OVERVIEW
Bruce has participated in high stakes antitrust and patent and trade secret litigation including seminal cases over several decades.
Prior to joining the firm, Bruce was a partner at Hosie Rice LLP, The Furth Firm and Furth, Fahrner & Mason where he worked on antitrust, intellectual property and a variety of class action cases.
Clients
Bruce has represented a variety of companies in patent and trade secret litigation against an array of companies in the computer hardware and software businesses. In patent cases, he has represented both the patentee and accused infringer.
In the seventies, Bruce represented Kellogg Company in defending Federal Trade Commission charges of a “Shared Monopoly.” In the eighties, he represented the forerunner of Sprint, in antitrust actions against AT&T that paralleled the government action leading to the divestiture of the Bell System. In the nineties, he represented Billy Sullivan in his suit against the National Football League, to establish that its restriction on public ownership of teams violated the antitrust laws.
EDUCATION
University of Michigan, J.D., 1977
University of California at Berkeley, B.A. in Economics, 1974
BAR ADMISSIONS
California
PUBLICATIONS
EVENTS
PERSPECTIVES
Experience
Antitrust/Competition
- O’Bannon v. NCAA – Trial and appellate victory ending the NCAA’s agreement to deny student-athletes compensation for the use of their names, images, and likenesses. $40 million settlement reached with defendant Electronic Arts, Inc.
- Kellogg Company - Shared Monopoly Case – (Federal Trade Commission, D.D.C.) – FTC sought to establish the power to regulate highly concentrated industries under Section 5 of the FTC Act even where no collusion was proven. The FTC sought to break Kellogg into four companies based on the claim that it had shared a cereal monopoly with three other major cereal manufacturers through parallel, non-collusive activity. The FTC ultimately dismissed the case, after the administrative law judge ruled in Kellogg's favor on nearly every disputed issue of fact.
- Southern Pacific Comm. Co. v. AT&T – (U.S. District Court, District of Columbia; U.S. District Court, Northern District of California). Case alleging monopolization of long distance telephone service for the founder of Sprint service in a parallel case to the Department of Justice case that resulted in the breakup of the AT&T and the Bell System.
- Sullivan v. National Football League – (U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts; U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit). The former owner of the New England Patriots NFL Franchise challenged the league's policy forbidding public ownership of member clubs.
Intellectual Property
- Burst v. Microsoft – Alleging theft of trade secrets and breach of a non-disclosure agreement, as well as patent infringement and antitrust violations relating to streaming media.
- Privasys, Inc. v. MasterCard International Inc. – Alleging patent, trade secret and contract claims for a start-up technology firm developing a electronic payment card with a programmable magnetic stripe.
- Fullview v. Microsoft – Alleging infringement of 360º camera patents.
- Apple, Inc. v. Burst.com – Alleging patent infringement based on features of the iPod and iTunes products.
- BackWeb Technologies v. Microsoft – Alleging patent infringement for feature including in the Windows operating system.
- BackWeb Technologies v. Symantec, Sybase – Alleging patent infringement for products to automatically update software for enterprise customers.
- Implicit Networks v. Microsoft, HTC, Oracle, Sun, IBM, and others – Alleging patent infringement of application server, data processing and graphical user interface patents.
