Roger Clark of Clark & Goldberg is a strong supporter of the union between science and technology. He certainly has a lot of insight concerning this story in the Los Angeles Times (latimes.com) about how gene therapy is making a comeback after a series of serious setbacks that threatened to permanently derail human tests. In recent years, European scientists have cured more than two dozen patients suffering from three rare, and in some cases lethal, immune disorders. Spurred by this success, plus the development of new techniques aimed at making the therapy safer and more effective, more than 300 gene therapy trials, including one for Parkinson's at UC San Francisco, are underway in the U.S. and abroad. Yes, biotech holds great promise. Setbacks may occur, but the future looks bright indeed.

Roger Clark of Clark & Goldberg knows that, as an IP lawyer, the entertainment community is a mighty economic tool. He continues to follow this story in The Wall Street Journal (wsj.com) about how, to preserve profits, Hollywood is slimming its bloated infrastructure. Studios are taking a tougher stance on expensive talent deals for big stars -- as illustrated by Paramount Pictures' recent divorce from actor Tom Cruise. Executives are also clamping down on the number of films that they make, while reining in staffing and marketing costs. "It's going to be a delicate dance for quite some time," says Dick Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Co.'s studio. Yes, cost containment has arrived in Hollywood. Alas, I won't shed a tear just yet.

Roger Clark of Clark & Goldberg is an excellent IP lawyer and a great fan of technological innovation. He highly recommends this article by Robert Levine in the New York Times (nytimes.com) about how, although www.Wikipedia.org is operated by a nonprofit foundation, ideas for advertising-based wiki sites are beginning to take their place alongside blogs and social networking sites as a staple of Silicon Valley business plans. In addition to Wikia, a site devoted to topics judged too esoteric for the online encyclopedia, there is ShopWiki, for product reviews, and Wikitravel, for tourism advice. Several start-ups allow users to operate their own wiki sites.

Roger Clark of Clark & Goldberg knows that celebrity is its own form of intellectual property, provided it is popular and non-controversial. Hence his interest in this story by Merissa Marr in The Wall Street Journal (wsj.com) about how Tom Cruise isn't used to Hollywood studios showing him the door. But after a year of Mr. Cruise's controversial and sometimes odd public behavior, the studio he has long called home is ushering him off the lot. In an unusually public rebuke, Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone said that his company's movie studio, Paramount Pictures, plans to end its 14-year relationship with the 44-year-old Mr. Cruise and his film-production company. This action has a lot to do with Cruise's erratic public behavior, not his cumulative box office numbers, which are incredible. Bottom line: Tom Cruise has become a very polarizing figure, since he has declared war against psychiatry, professed his loyal support for Scientology and acted plenty weird. No wonder Paramount canned him.

Roger Clark of Clark & Goldberg knows that the film industry is a great source of intellectual property and technological change. He really enjoyed this wire story about how Warner Home Video said on Wednesday it will release 10 high-definition titles on September 26, including six in the Blu-ray format and four in the competing HD-DVD format. The Time Warner Inc. unit will release on Blu-ray "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride," "Swordfish," "Space Cowboys," "Lethal Weapon 2," "The Fugitive" and "House of Wax." Making their HD-DVD debuts are "The Dirty Dozen," "Grand Prix," "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood." Movies just got even better!

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California today sued the city of Garden Grove for using an unconstitutional city code to prevent local Buddhists from expanding their congregation.

The lawsuit on behalf of Quan Am Temple, which is also known as the Vietnamese Buddhism Study Temple, was filed in federal district court in Santa Ana.

"Under the Garden Grove city code, city officials have full discretion to decide what religious institutions are allowed to practice in the city and where they are allowed to practice," said Belinda Escobosa Helzer, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California in Orange County. "We are challenging this unconstitutional code so that Quan Am Temple and other religious institutions in the future are legally allowed to practice their religion."

The current Garden Grove statute requires religious institutions to be housed in residential zones or seek a zone change from the city and obtain a conditional use permit prior to practicing their religion in the city. The city used this ordinance to prevent the Quan Am Temple from moving to its newly purchased building, even though the city has routinely allowed non-profit organizations to be housed in commercial areas, and has granted zone changes to other religious groups.

The ACLU is asking the court to block the city from enforcing the ordinance because it violates the U.S. and California Constitutions as well as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, a federal statute that protects religious freedom in the land-use and prison contexts.

"It is very difficult for us to file this complaint, but we feel we have been left with no choice," said Thich Dao Quang, the abbot of the Quan Am Temple. "We have done everything possible to allay the concerns of the city. We reduced the size of the temple, we added extra parking, we offered to pay property taxes, we proposed a shuttle service for congregants on busy holidays and we even paid for a traffic study of the site that said traffic would be reduced, but still the temple has been denied. We now have nowhere to practice our religion."

Quan Am Temple opened in Garden Grove in 1999, but by 2003 the congregation had outgrown its one-story building. To better accommodate its congregation of 150 to 300 area residents and 14 monks and nuns, in 2004 temple leaders purchased a medical building on 1.8 acres using a $1.95 million loan from a congregant. The building had been on the market for three years in an area zoned for "office-professional" use. According to the complaint, the temple received assurances from city council members that the city would support converting the building to place of worship. However, despite a recommendation from city staff, the planning commission and the city council denied the temple's requests for permits to begin converting the site.

"The city says it's worried about losing its tax base, but the temple has offered to pay property taxes even though religious institutions are tax-exempt and the building has sat nearly empty for about three years," Escobosa Helzer said. "The temple is hanging on by a string. Its congregation is unable to practice its religion and the temple is losing money and barely able to survive. They cannot even afford to keep all the lights on as they try to hang on to the building while this ordeal continues."

WASHINGTON –(USDOJ) Faheem Mousa Salam, a former employee of a government contractor working in Iraq, has pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by offering to bribe an Iraqi police official, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein of the District of Columbia announced today.

The plea was accepted today by the Hon. Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

During his guilty plea hearing, Salam admitted that in January 2006, he offered a senior Iraqi police official approximately $60,000 in exchange for the official’s assistance with facilitating the sale of approximately 1,000 armored vests and a sophisticated map printer for approximately $1 million. Salam requested the official use his position with the Iraqi police force to coordinate the sale of the material to the multinational Civilian Police Assistance Training Team (CPATT), an organization designed to train the Iraqi police and border guard in Iraq. Salam admitted that he later made final arrangements with an undercover agent of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction who was posing as a procurement officer for CPATT. Salam admitted that during the subsequent discussions with the undercover agent he offered a separate $28,000 to $35,000 “gift” to the agent to process the contracts.

The maximum sentence for a charge of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is five years in prison plus a $100,000 fine or twice the gross gain, whichever is greater.

The case is being prosecuted jointly by Fraud Section Deputy Chief Mark Mendelsohn and Trial Attorney Stacey Luck of the Criminal Division, Department of Justice, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Bradley Weinsheimer of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. The case was investigated by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.