Christopher Rucinski is a managing director at Elysium Digital, specializing in computer science and intellectual property litigation, including patent, trade secret, copyright, and trademark cases. He has served as an expert witness in federal court (both deposition and trial testimony) and has served as a consulting expert on more than 100 other engagements. He has also assisted government agencies in …
Christian Hicks co-founded Elysium Digital in 1997 and served as its president until Elysium's acquisition by Stroz Friedberg in 2015. Christian has stepped back from full time employment with Elysium and now acts as an independent consultant. Christian has advised clients on more than 150 matters relating to intellectual property and computer forensics, including landmark cases such as U.S. v. …
Geoff A. Cohen, Ph.D. specializes in computer science and intellectual property litigation, including patent, trade secret, and copyright cases. He has extensive experience investigating the development and design of software systems, identifying and assessing evidence of infringement, and researching and evaluating prior art. He has served as a consulting and testifying expert witness in cases in state court, federal court, …
Michael Fenn is a vice president at Elysium Digital, specializing in intellectual property litigation and other technology-focused disputes. Mike has seven years of industry experience working as an electrical, systems, and software engineer and more than a decade of experience advising both technology companies and law firms in patent, trade secret, copyright, and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) matters. He …
Martin Kemp is a vice president at Elysium Digital, specializing in intellectual property litigation and protection. Martin has over two decades of experience designing computer software and electronic devices, and more than 18 years of experience serving as a consultant to law firms, in-house counsel, and government clients in patent, trade secret, copyright, and technology analysis cases. He has advised …
Daniel W. Steinbrook is a vice president specializing in intellectual property litigation at Elysium Digital.
Edward Felten, Ph.D. is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He also is the founding Director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Professor Felten provides his extensive experience as an expert to Elysium's clients. He has been deposed, has submitted expert reports and declarations, and has testified on behalf of clients …
Bill Rosenblatt is a leading consultant on digital media technology and its relation to intellectual property. He has acted as a litigation expert in numerous copyright, patent, and antitrust matters in federal court and before the Copyright Royalty Board. He has testified before the National Academies and Federal Trade Commission, and he has consulted to the U.S. Copyright Office and …
Michael J. Freedman is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. His research broadly focuses on distributed systems, networking, and security.
J. Alex Halderman is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, and continues to hold an appointment as a Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Professor Halderman has served as a technical expert in federal court, submitted multiple expert reports, and worked as a technical consultant and analyst on …
Professor David Dobkin joined the Princeton University faculty in 1981, and has served as Chair of the Computer Science Department (1994-2003) and as the Dean of the Faculty (2003-2014). In 1998, David was the first faculty member named to the Phillip Goldman '86 Professorship in Computer Science, a professorship created through a gift from David's former student and WebTV Networks …
Donald S. Crankshaw, Ph.D. is a director at Elysium Digital, specializing in intellectual property litigation. Donald has been part of the company for more than a decade and has worked on diverse projects involving semiconductor fabrication, electrical circuit design, data analysis, code comparison, software copyright, and prior art search. In the course of his work, Donald has served as an …
Michael D. Edge is a director at Elysium Digital, specializing in data analytics and technology-based intellectual property litigation including patent, trade secret, and copyright cases. He has consulted on more than 60 matters in a wide variety of technical fields, has submitted federal court declarations, and has submitted expert reports and served as a testifying expert in federal court and …
Radostin A. Pachamanov, Ph.D. is a director at Elysium Digital, specializing in intellectual property litigation, including patent, trade secret, and copyright cases. He has consulted on a diverse set of matters, involving a large variety of software and hardware technologies. His work has encompassed infringement analysis, invalidity charting, claim construction, prior art searching, software code analysis in languages like Assembly, …
Alisa Kroutikova is a director specializing in intellectual property at Elysium Digital. She has worked on over 30 matters, specializing in patent litigation, trade secrets, and software copyright.
Jake Cohen is a manager specializing in intellectual property litigation at Elysium Digital.
Gordon has over three decades of technical experience in the software industry. Prior to joining Elysium Digital, he designed communication systems, radar systems, speech recognition software, and web site security software.
Dr. Charlie Kohl is a manager specializing in intellectual property litigation at Elysium Digital. Charlie's work has included an expert report on misappropriation of trade secrets; infringement analysis of software products in the iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows operating systems; damages analysis; design of workarounds for potential infringement; and forensic analysis and reporting. Charlie's doctoral research involved rule-based systems for …
Daniel Dwoskin is a manager specializing in intellectual property litigation at Elysium Digital. Daniel has consulted as a technical expert on over 25 unique matters, during which he has developed skills analyzing source code; processing, overseeing, and performing analyses of large datasets; developing extensive custom toolsets; drafting expert reports and other court documents; and helping prepare for depositions.
Giulio Amodeo is a manager at Elysium Digital, specializing in intellectual property litigation.
Grant Schowalter is a consultant specializing in intellectual property litigation at Elysium Digital.
Bret Harsham is a consultant specializing in intellectual property matters at Elysium Digital.
Levi Winkle is a consultant specializing in intellectual property litigation at Elysium Digital.
Noelle Tuchscherer is a litigation analyst at Elysium Digital's Intellectual Property Solutions.
Dakota Richardson is a consultant specializing in intellectual property litigation at Elysium Digital.
Madeleine Weber is a consultant on the intellectual property litigation team at Elysium Digital.
Emily Crawford is a consultant specializing in intellectual property litigation at Elysium Digital.
Elysium Digital has in-house testifiers with a host of experience and expertise. We also have access to a developed network of outside testifiers.
Elysium provides consulting services and expert testimony regarding the software and technology underlying trade secret misappropriation, copyright infringement, patent infringement, and other intellectual property matters.
Elysium Digital has provided expert advice and analysis to clients for years to help them create or refine their IP strategies.
In 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) brought an antitrust case against Microsoft alleging that, by bundling its Windows 98 operating system (OS) with its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser, Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive conduct designed to maintain its OS monopoly and increase its web browser market.
In one of the largest software code copyright and trade secret investigations on record, Elysium and the expert witnesses it supported performed crucial and innovative analyses to support the winning arguments of infringement and misappropriation.
In January of 2010, investment management firm Trust Company of the West ("TCW") brought a case against some of its former employees. TCW alleged that the former employees had engaged in improper copying of software and were using the code at their new firm, DoubleLine Capital LP ("DoubleLine"). TCW engaged Elysium to assist with technical analysis for the case. Following …
Elysium assisted Shurtape in its trademark claim against 3M by tracing online posts demonstrating consumer confusion over similar-sounding trademarks from Shurtape and 3M. Elysium consultants found evidence supporting the admissibility of these otherwise anonymous Internet posts by showing that the posts were made by actual consumers with no other business relationship to the parties. Our work involved forensically preserving online …
What can you do when artificial intelligence (A.I.) lies about you? This exact question was asked recently in a New York Times article of the same name. In the piece, a Dutch politician describes how an A.I. chatbot, BlenderBot, had correctly described her political background but had also incorrectly described her as a terrorist. Her story is not unique. An …
United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell recently ruled that artwork that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence (A.I.) does not qualify for copyright protection, noting that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright [1].”
With the rise of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence assistants, many people have begun to wonder if their job may one day be taken over by A.I. As a computer engineer, I told myself that A.I. wouldn’t take my job because, well, someone has to make the A.I., right? Sure, they can write cover letters and book reports, but it’s …
When most people see the 2021 action-adventure/comedy film Free Guy, they probably enjoy watching an adorably innocent character in an absurdly violent video game world. Or perhaps they empathize with an AI grappling with questions of reality and the meaning of his own existence. But as for me, I see a software intellectual property investigation that could have gone much …
Elysium assisted counsel from Lawyers for Civil Rights in a pro bono capacity.
If you have ever acquired a vintage baseball card, you might have experienced the feeling brought on by exclusive ownership of something rare. Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, combine limited supply with ownership verification features to evoke this feeling.
When given a collection of source code to analyze, what are the advantages of reading it versus running it?
Not so many years ago, sitting down at a computer meant waiting several minutes for it to start. By contrast, our phones are nearly always on, typically only needing to be restarted when the battery runs out or to install an occasional system update. The boot process, the process by which a digital device transforms from a cold piece of …
We’ve spent the last two posts describing the most basic levels of system software. Most recently, we considered how a series of boot loaders create and enforce a chain of trust. Consumer devices didn’t include this feature in the past. A computer processor can happily execute whatever code is present in memory, and few will stop to check for a …
During discovery, litigants request and receive information and documents from each other that are relevant to the case so that both sides can learn the facts and develop their legal strategies around them. As technical experts, we often help clients draft such requests for technical documentation as well as source code for computer programs. The particular wording of such source …
In our increasingly digital age, databases sit behind the scenes retaining and managing our digital data—whether financial records, text messages, a company sales list, or the “trivial” statistics of fantasy football—nearly everywhere.
In our previous post, we described how the early moments of smartphone power-on involve a set of boot loaders sequentially handing off control after making incremental progress. These increasingly complex programs essentially run a relay race to bring a computer or smartphone into a usable state.
In late 2018, Apple acquired three issued patents and five patent applications from the defunct home security camera startup Lighthouse AI (the "Lighthouse portfolio").
Elysium has been proud to help organize the annual Trade Secret Law Summit for the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), to be held next week (December 4 and 5, 2014) at Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
The Supreme Court’s January ruling in Hana Financial, Inc. v. Hana Bank puts the issue of trademark tacking in the jury’s hands, but the underlying question of when the mark was first used still remains.
When a company becomes aware that it may be accused of patent infringement, the instinct for in-house counsel is to engage the company’s engineering staff to perform an analysis of the technologies and patents involved. After all, the reasoning goes, the company’s own engineers have intimate understanding of the technology and are already on the payroll. Later, during litigation, the …
Anyone who ordered a computer from Gateway or Dell in the 1990s probably remembers choosing software for the system while placing the order, then having their computer arrive days or weeks later with the software they selected. Today, customers routinely purchase PCs with fewer options, and with software on the devices chosen and pre-installed by the manufacturer. Although the practice …
Geoff Cohen, one of Elysium's testifying experts, has been tracking the Goodlatte bill (the "Innovation Act") and the associated changes that it could bring to the patent litigation world. Geoff provided an interview to Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld who quoted Geoff in this article about the bill.
Last week, FBI Special Agent Carmine Nigro gave a fascinating talk at Elysium on economic espionage and intellectual property theft. Although the presentation covered a broad range of threats and mitigation strategies, one theme was the danger posed by an organization’s own employees. Employers inherently place some degree of trust in their employees, and abuse of that trust may be …
Elysium's Geoff Cohen, a computer science expert, has kept a close eye on legislative and judicial activity related to patent law. Dr. Cohen notes the potential dramatic impact of the Supreme Court decision on Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank in determining the patentability of computer software.
What should you, as a lawyer, do to help your clients prepare in advance for litigation involving electronic evidence? Elysium's Cristina Lenares Antalik provides critical, yet relatively simple, steps that lawyers can take to help their clients avoid some of the pitfalls of being caught off-guard. Antalik notes that "Reasonable forethought and planning can reduce risk, save substantial cost, and …
Elysium analyzed a snapshot of the U.S. patents and patent applications that made up the Rockstar portfolio as of February 21, 2014. The report focuses on the U.S. patents and applications, and includes analysis of current assignments of patent and application assets, areas of technology covered, and timing of patent expiration dates. Elysium will update this report with additional analysis …
Every week, the USPTO publishes more than 5,000 applications for new patents. Some will be abandoned or languish in examination for years, but many others will issue within two years as patents covering a broad range of activity. And, of course, once patents issue from the USPTO, they can only be invalidated by overcoming a clear and convincing standard of …
Today, Elysium launched Legion, a unique patent analysis tool. As reported by Bloomberg, Legion is designed to enhance and improve collaboration, understanding, and effectiveness within legal teams involved in patent review work.
We are happy to introduce Elysium CLASSIFY™ as the latest service launched in response to clients expressed needs. Elysium CLASSIFY™ is an extension of Elysium’s proven eDiscovery capabilities that have been tested by some of the world’s most sophisticated legal teams for more than a decade. Our new service was recently covered by LTN's Sean Doherty.
Early in the morning of November 7, a serious fire damaged the San Francisco facility and equipment used by the Internet Archive. IA is a non-profit technical organization that, among its many projects, built and maintains the "Wayback Machine" – a digital archive of more than 150 billion live captures of Web pages dating in some cases back to 1996. …
Many vendors have entered the computer forensics market to fulfill the needs of law firms, law enforcement agencies, and businesses. The challenge many organizations now face is finding a forensic analyst who can quickly and clearly explain technical topics to non-experts, such as lawyers and juries.
Earlier this week, Google agreed to settle patent litigation with Rockstar, the consortium backed by Apple, Microsoft and other large tech companies.
When Ken Liu isn't consulting on areas of computer science such as software development and mobile devices, he's busy writing award-winning science fiction. His recently published first novel, The Grace of Kings, was featured yesterday on The ARTery, the arts and culture website connected with Boston's 90.9 WBUR.
"With Republicans and Democrats announcing their intentions to run for president, it’s a reminder that the 2016 election cycle is just around the corner," states Joe Calandrino in a recent article on electionLine.org. He opines, "As the races and rhetoric heat up, questions will be raised about how officials can conduct a massive, complicated, high-stakes, and technology-centric election process without …
Elysium expert Joseph Calandrino noted to CNET that "[o]ne possible goal of this attack is to facilitate future targeted attacks. The type of data that was stolen from the hospital system is often used to verify a person's identify. The exposure of this data creates a risk that the hackers could leverage it to gain access to other accounts and …
Earlier this week, advice website Lifehacker featured Elysium digital forensics expert Jason Eaddy in a live question-and-answer session. During the forum, Jason fielded Lifehacker community members' questions about topics such as forensic training, encrypted data, and wireless devices. Jason also described the types of forensics matters Elysium handles, noting that the company's largest forensics-related case to date involved "300+ devices" …
An article recently published in New England In-House explores the impact of the "flurry of patent and other intellectual property decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court." Writer Brandon Gee spoke with Elysium testifying expert Geoff A. Cohen, along with other observers in the field, to gain insight into how patent litigation could be affected by decisions such as Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, Nautilus …
On Wednesday, November 12, Elysium’s founding witness Ed Felten presented his thoughts on preserving privacy in the counterterrorism age at a public meeting of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). The PCLOB is “an independent, bipartisan agency within the executive branch” charged with monitoring the government’s actions and policies, with an eye towards balancing privacy and civil liberties …
"As companies and users store and manipulate more data in the cloud, opportunities increase for outgoing employees to misappropriate work products," writes Elysium co-founder and president Christian B. Hicks in a recent article discussing the importance of safeguarding proprietary data during employee exit procedures.
Killer robots have been a part of the popular imagination for much of the past half century: see, for example, Robocop, the Terminator films, and both iterations of the Battlestar Galactica television series. But just how likely is the prospect of a killer robot in real life? An article written by Matt Lichtfuss and recently published on HackSurfer suggests that such …
We are excited to announce that Elysium will relocate to Boston's Financial District in October 2012. We will occupy the 11th floor of 2 Oliver Street, an office tower located one block from Post Office Square and in close proximity to many of our Boston-based clients.
We are excited to announce that Elysium has relocated to Boston's Financial District as of Monday, October 15th. We now occupy the 11th floor of 2 Oliver Street, an office tower located one block from Post Office Square and in close proximity to many of our Boston-based clients.
We are excited to announce that Elysium has formed a partnership with Chipworks, a leader in reverse engineering and patent infringement analysis of semiconductors and electronic systems. We expect that Elysium's customers will benefit from Chipworks' expertise and facilities.
Elysium Digital was featured this morning on “Good Morning America” in a story about cell phone data privacy and security. The segment warned consumers that hackers can easily find personally identifying information on lost, stolen, or recycled phones, and that data can be retrieved even from phones that have supposedly been “wiped.”
Elysium Digital is proud of today's announcement that Ed Felten has become the new Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer. In this position, which is part of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Ed will advise President Obama, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, and others in the Executive Office on issues of public policy in security, …
The first installment of the Elysium Digital Speaker Series will take place on Wednesday, June 24 and will feature Carmine Nigro, Special Agent, FBI Boston.
Elysium Digital today named Cristina Antalik as the firm’s Electronic Discovery Manager. Reporting to Jason Eaddy, head of the firm’s Forensics & Discovery Practice, Antalik will oversee Elysium’s electronic discovery (eDiscovery) services including collection and processing of electronically stored information (ESI), review hosting, production, and consulting.
Video game developer Epic Games, Inc. makes the award-winning Unreal Engine 3 technology that powers hundreds of successful PC, console, and mobile games, including Epic’s own critically-acclaimed “Gears of War” series. However, after several years of licensing Unreal Engine 3, game developer Silicon Knights sued Epic in 2007, contending that Epic had failed to deliver a working game engine or …
Elysium's intellectual-property practice encompasses software code and device analysis (and expert testimony) for patent and copyright cases. Increasingly, this means we practice in front of the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).
Discovering a suspected data breach in your systems can be a harrowing experience. Available details might be confusing or unclear at first, and concerns about what the incident may mean for your business, your customers, and others can be overwhelming. As chaotic as the situation may be, a calm and organized response can save considerable difficulty. In this post, we'll …
If you follow the online advertising or privacy communities closely, you have likely heard of cross-device tracking. For those less familiar with the topic, cross-device tracking attempts to link an individual’s activity as that person switches between computers, smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices (e.g., smart TVs). Its stereotypical purpose is for marketing, such as targeting ads or tracking conversion …
On April 7, 2014, the Internet-wide OpenSSL "Heartbleed" vulnerability was publicly announced. Elysium secured all applicable systems against this flaw shortly after updates were released, and new server-side SSL keys and certificates have been installed.
In this white paper, we describe a brief prior art search we conducted against two of the patents held by Summit 6 LLC, which have been asserted against some of today’s leading web and mobile devices companies. We suggest some possible areas where valuable prior art may be found and analyze two pieces of prior art in some depth.
