May 07, 2008
April 2008 Quick Links
By Eric Goldman
Anti-Gaming
* Even though Ticketmaster won its lawsuit, Minnesota overreacted to the Hannah Montana ticket crush by banning software to circumvent an online ticket allocation process. See Sec. 609.806. Check out the hyperbole in this press release! What's next? Are legislators going to make SEO a crime?
* Google modified its relevancy algorithm 450 times in 2007. And yet courts still cite to Brookfield for how search engines operate!
* The UK cracks down on shill marketing online. ClickZ: "Under the new [UK] Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading regulations, it will be illegal to "Falsely claim or create the impression that the trader is not acting for purposes relating to his/her trade, business, craft or profession," or to "falsely represent oneself as a consumer."" See also AdAge.
IP
* Speaking of SEO....the latest pathetic attempt to grab a generic term and trademark it? "SEO." Sarah Bird is on the job.
* Do student notes of a professor's lecture constitute copyright infringement? We may find out.
* Atlantic v. Howell. More on the "making available" theory of copyright infringement.
* Sarah Bird on registering copyrights in websites and blogs.
* A for-profit T-shirt listing the names of deceased Iraq soldiers sparks a publicity rights lawsuit.
General
* Bowen v. YouTube, Inc., 2008 WL 1757578 (W.D. Wash. April 15, 2008). The court upheld the forum selection clause in YouTube's user agreement.
* eBay is ending its promotion of third party live auctions. Maybe because of this loss?
* Rebecca blogs on SuccessFactors, Inc. v. Softscape, Inc., 2008 WL 906420 (N.D. Cal.), an odd case involving the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act and an "attack PowerPoint" allegedly sent by a competitor to its prospective customers.
* Kate Kaye writes about the new Internet industry lobby group, the "State Privacy and Security Coalition," designed to fight laws like the Utah Trademark Protection Act.
* Kevin Werbach, The Centripetal Network: How the Internet Holds Itself Together, and the Forces Tearing it Apart, UC Davis Law Review, Forthcoming. An interesting paper applying "network formation" theory to show how the Internet came together as a unified network and how those unifying forces are under constant stress.
Posted by Eric at 08:52 PM | Content Regulation , Copyright , Internet History , Licensing/Contracts , Marketing , Publicity/Privacy Rights , Search Engines , Trademark | TrackBack
April 28, 2008
47 USC 230 Trifecta of Cases--Friendfinder, e360insight, iBrattleboro
By Eric Goldman
47 USC 230 cases have been coming at such a rapid clip that I've fallen behind. In this blog post, I'll catch up on three recent cases:
Friendfinder
Doe v. Friendfinder Network, Inc., 2008 WL 803947 (D.N.H. March 27, 2008)
This case involves the publication of a false user-supplied profile on adult dating/hook-up services operated by AdultFriendfinder and Various. Fake dating profiles have been the source of a fair amount of 230 litigation; see, e.g., the Anthony v Yahoo, Landry-Bell v. Various, Doe v. SexSearch, Barnes v. Yahoo, and of course the Carafano case. The Friendfinder case involves two allegations we haven't seen before: (1) when the plaintiff complained, the sites removed the profile but displayed the following message on the profile page: "Sorry, this member has removed his/her profile," which allegedly implied that the plaintiff in fact had authorized the page initially, and (2) portions of the fake profile had been displayed on third party sites as "teasers" to advertise the adult dating services.
The court quickly dismisses the defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and various soft tort claims per 230, even if the defendants affirmatively reposted the profiles and even with respect to pull-down menus used to help profile building. This opinion came out before the Ninth Circuit en banc ruling in Roommates.com, but taking Kozinski's disclaimers at face value, the discussion about pull-down menus should have survived Roommates.com.
The court also says that 230 protects the site-authored announcement on the removed profile because "the allegedly tortious nature of those statements proceeds solely from the association they create between the plaintiff and the content of the profile." This might be an important standard to help future courts determine when 230 governs allegations of false marketing representations predicated on bad user info.
The court takes a less defense-favorable direction regarding the right of publicity claim. In direct conflict with the Ninth Circuit's ccBill ruling, this court says that 230 does not preempt state IP claims. Personally, I think this court got the statutory construction right and the Ninth Circuit got it wrong. As this court correctly explains, a court cannot interpolate the word "federal" into 230(e)(2) if it uses intellectually rigorous statutory interpretation.
Having left open the state IP claims, the court (also correctly, IMO) says that a right of publicity claim is an IP claim while any other invasion of privacy claim (i.e., the other three prongs of Prosser's four privacy torts) is not.
The court also survives the plaintiff's allegation of a Lanham Act false designation of origin claim with respect to the use of the false profile in the advertising teasers. But why didn't the court examine the application of 230 to this Lanham Act provision, which arguably isn't an IP claim? I think the court considered the false designation of origin claim, as applied to a false endorsement, to be equivalent to a right of publicity claim, but it would have been nice for the court to unpack this assumption.
The litigation over teaser content raises a question that's been bothering me for some time--when is republication of user-supplied editorial content (in this case, the dating profile) as teaser content on third party websites legally governed as commercial advertising? Teaser editorial content is ubiquitous, but it also serves a marketing function that could (should?) be regulated by commercial advertising restrictions such as the right of publicity. Hey, if you're looking for a paper topic, I think this issue (use of user content in teaser content as a right of publicity issue) is a good one.
More discussion about this case: CMLP, Rebecca, Jeff Neuburger, John Leonard
e360Insight
e360Insight, LLC v. Comcast Corp., 2008 WL 1722142 (N.D. Ill. April 10, 2008)
e360 is an email marketer/alleged spammer. Comcast blocks their emails from getting to Comcast subscribers. e360 sues Comcast for a variety of torts. The court sweeps all of the claims away on a judgment on the pleadings per 230(c)(2), saying that spam filtering constitutes the blocking of objectionable content contemplated by the statute. Further, agreeing with the Kaspersky case, the court says that any good faith requirement in the statute is subjective, not objective, and e360 didn't plead any evidence of subjective bad faith. Case dismissed.
This opinion adds to the burgeoning caselaw under 230(c)(2) showing that it will crunch claims by anyone upset that their communications are being filtered. As applied to an IAP like Comcast, I think this raises an interesting angle in the net neutrality debate. If you're looking for a paper topic, it seems like it would be timely to recap 230(c)(2) jurisprudence and analyze its interplay with other speech-preserving doctrines (must-carry laws, Constitutional free speech restrictions, net neutrality, consumer protection requirements of disclosure, etc.).
iBrattleboro
Mayhew v. Dunn, 580-11-07 (Vt. Superior Ct. March 18, 2008)
This is a simple and clean opinion. The defendants operate the iBrattleboro.com website. A third party posted material to the website that allegedly harmed the plaintiff. The website operators get a judgment on the pleadings. Case dismissed. This is a nice illustration of 230 working exactly as it should. Some useful color on the case from CMLP.
Posted by Eric at 10:27 AM | Derivative Liability , Publicity/Privacy Rights , Spam | TrackBack
February 25, 2008
CaféPress Denied 230 Motion to Dismiss--Curran v. Amazon
By Eric Goldman
Curran v. Amazon.com, Inc., 2008 WL 472433 (S.D. W.Va. Feb. 19, 2008)
Erik Curran was a National Guard soldier who served in "a combat zone." For reasons unclear from this opinion, he was photographed by an unspecified photographer, and the photo (or photos) of Curran became widely republished. Erik is now suing numerous defendants for violations of his publicity and privacy rights based on these republications.
CaféPress is a defendant because third party users provided Curran's photos for republication on CaféPress-produced t-shirts. CaféPress asserts a 230 defense.
Superficially, 230 looks possible. The images were provided to CaféPress by third parties, CaféPress is a website, and 230 preempts right of privacy claims. I also think 230 probably bar right of publicity claims; even if the publicity claims are IP claims, they would still be state-based IP claims that should be preempted per ccBill.
Nevertheless, I'm a little confused about CafePress' 230 defense. Even assuming 230 facially applies, it should cover only CaféPress' web-based publications and not the vending of physical goods. (As discussed in the Accusearch case, it's possible that any vending by a merchant of record is outside 230's scope, even when the vended materials are just online data). Thus, CaféPress' shipment of physical space t-shirts with an improper image could be outside 230's scope. Perhaps CaféPress believes (much like Amazon did in the Corbis v. Amazon case) that the physical space sales are made by its users, not CaféPress. I could see a judge buying that argument, but if CaféPress is integrally involved in every aspect of the physical retailing, manufacturing and shipment of the impermissible items, it's not clear CaféPress can avoid liability for the non-cyberspace activities, none of which should be covered by 230. (In this sense, I believe CaféPress provides substantially more services to its third party "merchants" than Amazon provides its zShop merchants that were at issue in the Corbis case).
The court doesn't get into this nuance here. Instead, CaféPress argued that Curran's complaint had not alleged that CaféPress had created or developed the content at issue. The court says this argument is insufficient because "CaféPress relies upon the absence of facts not pled in the complaint and seeks to place the onus on the plaintiff to plead around affirmative defenses, which it need not do." I think the court is wrong about this--many courts have granted the 230 defense on a motion to dismiss based on incomplete allegations--but this may not matter in the end. The court adds that "plaintiff faces an uphill battle given the broad grant of immunity conferred by § 230, as interpreted in the seminal case of [Zeran]." But the denial of the motion to dismiss gives Curran a fishing expedition license and some time to parse through the liability associated with vending physical items.
One other interesting note. Curran also sued Amazon for displaying a book cover (from a third party publisher) that featured Curran without his consent. Amazon defended by citing the Almeida case, which dealt with an identical issue. In Almeida, the court sidestepped Amazon's 230 defense and instead held that Amazon wasn't liable because the book cover display was just incidental to Amazon's sale of the book. This court defers the issue, refusing the motion to dismiss as too early to make that judgment.
UPDATE: Michael Erdman's comments.
Posted by Eric at 10:33 PM | Derivative Liability , Publicity/Privacy Rights | TrackBack
December 10, 2007
Yale Reputation Economies Symposium Recap
By Eric Goldman
Reputation is a hot topic in Cyberlaw circles, so the Yale ISP conference on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace came at a propitious time. Some of my meta-observations from the talks.
1) We lack a uniformly accepted definition of reputation. During the conference, it was clear that most speakers were working with their own idiosyncratic definitions. Without a standardized definition, people can easily talk past each other.
2) Reputational systems are everywhere--FICO scores, letters of recommendation, Google PageRank, product review sites like Epinions, spam filters, employee evaluations, etc. I plan to catalog them in my next big paper. For now, Jonathan Zittrain gave two interesting examples: (1) British pubs are now taking patrons’ fingerprints and publishing a blacklist of rowdy pubgoers to other pubs, and (2) websites allow angry drivers to criticize bad drivers by license plate number.
3) We often treat reputation as a monolithic assessment (good or bad), but it is granular and contextual. Reputation systems need to reflect these nuances, and we’re seeing movement in that direction. For example, eBay is considering more granular feedback scores, which might entail different scores for product description accuracy and shipping speediness. However, increased granularity is subject to the accuracy/simplicity tradeoff—increased complexity improves accuracy but makes it more costly to participate in the system.
To overcome the accuracy/simplicity tradeoff and reduce collection costs, reputational data can be collected automatically. Bill McGeveran compared Facebook’s automatic collection of recommendations through Beacon with ratemyprofessor.com (a site I’ve critiqued before--1, 2, 3), where the communication costs discourage students from providing feedback unless they hold extreme views (i.e., love it/hate it).
Jonathan Zittrain suggested that people should be able to request that some information should not become part of their reputation. He gave robots.txt as an analogy; it is a voluntary standard that web publishers can use to keep content (that might have reputational implications) out of the search engines, which in turn significantly reduces its visibility. Although robots.txt is voluntary, it is widely followed. Jonathan thinks a similar voluntary system might be helpful for reputational data.
4) As noted by several speakers, reputation has economic value that can be converted into cash. For example, spammers have better delivery success—and thus make more money—if they can work with a high-reputation email address that is less likely to be blocked/filtered, and an seller with high feedback commands premium prices for his/her auctions. These payoffs create incentives for “bad guys” to capitalize on undeserved reputation, leading to the hijacking of high-feedback accounts and feedback-inflating activity (such the serial consummation of penny auctions) that can be used for a short but intense burst of fraud.
Bill McGeveran gave Facebook’s Beacon as another example of reputation’s selling power. In that case, Facebook and marketes are engaged in “reputational piggybacking” to get extra credit from the “recommending” user’s validation.
Because reputation has economic payoffs, we are tempted to provide property-like protections for reputation. Trademark law is an example of this in the commercial context. In contrast, with respect to individuals, damaged reputations can have significant non-economic harms that are not well-handled through property systems. Discussions about legal protection for reputations can get confusing when economic protectionism are conflated with these non-economic harms.
5) No reputational system will be perfectly accurate. Any system will have Type I and Type II errors. So how accurate must a reputational system be for it to be credible? We should assess this question by comparing a reputational system’s errors against the errors from alternative systems (or the absence of the system altogether).
A reputational system might be improved through more robust error correction mechanisms. Jonathan Zittrain gave the example of the Google News feature that allows a quoted individual to add comments right below the article. This reminded me a lot of Frank Pasquale’s asterisk proposal.
6) Reputational information is time-sensitive in that more recent reputational information is more useful to assessing reputation. Jonathan Zittrain proposed a concept of “reputational bankruptcy” where "old" information could be permanently suppressed because it is not useful to make future assessments. He analogized this to the time-based degrading of eBay’s feedback score, which segregates transactional information by date (i.e., 1 month, 6 month, all time).
More resources on this topic:
* notes from my talk
* my article on the intersection between online word of mouth and trademark law
* the collection of position papers from the event
* other recaps: the conference wiki, Jenny Ambrozek, James Grimmelmann, Aldon Hynes, Greg Lastowka, Andy Oram, Frank Pasquale (1, 2), Rebecca Tushnet (1, 2, 3, 4), Michael Zimmer
Posted by Eric at 10:27 PM | E-Commerce , Publicity/Privacy Rights , Spam , Trademark | TrackBack
November 26, 2007
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet: Ackerman's Review of Daniel Solove's Newest Book on Privacy and the Internet
My slightly incented [FN1] take on Dan Solove's most recent book: The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet.
by Ethan Ackerman
Unfortunately, I have to advise against beginning to read this book late on a Friday night on a crowded subway car full of antics-heavy party-goers if you also have a cellphone camera in your pocket. Why? It's not the locale or the company, as Dan Solove begins his compelling second exploration of privacy on a crowded subway too - on the freshly dog-poop-messed floor of a Korean subway car, to be exact. No, it's because readers that are most of the way through the book can appreciate the situation's potential much better. Fortunately for my fellow Friday night riders (especially the guy who kept trying to play the jug on an empty bottle of malt liquor) I was already into Chapter Six that night. More than 130 pages in, I'd already heard tales of funnier, sadder, and more embarrassing moments recorded for public posterity. More importantly, I'd also been exposed to a significant chunk of Solove's excellent thinking on the nuanced impact on individual privacy that comes from a massively participatory Internet - where everyone can be a content contributor, where anonymity and obscurity are likely fleeting but consequences may be lifelong, and where many users' expectations and norms are still trying to adapt to previous technologies like cameras and newsprint.
It is this aspect of Solove's book - the deep AND wide thinking about an individual's interaction with the modern Internet - that moves the book out of the one-point-rigorous-analysis of an academic article and the semi-random anecdotal topicality of a blog post and into the category of critical (in the must-read sense) literature. Where Solove's previous work tackled the pressing but somewhat solve-able problems that arose from individuals losing control of their personal information to government and commercial entities, this book tackles individuals' loss of access and control of their information at the hands of other individuals - and, increasingly, by their own hand on blogs, social networking and image sharing sites of their own.
As Solove points out, this book is much more ambiguous and less proscriptive in its conclusions than his prior work. Reading the book is the best way to understand why Solove doesn't just say "do more 'x'," or "make 'y' illegal on the Internet," or "tech people about how to do 'z'," but Solove's reasoned reluctance to throw out lots of solutions (and the nuance of the few ideas he does suggest) seem to be the main sticking point with reviewers so far. While having my own suspicions and opinions on what might and might not (and what definitely does and does not) work about modern privacy protections, I have to agree with Solove on one of his main premises - it is equal parts impossible and vital to avoid over-censorship or under-protection when trying to simultaneously protect individual autonomy, speech and privacy. I'd have to agree with what I think Solove's ultimate aim is here - informing people and getting them to think more about privacy themselves. To put words in Solove's mouth, if everyone is more informed and thinks about these issues themselves, not only will any ultimate solutions probably be better, but they will also perhaps be moot, as more people will have chosen the non-problematic action in the first place.
Chapter Three may prove particularly interesting for some of the marketing and economics-analysis readers of this blog. Despite the fact that it looks like a well-written lay discussion of just what makes communication different on the Internet (it even innocently starts out with anecdotes about the Washingtonienne scandal), Chapter Three is an excellent stealth lesson in communications theory, information theory, and even an economics lesson about reducing transactions costs and capturing the benefits and harms of previous externalities. Solove could have titled this chapter "the long tail phenomenon of online talk." Though the chapter never says so in so many words, it discusses the impact of markedly reduced transaction costs of sharing AND recalling information. It uses network theory to explain how the connectedness of an information sharer still largely dictates information flow, and it also explores how the Internet has increased both the positive and negative externalities associated with information exchange.
My biggest beef is with a topic that pops up only briefly, once at the end of Chapter Two and again briefly in the conclusion: what might the future of privacy look like? More specifically, where are important trends taking us and in what ways may we consider privacy that we don't now? Solove's work dedicates page after page to the values and desires and social benefits that form our notions of privacy, and equally numerous pages to developments that alter and possibly enhance or diminish our privacy. But how about at least exploring alternate visions of what that may look like as time progresses? (Talk about reviewers wanting to have their cake and have it fed to them too.) The last two paragraphs of Chapter Two tease the reader with the idea that privacy may not even matter to future generations, a plausible idea that finds much support in the preceding pages. Yet, this meme is basically dropped until a brief resurrection in Chapter Eight, where it serves (in "Do people want privacy anymore") as a foil for Solove's convincing later argument that yes, people want privacy and they have a nuanced, non-binary view of privacy that changes, but does not necessarily diminish, with each technological change. How about a few pages on that dys/u-topian future where privacy doesn't matter - the utopian one where social acceptance and factual accuracy negate any need to 'hide' embarrassing facts and early learning mistakes, or the dystopian one where our warts and peccadilloes are now universally surveilled and broadcast, but still have sanctions and social stigmas associated with them?
[FN1] If there is only one thing for an author worse than a poor book review, it is probably no book reviews. While this problem wouldn't apply to The Future of Reputation, Dan Solove did a rather innovative thing to insure against it anyway. He offered free review copies to any mainstream blogger who would author a review, regardless of content. This review is in response to that generous offer.
Posted by Ethan Ackerman at 11:17 AM | Publicity/Privacy Rights | TrackBack
November 21, 2007
Search Redirection Tool Could Be Trespass to Chattels--Burgess v. EForce
By Eric Goldman
Burgess v. EForce Media, Inc., 2007 WL 3355369 (W.D.N.C. Nov. 9, 2007)
Every now and then a consumer goes on a me-vs.-the-world bender and decides to unilaterally save society by suing everyone in sight. Burgess' anger over unwanted advertising may have sparked such a campaign. His previous appearance on the blog involved his pro se lawsuit against American Express and many other major brand names for unwanted pop-up ads. In that ruling, the court intimated that advertisers could be liable for contributory trespass to chattels.
In this companion action, Burgess sued a number of defendants for spam. The court rejects his CAN-SPAM claim for lack of standing (he doesn't qualify for the limited private causes of action).
Burgess also sued for the installation of search redirection client software, claiming it was a privacy invasion, trespass to chattels, and "illegal conduct." The defendants first tries to dismiss the claims as preempted by CAN-SPAM, but CAN-SPAM's preemption clause does not apply to generally applicable laws like privacy invasions and trespass to chattels. Nevertheless, the magistrate report (approved by the judge) dismisses the privacy invasion claim for failure to state a claim, saying:
While the undersigned shares in plaintiff's frustration with the internet and the unconscionable applications that interfere with one's use and enjoyment of technology--and at times display offensive websites--frustration of purpose is not an invasion of privacy. Further, the undersigned cannot find any North Carolina case recognizing a cause of action for invasion of privacy based on computer viruses that redirect internet searches or inquiries, or any cases that would suggest that similar such conduct in other fields would support such a claim.
The "illegal conduct" claim was also dismissed.
On the other hand, building on Burgess prior ruling in state court, this court refuses to dismiss the trespass to chattels claim. Citing to Sotelo and others, the court says that Burgess' "pro se pleadings are not a model of clarity but nevertheless suffice to state a claim for trespass to chattels. He sufficiently alleges actual possession of his computer and 'unauthorized, unlawful interference' with his use of this personal property." So the Sotelo precedent marches on, even though this court (as with the prior Burgess court) doesn't acknowledge Hamidi, Mummagraphics or the other cases that would put these expansive trespass to chattels rulings in serious doubt.
As a result, Burgess' case lives to see another day. I'm sure we haven't heard the last from him!
Posted by Eric at 02:32 PM | Adware/Spyware , Publicity/Privacy Rights , Search Engines , Spam | TrackBack
October 28, 2007
Blogger Wins Lawsuit Over Gripe Post--BidZirk v. Smith
By Eric Goldman
BidZirk, LLC v. Smith, 2007 WL 3119445 (D.S.C. Oct. 22, 2007)
I have previously blogged about BidZirk v. Smith, a flagship example of how a pernicious and misguided plaintiff with a thin skin can ruin a blogger's life. Fortunately, even though the blogger handled the case pro se, the court saw the case's lack of merit and finally ended the case.
The case started when Smith blogged a lengthy post on his negative experiences with BidZirk, an eBay drop-off company. BidZirk struck back with a lawsuit claiming defamation, privacy invasion and trademark violations. After losing its request for a preliminary injunction, BidZirk appealed to the Fourth Circuit, which denied its request. Very messy discovery followed, with both parties getting chastised for their conduct. Finally, in this ruling, the court granted Smith summary judgment, and threw in some sanctions against plaintiffs' counsel to boot.
Specifically, the court said:
* calling BidZirk's founder a "yes man" was an opinion and therefore not actionable as defamation
* South Carolina doesn't recognize the false light invasion, and even if it did, nothing portrayed the plaintiffs in a false light. Further, linking to a photo published on a third party website does not constitute a publicity rights violation
* Smith was immune from trademark claims because his reference to BidZirk was in the context of news reporting or news commentary. Though the court doesn't equate bloggers and journalists generally, it gives Smith the same protection given to journalists
* BidZirk's attorney filed a lis pendens on Smith's condo, and the court sanctioned the attorney $1,000 because the attorney had no basis to claim a right against Smith's property
As a result, BidZirk's lawsuit should be over unless it makes the unwise choice to appeal to the Fourth Circuit (a distinct possibility given its past practices). But the really unfortunate part is that the court signalled that its disinclination to support the plaintiff's claims very early in the lawsuit. A rational plaintiff would have taken the hint then. Instead, the plaintiff wasted everyone's time, money and emotional energy pursuing a fruitless case.
Meanwhile, I'm not clear what, if any, of Smith's counterclaims are still outstanding. Perhaps Smith will get some additional remedy beyond the moral vindication and $1,000 in sanctions. But even if he does, there really is no way to correct the fact that the plaintiff consumed the last year and a half of Smith's life, forcing him to defend a lawsuit that was ridiculous and ill-conceived from the outset. (The court declined to award Rule 11 sanctions, saying it was a close call).
As the court says, "In essence, this is a case in which the Plaintiffs have sued Smith because he published articles on the internet critical of the Plaintiffs' business." Thus, on the surface, this appears to a cautionary tale to all bloggers that we live in peril of being dragged into court whenever we negatively critique businesses. Yet I see this ruling as a redemption of sorts--it takes a lot of courage to blog, and it takes even more courage for bloggers to stand behind their words when challenged, but we have a responsibility to make sure we can't be bullied on either front. On behalf of bloggers everywhere, we applaud Philip Smith's courage and determination to defeat this case.
UPDATE: Comments from the defendant himself, Philip Smith, as well as Sam Bayard.
Posted by Eric at 10:57 AM | Publicity/Privacy Rights , Trademark | TrackBack
October 24, 2007
Interesting Contract Interpretations in Eighth Circuit Fantasy Baseball Case--CBC v. MLB
By Eric Goldman
CBC Distribution and Marketing, Inc., v. Major League Baseball Advanced Media, L.P., No. 06-3357/3358 (8th Cir. Oct. 16, 2007)
You've already heard about this case, which held that MLB's right of publicity claim against a fantasy baseball league provider was barred by the First Amendment. Personally, I found that ruling only mildly interesting. The First Amendment defense to ROP claims is so squirrelly that I have no idea when we'll see it again, so the precedential impact of this ruling is unfortunately low. Instead, the court should have ruled that publishing player statistics in an online commercial database isn't a commercial exploitation (i.e., lacked the requisite "commercial advantage") of any player's publicity rights any more than publishing a book compiling such statistics would be. That would have been a more sensible ruling and would have provided a lot greater certainty for the future.
In any case, I think the discussion about the expired CBC-MLB contract is way more interesting than the right of publicity discussion. The court lays waste to the standard interpretation of at least 2 very commonly used contract provisions, and this provides a cautionary tale to drafters.
Representation/Warranty of Authority
The contract said that the licensor "represents and warrants that it has the authority to grant the rights licensed herein." Normally, this R&W is made as part of a series of ownership R&Ws--typically that the licensor (1) owns its licensed stuff, (2) has the right to grant licenses to the stuff, and (3) use of the licensed stuff won't infringe any third party rights. When these R&Ws are poorly drafted, they can be effectively redundant (i.e., a third party claim of infringement triggers all three R&Ws), but #2 does pick up two additional situations compared to #1: (a) where the licensor owns the stuff but has granted an exclusive license to a third party that would conflict with the newly granted license, and (b) where the licensor itself in-licenses stuff, in which case the R&W tests if the licensor has appropriate sublicensing rights.
Here, the court rejects the licensee's argument that the Players Association (the licensor) breached the R&W because it didn't have good title (because there were no enforceable publicity rights). Instead, the court reads the R&W as an R&W of agency--that is, that the Players Association is the agent of the players.
FWIW, personally, I rarely use R&Ws of ownership. Usually, I handle infringement risks solely through an indemnity. So I would be unlikely to encounter this issue in a contract I drafted. But I have seen this language hundreds of times in other contracts, and I believe the parties have always intended to ascertain the licensor's good title. As a result, this court seems to have completely misread this provision, and its interpretation jeopardizes the interpretation of the language in the many, many other contracts where it appears.
Declaration of Ownership
The court also interprets the language that the Players Association "is the sole and exclusive holder of all right, title and interest" in and to the players' names/statistics. I call this type of provision a declaration of ownership--typically intended to clarify the respective ownership rights between the parties. Personally, I hate these provisions, especially in licenses of public domain data. What does it mean to declare the licensor the "owner" of public domain data? And I've had way too many pointless/fruitless negotiations over the ownership about user data that are unquestionably hindered by the weak grammatical structure of such a declaration.
The Eighth Circuit gives us another reason to hate the declaration of ownership clauses. They say that "quite obviously" the language is an R&W of ownership, which the Players Association breached because, in fact, it didn't have enforceable right of publicity rights. So watch out for those declaration of ownership clauses--they could become an unintended backdoor warranty of ownership!
Enforceability of Post-Termination Restrictions
The MLB contract had provisions waiving a licensee's right to challenge MLB's ownership rights (the no-challenge clause) and restricting post-termination use of the data (the no-use clause). The no-challenge clause isn't that unusual in the trademark license context, but it's extremely aggressive with respect to licenses of public domain data. (I can't recall ever seeing it in a right of publicity license). The no-use provision is very common among licenses of public domain data. Without the clause, immediately after the license, the licensee will have an electronic copy of the data and can exploit it freely without paying for it, thus undermining the licensor's business model.
The district court struck down both clauses on public policy grounds. This was a sensible approach with respect to the no-challenge clause, which has the effect of precluding judicial oversight over dubious claims of ownership. As for the no-use clause, I'm reminded of the Listerine case and the survival of confidentiality restrictions in a trade secret license even after a trade secret has lapsed in the public domain. Normally we tolerate these trade secret restrictions that make the licensee worse off than if the licensee had never signed the contract in the first place. I'm not sure it's a good policy result, but it's well-established as a legal doctrine.
Whenever I did data in-licenses, I would always contractually preserve our post-termination ability to procure replacement data from other sources for this very reason (just like I always include a provision in trade secret licenses/NDAs removing the confidentiality obligations if the trade secret is in the public domain). My guess is that MLB was a real bear about such negotiations, so they probably would have resisted the inclusion of such a provision. But without that provision, there is a risk that the court would enforce the post-termination obligation in a way that effectively made the data licensor a monopoly supplier of the data in the future.
The court sidesteps all of this by finding the declaration of ownership provision was a warranty that the licensor breached and thus released CBC from the reciprocal obligations. This sure seems like a roundabout way to reach the result that CBC isn't contractually restricted from using public domain data. It would have been cleaner if the court would have categorically restricted such clauses on public policy grounds. Instead, because the court took this convoluted process, licensees of public domain data either have to (a) include sufficient warranties (or clauses that a court will misinterpret as a warranty) that will allow the licensee to escape post-termination restrictions on public domain data, or (b) as I always do, include a post-termination right to obtain the data from other sources, which is usually painful to negotiate.
Posted by Eric at 06:13 PM | Licensing/Contracts , Publicity/Privacy Rights | TrackBack
October 06, 2007
September 2007 Quick Links Part I
By Eric Goldman
Marketing
* From the NYT: There are 200+ auto repair shops in the "Iron Triangle" area in New York, and apparently they compete fiercely with each other, shouting out price quotes as cars needing repairs drive by. But according to one business owner, "Competition is fierce, but we got ground rules here for pulling in customers...For one, you got to stand in front of your own business. You can’t come and stand in front of my shop and steal my customers."
* Cowan v. Hotwire, LASC Case No. BC328621 (Los Angeles Superior Court complaint filed Feb. 10, 2005). I just found out about this case because apparently I'm a potential class member. The gist of the lawsuit is that Hotwire overpromised the hotel quality based on the star ratings assigned to specific hotels. Whether or not this lawsuit is meritorious, it's another reminder that companies need to precisely characterize their rating systems.
* You may recall the lawsuit over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, a non-fiction story that was a little fictional. The case settled with a class remedy of a refund for book purchasers who went through a fairly complicated process. Care to guess how many purchasers tendered claims? Try 1,345--meaning about $20,000 of actual cash will go into the hands of "harmed" class members. Transaction costs to award this $20,000 of relief? Lawyers want almost $800,000, plus the costs to communicate with the class were about $335,000--in total, about $56 for every $1 of relief.
* In this article, I discussed how intermediaries would seek to mine a person's various methods of communication as source material for ad targeting (that is, unless the law restricts the intermediaries' ability to mine such data sources). The latest example? Pudding Media, which provides free Internet-based calls for the opportunity to deliver contextually relevant ads triggered by the contents of the phone call.
* The "perfect schwag"? One obvious option that didn't make the list...slinkies!
Intellectual Property
* We usually assume that copyright owners won't license their content to critics seeking to disparage them; hence, fair use is needed to permit such critical secondary uses. But a counterexample from the NYT: Naomi Klein licensed the Canadian "National Post" to display excerpts of her book alongside a critical review. There is some evidence Klein didn't know the hatchet job was coming, but even if she did, would it have been a bad choice on Klein's part? Not necessarily. See this study showing that even a critical New York Times book review lifts sales.
* Chang v. Virgin Mobile USA (D. Tex). See the NYT article on this case. Virgin Mobile allegedly downloaded photos from Flickr to use in an advertising campaign without getting publicity consents from the individuals depicted. This is a lawsuit by one of the depicted individuals. I'm very surprised by this apparent oversight because most ad agencies are thoroughly aware of publicity rights issues. Maybe someone mistakenly thought that Flickr's Creative Commons license extended to publicity rights?
* Freecycle Network, Inc. v. Oey (9th Cir. Sept. 26, 2007). Defendant does not make a trademark "use in commerce" when his actions were not "made to promote any competing service or reap any commercial benefit whatsoever."
* WSJ: "Web-Address Theft Is Everyday Event"
* WSJ: Some franchisors are loosening restrictions on franchisees’ ability to make independent choices.
Posted by Eric at 10:10 PM | Copyright , Domain Names , Marketing , Publicity/Privacy Rights , Trademark | TrackBack
June 20, 2007
The 4th Amendment in your inbox
By Ethan Ackerman
While the 4th Amendment gets litigated more often than, say, the 10th Amendment, it is still rare when a court finds federal law unconstitutional for inadequately protecting a 4th Amendment interest in email's privacy.
Earlier this week, the 6th Circuit in Warshak v. US did just that. Largely agreeing with amici briefs filed by law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the 6th Circuit ruled that "A [government] seizure of e-mails from an ISP, without either a warrant supported by probable cause, notice to the account holder to render the intrusion the functional equivalent of a subpoena, or a showing that the user maintained no expectation of privacy in the e-mail, amounts to" a 4th Amendment violation - notwithstanding the statutory language.
The case arose out of a wire/mail fraud investigation into Warshak's personal and business activities. Federal agents obtained an order issued under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) directing Warshak's ISP to produce account information and email contents. Importantly, the order found (as the SCA required) that there were "reasonable grounds to believe" the emails were "relevant to a criminal investigation." The order was not, however, a full "probable cause" warrant.
Warshak learned of this surveillance one year later when he received the SCA-required notice letter (270 days after the SCA required it to be sent) saying his emails had been searched. Warshak promptly requested that the government stop searching his email without a warrant or notice, but the government declined to commit to stopping. As a result, Warshak sued, alleging that warrantless searches of email violated his 4th Amendment rights. The District Court and 6th Circuit largely agreed.
Having concluded that the government had mostly complied with the SCA in its searches, both the District Court and the Sixth Circuit nevertheless insisted on a 4th Amendment analysis. They had little trouble concluding that people "maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in e-mails that are stored with, or sent or received through, a commercial ISP." This is a "well duh" conclusion to most Internet users, but interestingly, relatively few Courts of Appeal have made this Constitutional analysis. Why? It's not due to courts' laziness or aversion to Constitutional holdings, but it reflects that the federal statutes for the most part actually track Constitutional protections. So, arguably, this case reflects a rare circumstance where government searching complied with statutory law, but not the 4th Amendment.
Because the SCA protects some emails, most email cases never reach the 4th Amendment; a case can be decided based on the statute. (This is easier said than done in practice, as the SCA is a dense, detailed and specific statute.) For example, in a recent high-profile example, US v. Councilman, the 4th Amendment was effectively invisible. However, lurking in these cases is whether the 4th Amendment protection requires more than the statutory protections - especially as amendments (like the Patriot Act) have pared back the protections or standards in these statutes.
For more on the court's actual 4th Amendment analysis, read the opinion or this summary. In short, the court had to resolve whether the applicable data was (1) the type routinely disclosed to 3rd parties, in which case there was no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' and a subpoena was sufficient authorization, or (2) the contents of communications fully protected by the 4th Amendment, which requires the government to obtain a probable cause warrant. It concluded the data was the latter.
From this (wholly unbiased, disinterested, dispassionate - honest!) viewer's opinion, this case highlights the weakness of having statutory provisions attempt to protect Constitutional rights. Here, the relevant provisions were produced by political compromise, not an effort to implement the 4th Amendment. The Court of Appeals opinion subtly acknowledges this in its discussion of the Supreme Court's Berger case, pointing out that early wiretap statutes had the exact same inadequate "reasonable grounds to believe" standard that forced the Berger court to similarly overrule those statutes. It's always nice to see a rigorous analysis from an actual user's perspective.
ERIC'S ADDITIONAL COMMENT: Among other things, this case is a sobering reminder of how government actors sometimes zealously pursue their objectives without regard for appropriate safeguards. The Sixth Circuit's opinion is bristling with hostility towards the government's post hoc attempts to justify its behavior. In this respect, we're lucky that the judiciary "has our back," but it's still chilling--and sad--to consider the efforts Warshak had to go through to get very basic and rather obvious protections.
Posted by Ethan Ackerman at 06:52 AM | Publicity/Privacy Rights | TrackBack
June 12, 2007
AutoAdmit Fiasco Turns Into a Lawsuit--Doe v. Ciolli
By Eric Goldman
Doe v. Ciolli, 307CV00909 CFD (D. Conn. complaint filed June 11, 2007)
AutoAdmit is a message board for law students and related groupies. It's a relatively untamed corner of cyberspace. The site owners have espoused a relatively ideological view that they don't remove user posts, which has contributed to a rough-and-tumble site with lots of inappropriate and juvenile postings.
The site has been well-known in legal education circles for a number of years, but it crossed over to widespread national prominence with a Washington Post article in March discussing how some law students had been harmed by posts on AutoAdmit. The article starts out:
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.
The article then points the finger at AutoAdmit, blaming it for her lack of job market success.
Things generally have gone downhill from there, contributing to the relatively unusual situation where one of the site operators had his law firm job offer revoked. But now the heat has been turned up even higher with a lawsuit against a number of the posters to the AutoAdmit site. This is a very messy situation, so let me try to offer some (I hope) relatively innocuous observations:
1) I suspect the law students whose aliases were named in the complaint had that sickening stomach-liquefying feeling when they realized they were being sued. Being sued is an expensive and scary process.
2) The facts aren't entirely clear, but I believe the plaintiffs aren't trying to hold defendants liable for postings they didn't make. Of course, 47 USC 230 would likely bar most/all of such claims (although after Roommates.com, who knows how far 230 goes?), so it appears that the plaintiffs are wisely steering away from that trap.
3) I think the plaintiffs face some very significant causation issues here, at least with respect to the defamation claims that aren't per se libelous. For example, the plaintiff with 16 interviews and zero offers will have to connect the dots to show the online postings caused or contributed to this result. This doesn't sound very easy at all, and it creates the opportunity for the defendants to pick over the plaintiff's life and qualifications with a fine-tooth comb to show that there were other explanations for her lack of success. In all likelihood, this means more embarrassing revelations for the plaintiff; compare the public disclosures that Robert Steinbuch faced by bringing his lawsuit against Jessica Cutler.
4) I wonder if the judge will consider the message board's wide-open and infantile nature when evaluating the postings. Some of the postings cited in the complaint were, in context, so over-the-top that I can't imagine any reader giving them serious credibility. For an analogous circumstance where the judge recognized the contextual silliness of some remarks, see DiMeo v. Max.
5) This lawsuit could be very divisive in the legal education community. In one corner, free speech and personal/professional autonomy; in the other corner, intolerance for harassing and discriminatory behavior (especially by professional school students, like law students) that can seriously harm the professional opportunities and personal enjoyment of other students. These conflicting norms aren't new, but they tend to divide groups into camps that have a hard time finding a middle ground.
6) Although the defamation and related claims will get most of the attention, the copyright claim seems more pernicious--the postings might be covered by fair use [update: see Rebecca's take], but otherwise the defenses against copyright infringement are narrower and less squishy than the defenses against the other personality harm claims.
HT: WSJ Law Blog.
UPDATE: Eugene has a number of interesting observations.
UPDATE 2: David Lat recaps and summarizes the discussion.
Posted by Eric at 11:57 AM | Content Regulation , Copyright , Derivative Liability , Publicity/Privacy Rights | TrackBack
June 02, 2007
Steinbuch v. Culter Update: Cox Out, Cutler Bankrupt
By Eric Goldman
Two updates in the always-interesting Steinbuch v. Cutler case.
1) Steinbuch v. Cutler, No. 05-970 (D.D.C. May 16, 2007). Ana Marie Cox, the Wonkette blogger--who was brought into the suit merely for linking to the allegedly tortious blog--was dismissed from the case on statute of limitation grounds.
2) Jessica Cutler has filed for bankruptcy. Not only has this resulted in a stay of the case, but after chasing Cutler in court for the past 2 years, Steinbuch apparently is going to learn first-hand the meaning of the term "judgment-proof defendant." The full text of the minute order:
MINUTE ORDER: In view of Defendant Jessica Cutler's notice of her Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition filing in the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Northern District of New York, this case is automatically STAYED pursuant to 11 U.S.C. Section 362. Signed by Judge Paul L. Friedman on 6/1/2007. (mm)
Posted by Eric at 02:31 PM | Derivative Liability , Publicity/Privacy Rights | TrackBack
April 18, 2007
Judge Kozinski Talks About Cyberlaw
By Eric Goldman
Last October, Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit chatted with me in my Cyberspace Law course for 75 minutes. If you listen to the recording, you'll hear Judge Kozinski's humorous thoughts on receiving gifts when he speaks (he auctions them on eBay), selling on eBay (he's very proud of his feedback rating), blogging (he hates bloggers--told me that right to my face at breakfast after I told him I was a blogger) and being a judicial male "superhottie," as well as a less spirited discussion about the law of virtual worlds and the Sex.com case (it's hard to pin down sitting judges on substantive legal doctrines). Hope you enjoy the interview.
Posted by Eric at 04:05 PM | Domain Names , Publicity/Privacy Rights , Virtual Worlds | TrackBack
March 01, 2007
February 2007 Quick Links
By Eric Goldman
* The California Highway Patrol (which, for reasons unclear to me, has investigatory power here) has concluded that the Angelides campaign did not break any laws when they reverse-guessed URLs on Schwarzenegger's website and found an unrestricted page with a video of the Gov wondering about Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia's "hot'' temperament because of her mixture of "black blood'' and "Latino blood'' and referring to Assembly Republicans as a "wild bunch." The CHP did recommend that Schwarzenegger's team tighten up their website security. Silly reminder: if you really want keep information a secret, don't put it on a website without password protection.
UPDATE: Greg Haverkamp points me to this document, which explains that the CHP has enforcement power over Penal Code 502 violations involving state computers. Interesting. In my mind, I see Erik Estrada revving up his PowerBook to bust some baddies...
* Voda v. Cordis Corp., 2007 WL 269431 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 1, 2007). Patent owner can't litigate infringement of foreign patent rights in US court as part of supplemental jurisdiction over a US patent infringement claim. Patry's writeup.
* NYT on how YouTube indirectly motivates teens to deliberately do stupid things just for the opportunity to post them and perhaps get notoriety. I had a first-hand observation of this when I trolled through YouTube looking for a Listerine commercial that I might show in class while teaching a case involving Listerine. A search for the word "Listerine" in YouTube produces video after video of people doing stupid things with Listerine, like eating big stacks of their breath film or snorting the breath spray and then writhing in pain. Watching video after video of people repetitively doing stupid stunts, I felt like shouting to these people: "IF YOU'RE GOING TO DO SOMETHING STUPID ON YOUTUBE, AT LEAST BE ORIGINAL!"
* From Steve Bryant at eWeek: Shannon Stovall sues Yahoo for including her photo in Yahoo's welcome email, claiming Yahoo violated her rights of publicity/privacy to the tune of $10M compensatory damages and $10M punitive damages.
* Digg users may mark content they don't agree with as "spam." The most recent example is Danny Sullivan's post on SEO, which got Dugg and then was eliminated when anti-SEO Digg users flagged it as spam. If a website defers content grading to its users, it has to trust that they are reporting their feedback accurately. If they aren't, the whole user grading process breaks down. And speaking of breakdowns, there is an active secondary market for Digg votes--check out how Annalee Newitz bought front page placement on Digg for about $100.
* The always-colorful Chris Hoofnagle has released a new paper, "The Denialists' Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts." By his standards, I suspect I've dealt a full house with some of my rhetoric! Now, I wonder if he's going to create a complementary deck for bogus rhetorical tactics used by consumer protection "advocates"?
* From the EFF: "Debbie Foster, a single mom who was improperly sued by the RIAA back in 2004 for file sharing, has won back her attorneys' fees." Capitol Records v. Foster, No. 04-1569-W (W.D. Okla. Feb. 6, 2007). Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped the plaintiff from advancing nonsense arguments in the case, including the specious argument that a computer owner is automatically responsible if third parties use the computer to infringe copyrights. Fred at the EFF rightly debunks this argument.
* Wikipedia article: "Wikipedia is Failing." Your perspective about success or failure may be influenced by the impressive traffic gains that Wikipedia is experiencing--Wikipedia is now one of the top 10 most trafficked websites. Most of that traffic is coming from Google.
* Doe v. Josef Silney & Assoc., No 07-04167CA15 (Fla. Cir. Ct. complaint dated Feb., 13, 2007). Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller sues an alleged vandal of his Wikipedia page for defamation and related torts. Fortunately, he left Wikipedia out of the suit. However, he only knows the IP address of the person who modified the page, and that IP address is registered to the defendant. Is owning the IP address enough to establish liability? Or is this like an RIAA blunderbuss sue-first, ask-questions-later approach? It seems like the lawsuit should have been against a Doe, with a subpoena to find out who actually edited the page using that IP address.
* US v. Twombly, 2007 U.S. Dist. Lexis 12664 (S.D. Cal. Feb. 22, 2007). A spammer challenges some criminal provisions of CAN-SPAM as vague and overbroad, but the judge has no problems reading the statute to facilitate sending spammers to the slammer. Venkat's writeup.
* CDT groks (and mostly bashes) a variety of online kid-protection bills proposed in Congress.
* From the NYT: Nancy Pelosi posted some videos from C-SPAN to her blog. The Republicans immediately attack her for "pirating" the videos. Turns out that those videos were actually recorded by the government, so they are in the public domain. Whoops! The Republicans had to issue a mea culpa retraction. However, Nancy did grab a C-SPAN-owned video elsewhere which she had to take down. If our legislative leaders can't figure out what video they can recycle, how in the world can less-trained lay people do so? Patry has more.
* A bearish view on domain name speculation from CircleID. I share the sentiment that domain names don't matter, so domaining and typosquatting strike me as a short-term arbitrage opportunity that inevitably will be mooted by a variety of forces. Thus, the idea of paying 40 or 60 years worth of revenue for a domain name is laugh-out-loud funny to me.
* The Long Tail notes that some brands, trying to build a more esoteric image, try to hide their ownership by mainstream mass-market brands, a phenomenon he calls "brand dis-synergy." Examples: Dagoba Organic Chocolate, Joseph Schmidt, Cacao Reserve and Scharffen Berger chocolates (all owned by Hershey) and Converse (owned by Nike).
* Veritas busted for manufacturing revenues via round-tripping with AOL (Veritas bought AOL ads and AOL bought Veritas software; each at inflated prices).
* What does "or" mean? According to the 8th Circuit, it can mean "and." Ken Adams is on the case.
* Ricky Hoggard Holman, a 18 year old high schooler in Sudbury, Canada, correctly blogged all 24 of the American Idol finalists. How? Online research, such as researching the MySpace pages of contestants and emailing their MySpace friends. He also talked to some of the booted final 40 contestants, a few of whom broke their punitive-laden confidentiality agreement to dish some dirt. Maybe he wasn't studying, but clearly he's learned a few things about the power of good old-fashioned research. (The article says he's a straight A student, so he clearly can balance many things). Nice job, Ricky!
Posted by Eric at 12:03 PM | Content Regulation , Copyright , Derivative Liability , Domain Names , Licensing/Contracts , Marketing , Patents , Privacy/Security , Publicity/Privacy Rights , Search Engines , Spam , Trademark | TrackBack
February 18, 2007
Steinbuch's Second Battlefront Against Cutler Shut Down
By Eric Goldman
Steinbuch v. Cutler, 2007 WL 486626 (E.D. Ark. Feb. 7, 2007)
Everyone's favorite blog law case, Steinbuch v. Cutler, spilled over to a second front. While the lawsuit over Cutler's blog posts continues in DC, Steinbuch initiated a lawsuit against Cutler and her publishers over the publication of her book, The Washingtonienne. Steinbuch has moved to Arkansas to take a law faculty position, so to make everyone else's life difficult, he sued for privacy violations in a federal court in Arkansas.
In this ruling, the court has little difficulty dismissing the claims for lack of jurisdiction. No one other than Steinbuch is located in Arkansas, and Steinbuch moved there after the publication date (thus, under the single publication rule, the continuing publication in Arkansas doesn't count for specific jurisdiction). Hyperion, the book's publisher, didn't make a marketing push in Arkansas, and sales--both by Hyperion and by Cutler from her website--have been anemic (see below), i.e., consistent with Asahi stream of commerce. HBO has optioned the book for a possible TV series, but they haven't committed any privacy violations yet. Plus, in all cases, the book is fictionalized, so it's not entirely clear that any Arkansan would recognize the book as a privacy violation. Finally, the corporate parents of Hyperion and HBO are too attenuated from this lawsuit simply by owning another defendant.
As a result, the court says what everyone knew all along--that the proper venue for this lawsuit is DC, where the blog-related litigation is ongoing and where all of the witnesses are located.
While this is yet another embarrassing judicial development for Steinbuch (this time, the embarrassment is seeing a law professor's motion being so soundly thumped), it's also embarrassing for Cutler and Hyperion that very few people are buying Cutler's book. As part of showing that they are not doing business in Arkansas, Cutler and Hyperion sheepishly admit that there haven't been a whole lot of sales. According to the opinion, "at least four copies of the book have been purchased here, forty-six copies were sold to retail or wholesale accounts, and two books were purchased from the internet....Arkansas has not proved to be a lucrative market for Cutler's book, and the evidence shows that the book's minimal distribution is diminishing." Let's see, 52 copies at an MSRP of $24 = less than $1,250 of gross revenue from the entire state of Arkansas. Ouch!
I'm also intrigued that HBO is thinking about developing the book into a TV series. Maybe they will call it "Sex in DCity"?
Posted by Eric at 12:50 PM | Publicity/Privacy Rights | TrackBack
November 21, 2006
Griping Blog Post Leads to Lawsuit--BidZirk v. Smith
By Eric Goldman
BidZirk, LLC v. Smith, 2006 WL 3242333 (D.S.C. Nov. 7, 2006)
Despite all of the hype about blog law, the reality is that we've had comparatively few blog-specific lawsuits. As a result, we give extra attention to the early disputes (like this one) as possible predictors of what's to come.
This case involves a classic griping blog post. The author, Smith, runs a blog called Fix Your Thinking, which purports to cover "editorial news & news commentary covering eBay & Apple drama." On Dec. 31, 2005, he ran a lengthy post entitled "Special Report: You Gotta Be Berserk To Use An eBay Listing Company! The Whole Story " In this post, he relates his unfavorable experiences with BidZirk, one of the many companies that help people resell goods on eBay. As part of this post, he used BidZirk's logos several times.
In response to this gripe post, BidZirk sued Smith for Lanham Act violations, defamation and invasion of privacy. Smith fought back with unspecified counterclaims. At a March 16 hearing, Smith promised to remove all but one of BidZirk's logos. On April 10, the judge denied BidZirk's motion for a preliminary injunction because Smith's use of the trademarks was for news reporting and commentary (which isn't actionable under trademark law). BidZirk has appealed the denial of the preliminary injunction to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In the Nov. 7 ruling, the judge evaluates BidZirk's motion to dismiss Smith's counterclaims for lack of federal subject matter jurisdiction. Smith's counterclaims relate to his experiences with BidZirk and their dealings in litigation, neither of which the court felt were close enough to BidZirk's claims over the blog post to mandate consolidation, and there was insufficient basis to support federal jurisdiction otherwise. Presumably, Smith can reflie his claims against BidZirk in an appropriate state court.
Putting aside the procedural technicalities, I'm still stuck on why the plaintiff brought this lawsuit in the first place. Smith posted a very idiosyncratic story to a relatively low-profile blog about a small eBay reseller with 3 storefronts in South Carolina. As a result, I assume that very few people would notice the post, let alone be influenced by it. The lawsuit just escalate the attention paid to the post. Meanwhile, I haven't been able to work through all of the facts, but on its face the trademark claim appears pretty bogus, and the defamation and invasion of privacy claims could be as well. So I have an especially difficult time understanding how this lawsuit is economically rational. Finally, given the website modifications that Smith has already made, I can't figure out why BidZirk thinks that a preliminary injunction is worth pursuing all the way to the Fourth Circuit.
Of course, there is always the possibility that this lawsuit is not about the merits and instead is just an abusive effort to punish a blogger for speaking out.... In any case, the seeming illogic of this lawsuit illustrates why there are comparatively few blog-related lawsuits. Most of the time, it just doesn't make sense to sue over a blog post.
Posted by Eric at 02:11 PM | Content Regulation , E-Commerce , Publicity/Privacy Rights , Trademark | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 01, 2006
Amazon’s Display of Book Cover Doesn’t Violate Publicity Rights—Almeida v. Amazon.com
By Eric Goldman
Almeida v. Amazon.com, Inc., 2006 U.S. APP. LEXIS 17989 (11th Cir. July 18, 2006)
Introduction
Product photos on e-commerce websites’ product pages are a notorious liability trap. During my tenure at Epinions, product page photos were the only reason why we actually got sued (twice…ugh).
Product photos can raise some pernicious copyright issues, but in this case, the plaintiff sues Amazon for publicity rights violations. Ultimately, the court rules in favor of Amazon, effectively creating a strong precedent that online booksellers are immune from right of publicity claims for displaying book covers, even if the publisher in fact violated the right of publicity. However, the court indulges in a sloppy analogy to offline bookstores that may limit the scope of this opinion to just online booksellers and perhaps a few other media vendors. The case is also noteworthy for a goofy but irresolute discussion of 47 USC 230.
Facts
A publisher published a child’s photo on the cover of a book. The publisher got the requisite publicity consent for the first edition, but there are differing views about whether the consent extended to a second edition. Amazon displayed the second edition's book cover on its product page for the book. The plaintiff sued Amazon for publicity and privacy rights violations (these ultimately merged) and civil theft.
Right of Publicity and 47 USC 230
The district court dismissed the publicity rights claim based on 47 USC 230. This was an interesting ruling because 47 USC 230 doesn’t preempt “intellectual property claims,” so the question arises—is a publicity rights claim an IP claim? A precedential case (Perfect 10 v. ccBill) expressly says yes, Black’s Law Dictionary includes publicity rights in the definition of IP, and I venture that most IP professors cover publicity rights (albeit briefly) in IP survey courses. So I think many of us have assumed/believed that 230 does not preempt publicity rights claims.
The appeals court discusses this issue in some detail but ultimately punts on the question. Instead, it explicitly says it’s not opining on the question, basing its ruling on other grounds. So a definitive resolution of 47 USC 230’s application to publicity rights claims will have to wait another day.
Along the way, the court drops some very unfortunate dicta into a footnote. Agreeing with some confusing dicta from the 7th Circuit’s Doe v. GTE case, this court says 230(c)(1) is “phrased as a definition,” even though the footnote acknowledges the extensive precedent treating it as an operative immunization. The court then continues:
there is no issue of actual or constructive knowledge because the Florida right of publicity does not impose upon interactive service providers an obligation to filter or censor content. Moreover, as a factual matter, there is no indication that Amazon had knowledge of the allegedly misappropriated image and it responded promptly to Almeida's notice by removing [the book] from its websites
This completely gratuitous language will unfortunately give plaintiffs a sense of false hope. As I’ve discussed repeatedly on this blog, actual or constructive knowledge is irrelevant to a 230 determination. See, e.g., Zeran. Yet, this court’s sloppiness will give plaintiffs more grist to try their tired and futile argument that scienter matters under 230. I’m very confident that the impending plaintiff frenzy will give the 11th Circuit the pleasure of revisiting this dicta to clarify itself.
Right of Publicity and Physical/Virtual Bookstores
Instead of 230, the court bases its dismissal on the text of the applicable publicity rights statute, which applies to using an image “for trade, commercial, or advertising purposes.” The court says that Amazon’s display of the book cover on a product page doesn’t qualify. Instead, the court analogizes the online bookseller to a physical space bookseller, where the product page is the equivalent of the bookseller placing books on its shelves:
Amazon's role as an internet bookseller closely parallels that of a traditional bookseller. Because internet customers are unable to browse through shelves of books and observe the actual book cover photos and publisher content, Amazon replicates the bookstore experience by providing its customers with online cover images and publisher book descriptions
The court also distinguished two Girls Gone Wild video cases because the defendants in those cases picked the women to showcase on the product packaging and advertising. In contrast, Amazon was reflected the book cover selected by the publisher.
The court concludes:
Amazon's use of book cover images closely simulates a customer's experience browsing book covers in a traditional book store. Thus, it is clear that Amazon's use of book cover images is not an endorsement or promotion of any product or service, but is merely incidental to, and customary for, the business of internet book sales
It’s always dicey to make analogies between physical space and online contexts, and this analogy is suspect as a factual matter. First, there is no question that Amazon’s product page plays a major role in Amazon’s marketing and sales strategy. It is designed to place well in the search engines and uses a variety of tricks to extract additional sales from the customer. So treating the product page as the equivalent of a store bookshelf is a very charitable view.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, Amazon displays book covers all over its website, not just on the product page. Amazon uses the covers on personalized recommendation pages, in search results, in merchandising emails to its customers, and in content it syndicates to its affiliates (and, I suspect, to other third parties). Basically, Amazon does a ton of marketing for itself using book covers, so Amazon absolutely uses book covers to increase its sales. This sounds a lot like advertising/commercial purposes to me.
Ultimately, as a policy result, I think the court got it right. Amazon is merely depicting the book cover chosen by the publisher, so this ought to be a “contributory” or secondary publicity rights claim—and I don’t think there should be such a doctrine (admittedly, I haven’t researched that topic).
In any case, by making its clumsy analogy to browsing an offline bookstore's shelves, the court effectively limits this precedent to websites that can analogize their pages to such shelves--online book retailers, online music sellers, maybe online poster sellers. However, I think it would be tough to stretch this analogy to, say, search engines—an issue I believe is still live in the Perfect 10 v. Google case.
Civil Theft
Finally, the plaintiff alleged civil theft, which requires knowingly obtaining/using another’s property with the intent to appropriate the property for his/her use. In the context of physical goods, this makes complete sense. In the content of intangible goods, the scope of this statute is very confusing. In copyright cases, we normally don’t have to worry about this claim because it’s preempted by federal copyright law. However, in the context of a publicity rights claim, the copyright preemption doesn’t apply. Here, the court dismisses the claim for Amazon’s lack of scienter (because it didn’t pick the book cover). Even better for Amazon, the civil theft statute has a fee-shifting provision, so the court upholds an award of attorney’s fees to Amazon.
Posted by Eric at 10:12 PM | Derivative Liability , E-Commerce , Marketing , Publicity/Privacy Rights | TrackBack
July 26, 2006
Stay at Home Mom K's Johnny Damon's Right of Publicity Claim
By John Ottaviani
Last week, ESPN.com reported yet another unsuccessful and ridiculous attempt to use trademark law to stifle negative commentary.
According to the article, Ann Sylvia, a Massachusetts mother of two children, has operated an on-line store on eBay since 2001 so she can spend more time at home with her children. The on-line store "Owen & Emma's Place," is named after her children. Among other items, the on-line store sells baby and children's clothing and maternity clothes.
Among the "Daddy's Girl" and "My Mom is Hot" baby bibs and onesies are several items that reveal Ms. Sylvia's baseball affections. The problem in this case was not the "Yucky Yankees" or "Yankees Suck" bibs. Ms. Sylvia also offers bibs and onesies with the phrase "Damon Sucks." Last month, eBay pulled the listing after The Scott Boras Corp. (the entity which acts as agent for the New York Yankee baseball player Johnny Damon) complained that these items violated Mr. Damon's right of publicity. The complaint went so far as to threaten to blemish Ms. Sylvia's eBay rating and jeopardize her "Power Seller" status.
Rather than backing down, Ms. Sylvia swung for the fence. She hit a home run when she pointed out that there were other baseball players named Damon in the major leagues, so that her bibs might not be referring to Mr. Damon at all. Ms. Sylvia eventually reached a compromise by agreeing not to use "Johnny," "Boston," "Red Sox," "New York," or "Yankees" in the listing for that particular bib.
For those who are not baseball fans, the background to this story is that Mr. Damon played baseball for the Boston Red Sox team from 2002-2005, and played a key role in Boston's 2004 World Series Championship. After the 2005 season, however, Mr. Damon elected to leave the Red Sox and signed a four year contract for a higher salary with the New York Yankees, the arch rival of the Red Sox. Many Boston fans (including my daughter) now feel that Mr. Damon is a traitor.
After Eric's commentary on the case where trademark law was used by a restaurant to try to stop a non-profit group from handing out leaflets about the restaurant's labor practices, I hope this isn't a trend. Will the entire crowd be enjoined from chanting epithets at Mr. Damon the next time he appears in Fenway Park? Outside the stadium, will all the vendors of merchandise that uses the names or likeness of Mr. Damon and his teammates in uncomplimentary ways be confiscated? There are significant First Amendment issues here. It also seems that Mr. Damon and his agent might spend their time more efficiently chasing counterfeiters, rather than those clearly commenting on his playing ability, business dealings or loyalty.
Posted by John Ottaviani at 09:21 PM | Publicity/Privacy Rights , Trademark
May 09, 2006
Ebates Sued for Trespass to Chattels--Sotelo v. Ebates
By Eric Goldman
Sotelo v. Ebates Shopping.com, No. 06C-2531 (N.D. Ill. complaint filed May 5, 2006)
The Collins Law Firm has filed a third class action lawsuit over adware, this time targeting Ebate's Moe Money Maker client software. The complaint alleges that Moe Money Maker interferes with other client-side software and that Ebates misrepresents the nature of Moe Money Maker in its marketing. Similar to the other complaints from the Collins Law Firm, this complaint alleges the following causes of action:
1) Computer Fraud & Abuse Act
2) Electronic Communications Privacy Act
3) Trespass to Chattels under common law
4) Illinois Consumer Fraud Act
5) Negligence
6) Computer Tampering
7) Invasion of Privacy under common law
8) Cal. B&P 17200 and Civ. Code 1021.5
The Chicago Tribune article on this lawsuit and Collins generally.
A status report on the other adware-related civil litigation that I know about:
* Sotelo v. DirectRevenue. Settled in March (Suzi's report on the settlement). It appears that settlement freed up Sotelo's time to become lead plaintiff again. I've recommended to David Fish that Sotelo should buy some really good anti-spyware software.
* Simios v. 180solutions. Case is in discovery.
* Michaeli v. eXact Advertising. Motion to dismiss filed Dec. 12, 2005 and still pending.
* Consumer Advocates Rights Enforcement Society v. 180solutions (a/k/a Battalgia v. DirectRevenue), No. 2:05-cv-02547-LKK-PAN (E.D. Cal). According to PACER, the last reported action was a motion to dismiss filed April 24 (principally on procedural grounds).
* Kerrins v. Intermix Media. The case appears to be proceeding. A trial date has been set for January 2007, but the parties could settle before that.
If you are aware of others that I missed, I'd love to hear about it.
Posted by Eric at 11:51 AM | Adware/Spyware , Licensing/Contracts , Publicity/Privacy Rights
February 15, 2006
Your License, Registration and DNA, Please?
Congress Passes, President Signs, Press ignores...
As broader nationwide DNA database becomes law, states rush to fill database with expanded collection laws of their own.
By Ethan Ackerman
The DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005, which I blogged about late last year, was signed by President Bush into law on January 5, 2006. The legislation expands federal DNA collection efforts to include some legal and illegal immigrants, and allows states to contribute DNA collected for any reason listed under state laws to the federal DNA database. The final language did not change since I first wrote about it. See also the summary here. Rather than rehashing the bill, this post will disc