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In this week's episode, Nasir and Matt welcome attorney Mark Wisnosky to discuss the ongoing legal battle involving patents on podcasts and legal crowdfunding. They also talk about a class action lawsuit against McDonald's, the proposed new rules for overtime pay, and Uber's smart move to increase its insurance policies. Nasir and Matt also answer questions dealing with manager managed LLC's, employees wanting access to their personal files, and what questions you can legally ask in an interview. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: We’re back with another episode of Legally Sound Smart Business! I’m very excited for this one. We have a packed content theme, I think. A lot of employment law issues and some patent law. What do you think, Matt? Are you ready for this? MATT: Yeah, there are a lot of good stories and questions this week, probably enough that it could be split into two separate episodes. We’ll see how long it runs and just see what happens, I guess, but there is a lot of action going on this week. NASIR: Action-packed. All right, let’s get started! MATT: This is a pretty interesting story and I guess it’s been going on for longer. I just heard about it this week but it’s been going on for a little bit longer. Obviously, anyone that listens to this know what a podcast is and is familiar with podcasts and listens to them. NASIR: By the way, that’s a weird assumption. That’s not necessarily. MATT: We’ve hit on this in episodes in the past but it’s essentially these patent troll issues. I heard about this from listening to Adam Carolla. He’s saying there’s these companies – mostly attorneys or law firms – just buying up these patents but there are these people saying that they own the technology behind podcasting. I’m not sure exactly what they’re saying they own but, apparently, it’s getting in this whole law suit that they own all the technology for podcasting and people that do podcasts have to pay them some sort of licensing. This is step one in the story. There are some other things going on, too. To fight this, Adam Carolla who is one of the most popular podcasts and Marc Maron who has another very popular podcast and some other big names, they’re all coming together. I think Adam Carolla is the one who’s running this page but he’s doing a thing on Fund Anything. This is like a Kickstarter – a crowdfunding idea – and he’s going on there and trying to pay the legal fees for the lawsuit through people that listen to podcasts, essentially. We have these patent trolls coming in on this podcast technology. We have licensing fees getting thrown around. We also have a lawsuit – litigation paid for by an audience, essentially. A lot of different pieces going on with this. NASIR: Absolutely. I actually read a little bit more about this guy. Apparently, the idea is some invention that he had in 1996. The process was based upon cassettes and somehow that translated to digital and his later patents that he filed and something to that effect. But all I know is that he has been successful once which is crazy. He actually won a lawsuit against Apple. It was appealed by Apple and then it settled and went away assumingly that Apple paid him off with less than the amount that it was awarded and it was like a 6-million-dollar original judgment. I assume that’s the money that he’s using to fight these lawsuits but I just cannot imagine that he’s going to be here for the long haul. We’re not patent attorneys but we have one in our firm that I wanted to give a call to so I think this is a great opportunity to get his perspective on this. I know we’ve talked about patent trolls in the past but I think this is a little bit more sophisticated. Let’s get him on the line. His name is Mark Wisnosky. Hey, Mark! Thanks for joining the show! We went over some of the details with this podcast fight with this patent troll. We’ve covered patent trolls in the past and I just cannot believe this guy is actually trying to claim this.