“Hot Topics in UGC Liability” Talk Slides

By Eric Goldman

Earlier this month, Internet law superstar Ian Ballon and I spoke for about 90 minutes on hot topics in Internet law. Watch the video by downloading or streaming (item #47) it.

I spoke about recent legal developments related to user-generated content. My talk slides.

In particular, the fourth slide is completely new. It’s my initial attempt to catalog some of the abusive takedown practices I’m seeing. If you have thoughts about abuses I should add to the list, please let me know. I think it’s important to start cataloging these practices for two reasons. First, should anyone propose mucking with the 230/512 allocation of responsibilities, it may be helpful to plop on the table some proposed defense-oriented statutory fixes to these bad practices rather than just respond to the maximalists’ wish list. Second, with so much focus on whether or not there are abusive lawsuits (see, e.g., the farcical DOC report on trademark bullying), it seems useful to catalog some of the bad dispositions we’re seeing without the dispute getting into court so that policy-makers can understand the true scope of the issues.

I’m also aggregating lawsuits where affected content publishers have sued the senders of abusive takedown practices. I feel like there’s been an uptick of this litigation in the past year or so. If you’ve seen any lawsuits on that front I haven’t covered, please let me know.