Lindsay Lohan and Ebola [e113]

Nasir and Matt start the week by discussing Lindsay Lohanstealing an app from a previous business venture. They then answer, "Should I take any Ebola precautions with my employees?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to our podcast where we cover business in the news and answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: And, here we are, bringing you another episode of Legally Sound Smart Business #100 – 100th episode. MATT: I think we’re a little bit past that. NASIR: Oh. 100? MATT: Uh, what is this? NASIR: 100-something episode. MATT: 113. NASIR: Oh, 113. I got excited for a second. I thought we were at 100. MATT: Yeah. Well, I guess we can count backwards. Maybe if we subtract 13 episodes from now. We’ll just go in reverse and get back down to zero. NASIR: That would be so confusing. MATT: Yeah. Ah. Well, speaking of confusing, we’re going to talk about the life of Linsday Lohan. NASIR: I was wondering where you were going with that. MATT: I never have any planned lead-ins, but I guess that one kind of made sense, but – not surprisingly – she’s in the news again for something bad. This time, she’s getting alleged of stealing a business idea. I guess she had a joint venture. Her and I believe her brother was involved too and then a friend of her brothers were in this joint venture to develop this shopping app. NASIR: I think fashion app, if there’s a difference. MATT: Fashion app? NASIR: Yeah. MATT: Revolutionized user shopping experiences. So, whatever that means but anyways. So, they had the idea. I assume Lindsay Lohan was only involved for name purposes only because I don’t know why you would choose her as any sort of business partner. But, basically, they had this deal or this joint venture with her brother’s friend and I guess, eventually, she just kind of stole his idea and ran off with it. And now, he has just filed in Manhattan Supreme Court for $60 million for her theft of his business idea. So, yeah, Lindsay Lohan. NASIR: That’s a good way to put it. Well, they also alleged that she signed a couple of contracts, one including a confidentiality and non-compete. She agreed to somehow be a spokesperson of some sort to this thing. And so, the app that they were working on uses some kind of image recognition technology that allows users to basically identify clothing or accessories in photographs or social media feeds which I swear sounds very familiar to – what’s that show? I don’t know. My wife loves that show. I forget what it’s called – The Big Bang Theory. That girl in there came up with an app idea where you take a picture of shoes and it will automatically tell you where it’s from or something. It kind of reminds me of that. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: Not to get too distracted with that. This other app which is – what’s the name? Vigme? MATT: Hers is V-I-G-M-E. I don’t know how you would pronounce it. NASIR: Okay. MATT: I don’t know what that even means either. NASIR: Yeah. So, of course, they were responding that the two apps aren’t clones and that the suit’s meritless, of course, and that’s their defense. But I think the focus is going to be on these actual written contracts because there’s so many app clones of different games and so forth of each other and a lot of times – we’ve talked about this in the past – from an intellectual property perspective, the only thing that you can really rely on is trademark and copyright, and trademark in the sense that it may have some likelihood of confusion of affiliation and then copyright if you’re actually copying images and so forth. But, in the business process and so forth, the only way to protect that is through patent protection and, oftentimes, with apps, because these come out so quickly, you don’t have that kind of protection. MATT: Yeah, and that’s what I was going to say. I mean,

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