Internet Obscenity Conviction Requires Assessment of National Community Standards–US v. Kilbride
By Eric Goldman U.S. v. Kilbride, 2009 WL 3448360 (9th Cir. Oct. 28, 2009) Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer were porn spammers, operating through Ganymede Marketing, a Mauritian company. I previously blogged on their case in 2007. Their spam failed…
Zittrain on the Dark Sides of Crowdsourcing
By Eric Goldman Last week, Cyberlaw expert/rock star Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School (visiting at Stanford Law School this term) spoke as part of SCU’s lecture series on IT, Ethics and Law. An overflow crowd of over 100 people…
Google AdWords Litigation Updates–Google Adds One Lawsuit and Ends Another
By Eric Goldman It’s been a little quiet on the Google AdWords trademark litigation front in the past couple of months, so it’s timely to check in on the situation. Jurin v. Google, Inc., 2:09-at-01695 (E.D. Cal. complaint filed Oct….
Facebook Not Liable for Private User Groups Per 230–Finkel v. Facebook
By Eric Goldman Finkel v. Facebook, Inc., 2009 N.Y. Slip Op. 32248 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Sept. 15, 2009) This is a really interesting legal dispute with an entirely predictable outcome for Facebook as a defendant. See my initial blog post…
Craigslist Isn’t Liable for Erotic Services Ads–Dart v. Craigslist
By Eric Goldman Dart v. Craigslist, Inc., 09 C 1385 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 20, 2009) Yesterday, Judge John F. Grady of the Northern District of Illinois federal court dismissed Cook County Sheriff Dart’s lawsuit against Craigslist for user-posted advertisements in…
DePaul Reputation Talk Slides
By Eric Goldman Last week I presented on my long-running Economics of Reputational Information project once again–this time at a DePaul conference on cyberlaw. I titled the talk “A Tale of Two Reputation Systems” and approached it as a comparative…
Q3 2009 Quick Links, Part 4
By Eric Goldman Spam * Ars Technica: “a disturbing number of e-mail users respond to spam, and not just because they’re dumb—some of them did so because they were actually interested in the product or service.” I collected some empirical…
Q3 2009 Quick Links, Part 3
By Eric Goldman Copyright * AP v. All Headline News settles. My initial blog post. The settlement order. * The Turnitin case has settled. My blog post on the district court ruling. * Corbis Corp. v. Starr, No. 3:07CV3741 (N.D….
Q3 2009 Quick Links, Part 2
By Eric Goldman Trademark * Venkat: Twitter makes the dictionary. * Federal Circuit says Hotels.com is generic. * Steve Madden sues eBay for trademark infringement. Marty’s coverage. Justia page. I found the fifth cause of action, “trademark delusion,” a surprisingly…
Q3 2009 Quick Links, Part 1
By Eric Goldman My system of managing news items that don’t warrant a full blog post but can’t fit into a 140 character Twitter post has broken down. So, I’m belatedly catching up on my backlog of things that caught…