| Law of Agency, Apparant or Ostensible Authority - seems the Principal "allowed"
Agents to sell scanners with this IP (same as SCO allowed Linux IP to be used
for a long time without action to control "any or all agents")...
When will
US courts wake up that all products have IP and that if a consumer buys
anything, a car, scanner, refrigerator, it has new parts, many are computer
parts, with software... so, the consumer is the innocent 3rd party, buys and
should be not harmed by a "principal" that allows Apparent or Ostensible Agents
to represent them when they sell a product with the "claimed IP".
Nothing
new here. Law of Agency should prevail as it has for hundreds of year, in many
countries around the world.
If this does not prevail, then commerce will
cease, as consumers will not buy anything (for fear of a lawsuit from a dubious
IP holder). US Court System needs to WAKE UP.
There is nothing magicial
about computers.
AND, there certainly, by a long history of case law, is
nothing new about the LAW OF AGENCY (studied in Law School
101).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_authority
In the
United States and in the United Kingdom, Apparent authority (also called
"ostensible authority") relates to the doctrines of the law of agency. It is
relevant particularly in corporate law and constitutional law. Apparent
authority refers to a situation where a reasonable person would understand that
an agent had authority to act. This means a principal is bound by the agent's
actions, even though the agent had no actual authority, whether express or
implied. It raises an estoppel because the third party is given an
assurance, which he relies on and would be inequitable for the principal to deny
the authority given. Apparent authority can legally be found, even though
actually authority has not been given.[1]
There must be some act or some
knowing omission on the part of the principal - if the agent alone acts to give
the third party this false impression, then the principal is not bound.[2]
However, the principal will be bound if the agent so acts in the presence of the
principal, and the principal stands silently and says nothing to dissuade the
third party from believing that the agent has the authority to bind the
principal. Apparent authority can also occur where a principal terminates the
authority of an agent, but does not inform third parties of this termination.
This is called lingering apparent authority. Business owners can avoid being
liable by giving public notice of the termination of authority, and by
contacting any individual third parties who would have had reason to know of
such authority.
In relation to companies, the apparent authority of
directors, officers and agents of the company is normally referred to as
"ostensible authority." Apparent authority issues also arise in the Fourth
Amendment context, concerning who has authority to consent to a
search.[3]
The doctrine of estoppel comes into play here to prevent a
principal from asserting to a third party that the agent has authority when in
fact he does not, and then subsequently the principal seeks to renege on an
agreement on the basis that the agent never had actual authority.
In law,
apparent authority refers to the authority of an agent as it appears to
others,[4] and it can operate both to enlarge actual authority and to create
authority where no actual authority exists.[5] The law relating to companies and
to ostensible authority are in reality only a sub-set of the rules relating to
apparent authority and the law of agency generally, but because of the
prevalence of the issue in relation to corporate law (companies, being
artificial persons, are only ever able to act at all through their human
agents), it has developed its own specific body of case law. However, some
jurisdictions use the terms interchangeably.
Text is available under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See
Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
GOOGLE FOR
MORE....
Goodbye Submarine IP against consumers...
That is, if the court
can finally see the forest thru the trees.
Too bad no billable hours in
seeing clearly that there is no case.
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