Q1 2016 Quick Links, Part 1 (Trademarks and Domain Names)
* Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences v. GoDaddy.com, Inc., 2015 WL 5311085 (C.D. Cal. Sept. 10, 2015). A major win for GoDaddy—and domain name parking programs generally—against a long-running cybersquatting suit by the Motion Picture Academy. This ruling…
Alleged “Conspiracy” Among Disgruntled Ex-Employees Defeats Section 230–Tanisha v. Chandra
[Note: as I’ve mentioned before, sometimes Westlaw randomly spits out cases months after they were issued. This opinion is 4 months old but just appeared in my Westlaw alerts this week. Despite its age, I’m blogging it because of its…
Amazon Defeats Publicity Rights Lawsuit Over ‘A Gronking To Remember’ Book Cover (Forbes Cross-Post)
Greg McKenna writes as a woman using the pen name Lacey Noonan. In 2014, McKenna wrote the book “A Gronking to Remember,” an erotic “fan fiction” book about New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski. He self-published the book digitally…
Big Win For Free Speech Online In Backpage Lawsuit (Forbes Cross-Post)
Regulators and plaintiffs have been trying to eradicate online prostitution ads for a decade. These efforts have been partially hampered by 47 U.S.C. 230 (Section 230), a law Congress enacted in 1996 to protect websites from liability for third party…
Facebook Isn’t Liable For Fake User Account Containing Non-Consensual Pornography–Caraccioli v. Facebook (Forbes Cross-Post)
Franco Caraccioli is a third-year law student in San Diego. For reasons not explained in the opinion, someone created a fake Facebook account named “Franco Caracciolijerkingman” and posted photos and videos of Caraccioli “sexually arousing or pleasuring himself.” (All facts…
PGA Can Turn Caddies Into ‘Human Billboards’–Hicks v. PGA Tour
As I’ve written before, marketers are in a never-ending quest to find and exploit new ways to capture consumer attention. With the rise of DVR ad-avoidance technologies, marketers keep finding more unskippable broadcast TV ad exposures like product placements. And…
Google Defeats Lawsuit Over Duplicate Content Penalty–D’Agostino v. Appliances Buy Phone
D’Agostino provided web development services to the Appliances Buy Phone (ABP) website. He wanted to sharpen his SEO skills, so he agreed in 2009 with the ABP owners to create a mirror version of ABP, called Appliances4Sale (AFS) as a…
Why The Subway ‘Footlong’ Lawsuits Fell Short (Forbes Cross-Post)
You may recall the lawsuit against Subway Restaurants for selling “12 inch” and “footlong” sandwiches that were allegedly less than 12 inches long. The case attracted lots of media attention and consumer sniggers because of Subway’s ubiquity (and the endless…
Posting Vacation Photos To Facebook Costs An Employee His Job–Jones v. Accentia (Forbes Cross-Post)
[Note: inexplicably, over at Forbes, this became my most-read blog post ever, with about a quarter-million views–even though it’s a short, breezy and quickly written post that I posted during the dead time of Sunday mid-morning.] Before the Internet, people…
Court Beats Down Another Competitive Keyword Advertising Lawsuit–Beast Sports v. BPI
If you’ve been keeping up with the blog over the past several years, you already know that competitive keyword advertising lawsuits consistently lose in court. So in that sense, today’s blog post isn’t telling you anything new. Yet, it’s still…