Court Reiterates 230 Dismissal–Doe v. Bates
By Eric Goldman Doe v. Bates, 2006 WL 3813758 (E.D. Tex. Dec. 27, 2006) I previously blogged about Doe v. Bates, which involved a plaintiff trying to hold Yahoo liable for child pornography disseminated by members of one of its…
Employer Not Liable for Employee’s Threatening Emails Per 47 USC 230–Delfino v. Agilent
By Eric Goldman Delfino v. Agilent Technologies, Inc., 2006 WL 3635399 (Cal. App. Ct. Dec. 14, 2006) Prior to this case, my working theory was that 47 USC 230 would not insulate employers from liability for employee actions because companies…
2006 Blog Year-in-Review
by Eric Goldman Most Popular Blog Posts of the Year 1) O’Reilly and the “Web 2.0” Trademark 2) NYT on Fair Use and Documentaries (overflow from Slashdotting of #1) 3) GEICO v. Google Opinion (Finally) Issued 4) Competitor’s Keyword Ad…
Google Wins Publisher’s Lawsuit over AdSense Termination–Bradley v. Google
By Eric Goldman Bradley v. Google, Inc., 2006 WL 3798134 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 22, 2006) I’m struggling with developing a policy regarding blogging about pro se lawsuits (i.e., lawsuits brought without a lawyer) against major companies like Google. On the…
My Wikipedia Page is Safe (For Now…)
By Eric Goldman In my last post on Wikipedia, I mentioned that my personal Wikipedia page had been tagged “article lacks information on the importance of the subject matter.” Shortly thereafter, things took the inevitable turn for the worse–the page…
Top Cyberlaw Developments of 2006
By Eric Goldman and John Ottaviani [Eric’s Note: I will be in Israel for the rest of the year. So while it’s a little premature to publish an end-of-the-year recap, this may be my last post for the year. John…
Site Outage and Comments
By Eric Goldman The website and blogs had a 4+ hour outage today. My web host pulled the plug (sadly, without warning me) because “it was crashing the server with 250 other customers on it. Something on your website is…
Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006
By Eric Goldman No one is better at coughing up legislative hairballs than Congress. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (grafted to the end of the SAFE Port Act) was passed over 2 months ago, but my repeated…
Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years
By Eric Goldman [UPDATE: I put together a more formal assessment of Wikipedia’s challenges in my 2010 article, Wikipedia’s Labor Squeeze and its Consequences.] About a year ago, I predicted that Wikipedia will fail in 5 years. My logic: *…
“Junk Mail is Alive and Growing”
By Eric Goldman Many people thought the era of cheap electronic communications would spell doom for junk mail because of the cost advantages of printing and distributing electronic solicitations over dead trees solicitations. But instead, over the past year, marketers…