Irvine CA Business & Commercial Law Blog

Our readers may remember that it has been almost a year since Facebook went on the public stock market. Much has been written about whether this was a smart decision for the company to make. At the time, Facebook executives said that they were forced to go public by Securities and Exchange Commission rules governing the company’s shareholder count. Essentially, they said, because so many of Facebook’s employees were shareholders, the company had to be offered on the public market.

Whether or not that is true—this has been debated—the company’s conversion didn’t go completely smoothly. In fact, Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., the company that owns and operates the NASDAQ stock market, recently agreed to pay $10 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that the company mishandled Facebook’s initial public offering last year and thereby violated securities laws. 

The screenwriters of "G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra" recently filed a lawsuit in a California federal court over key story elements of the sequel to their movie. The two accuse the two studios and the production and distribution company involved with the film as well as toymaker Hasbro Inc. of breach of implied contract and copyright infringement and ask that revenue from the sequel be placed in a constructive trust. They also ask for $23 million in damages.

The first movie was released in 2009, and the defendants began to plan a follow-up. While no one inked a contract with the writing team for the sequel, the defendants did, according to the complaint, ask them to come up with ideas for the next movie in the franchise.

Few business communities know better than California's how technology has changed the way businesses are launched, managed and grown. If you remember the 1980s, you remember that the venture capitalist was king. This was the person who could identify talent and drive and make a business happen. A good idea is nothing but a good idea without financial backing, right?

In the decades that followed, venture capital would evolve as markets changed and the Internet took hold. The bursting of the tech bubble and the financial meltdown of 2008 would winnow the field of funders to a precious few. So, if Warren Buffet is busy, who ya gonna call?

The answer is, "Everyone." You are going to call everyone. The Internet has introduced The Crowd to the funding mix, and The Crowd (our term, capital letters intended) could spell extinction for venture capital firms that are not on a par with Warren Buffet.

Two book publishers that have been household names for decades have cleared a major hurdle on their way to the altar. The companies, Random House and Penguin, are not based in California, but the merger offers a good example of the types of issues that regulators look at when competitors look to combine forces.

Pearson is an international company that owns a number of famous imprints, including Penguin, Dorling Kindersley and Rough Guides. Bertelsmann describes itself as a global media conglomerate whose publishing arm is Random House. Regulators are naturally concerned that a combination of two large companies could impede competition in the marketplace, in this case the English-language publishing marketplace.