Neil A. Smith

Mr. Smith is a partner in the Intellectual Property Practice Group in the firm's San Francisco office.

Video Game Industry Experience

Neil Smith has substantial legal experience in the video game industry. Since early in the industry's development he has been involved in patent prosecution and patent infringement opinion work, and early litigation involving the copyrightability of computer game programs, as a partner in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley intellectual property boutique Limbach & Limbach. He has represented numerous game developers, and companies, including Activision and Namco. He worked with Activision in its early years as a game developer, on issues of patent infringement, licensing, and trademark clearance and registration.

Throughout the years Neil worked with other companies who were developing video games, and was active in anti-counterfeiting litigation and enforcement for video game companies, including Nintendo, Namco and Sega. For Sega, Neil was a principal counsel in a series of cases, including Sega v. Maphia, which established contributory copyright infringement for the making available for downloading of copyrighted works. This was before the Internet took prominence, on a dial-in bulletin board, but the issue was the same as that in the Napster case, where Chief Judge Patel in the Northern District, and the Ninth Circuit both cited Neil's Sega cases for authority for indirect liability.

Neil's video game work involved enforcement, both with the United States Attorneys and Customs, and injunctions, seizure orders, asset freezes, and creative remedies in enforcing against copyright and trademark counterfeiting. Neil helped develop much of the law with respect to ex parte seizures and asset freezes, and extraterritorial jurisdiction under the Lanham Act for trademark infringement and asset attachments.

Neil continues to represent Namco anti-piracy and other matters, including Internet delivery, copying, fair use, black boxes ostensibly for game development, but actually for permitting copying and playing games on authorized systems, interface authorization interference devices and legal enforcement relating thereto, changes in platforms, such as from computer games to arcade video games, copyright legislation relating to orphan game access, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Internet and e-bay sales of a gray market and unauthorized video games.

For other game developers and publishers, Neil has participated in and overseen licensing, trademark and patent filings, and opinion work regarding infringement, and new issues such as virtual property, rights of publicity from the use of character imagery, and authorship.

Education

• L.L.M., Patent and Trade Regulation Law, George Washington Law School, 1973
• J.D., Columbia Law School, 1969
• B.S., Mechanical Engineering, Columbia University, 1966
• B.A., Physical Sciences, Columbia University, 1965

Events

• Trying A Copyright Fair Use Case, August 10, 2007