Ninth Circuit Rejects Plaintiffs’ Bad Misreadings of eBay’s User Agreement–Block v. eBay
Even after all of these years, I remain amazed by the bizarre contract misinterpretations that plaintiffs’ lawyers are capable of. Today’s case targeted the eBay user agreement, a document of special interest to me given my contributions to the agreement…
Court Spoils “Banana Lady’s” Appeal Over Online Recordings of Her Act
Catherine Conrad is the “Banana Lady” (see her Facebook photos) who delivers singing birthday telegrams. I didn’t know such things still exist, but perhaps they do in the Midwest (she’s based in the Madison, Wisconsin area). For reasons the court…
47 USC 230’s Legislative History
I had reason to revisit the legislative history for 47 USC 230, which was Section 509 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.[FN1] For some reason, I had trouble retrieving it through typical Google searches, so I’m sharing it here for…
Epinions, The Path-Breaking Website, Is Dead. Some Lessons It Taught Us (Forbes Cross-Post)
Before Yelp and TripAdvisor, before blogs or social media, there was Epinions.com. Founded in 1999, Epinions was a consumer review website before we fully appreciated how much we needed consumer reviews. It made several advances over other websites of its…
Talk on Why State Legislatures Shouldn’t Regulate Internet Privacy
As regular readers know, I view state legislatures as currently the #1 threat to the Internet’s integrity. In the name of “protecting the kids” and “helping the Internet”, state legislatures are manufacturing a slew of anti-innovation laws that cumulatively threaten…
Daughter’s Celebratory Facebook Post Really “Sucked”–Gulliver Schools v. Snay
Patrick Snay was headmaster at Gulliver Preparatory School, a private school in the Miami area. The school didn’t renew his contract, so he sued for age discrimination and retaliation. The parties settled confidentially for $150k, broken down as $10k of…
My Wife Has Lung Cancer. Read Her Story
[Introductory note: I don’t normally cross-post from my personal blog, but this post is so important to me that I wanted to share it here as well.] Nothing in life prepared me for the moment when the doctor told me…
More Intellectual Property Trivia Questions (The Outtakes)
Recently I posted our IP trivia quiz from WIPIP. To prepare those trivia questions, my colleagues (Tyler Ochoa and Brian Love) and I made a list of potential questions and then picked our favorites. In this post, I’m sharing the…
How Well Do You Know IP Trivia? Let’s Find Out
Last week, the High Tech Law Institute hosted WIPIP, a conference where IP professors and fellows present their academic works-in-progress for peer feedback. As part of the festivities, we had an IP trivia night–which I believe is the first IP…
H2 2013 Quick Links, Part 5 (Miscellaneous)
* Ars Technica: How the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts. A great story on how hard it is to remain anonymous online against determined federal agents. * Nice Reuters retrospective on Judge Rader. * DailyDot: The battle to destroy Wikipedia’s biggest sockpuppet army. Related: Is Wikipedia…