do to a competitor: do not download more of their software than you are licensed for, do not ignore the terms of use on their
Short answer: when an employee leaves for a competitor, your ability to stop them from using what they know comes down almost entirely to what you did beforehand: marking and restricting your confidential information, running exit interviews, and using confidentiality agreements. Starwood v. Hilton shows the payoff of protecting trade
EULA enforceability has a fraud ceiling. A limitation of liability protects you against most claims, but not against fraud.
Quick answer: selling software to the government means living by your own disclosed pricing. Oracle learned that the hard way. On July 29, 2010 the Department of Justice sued it for overcharging federal agencies, and in October 2011 Oracle paid $199.5 million to settle, the largest False Claims Act recovery
Paying bloggers, influencers or affiliates? What the FTC Endorsement Guides require, who is liable for false claims, and what changed when the FTC revised the Guides in 2023.
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
The 2007 Leegin decision overturned 96 years of law, so software vendors can now influence what distributors and resellers charge, in certain situations and within antitrust limits.