Acxiom Not Liable for Security Breach–Bell v. Acxiom
By Eric Goldman Bell v. Acxiom Corp., 4:06CV00485-WRW (E.D. Ark. Oct. 3, 2006) Acxiom is a major data miner/data broker. As a result, they have lots of sensitive personal data stored on their computers. Between 2001-2003, they suffered a major…
Google AdWords Contract Upheld–Person v. Google
By Eric Goldman Person v. Google Inc., 2006 WL 2884444 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 11, 2006) Carl Person is a candidate for New York’s Attorney General and an AdWords advertiser. He complains about a variety of Google’s AdWords’ policies, including its minimum…
One Judge’s Derisive View of Junk Faxes as Conversion
By Eric Goldman Rossario’s Fine Jewelry, Inc. v. Paddock Publications, Inc., 443 F. Supp. 2d 976 (N.D. Ill. Aug. 17, 2006). I’ve blogged before on courts’ rejection of a common law conversion claim based on the receipt of junk faxes….
Google Wins Lawsuit Over Search Results–Maughan v. Google
By Eric Goldman Maughan v. Google Technology, Inc., 2006 WL 2874791 (Cal. App. Ct. Oct 11, 2006) In 2004, Mark Maughan sued Google over the way that Google crafts the site description part of its search results. As the minority…
Article on Regulating Marketing–A Coasean Analysis of Marketing
By Eric Goldman Eric Goldman, A Coasean Analysis of Marketing, 2006 Wis. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming). In 2001, I had a career-altering epiphany while I was working at Epinions (this is the topic that prompted me to consider becoming a…
Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006
By Eric Goldman Last week, President Bush signed the Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006 into law. Ostensibly, this law was intended to overturn the Moseley case’s requirement that plaintiffs show “actual dilution” instead of a “likelihood of dilution.” However,…
Must Websites Comply with the ADA (and State-Law Equivalents)? National Federation of the Blind v. Target
By Eric Goldman National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corp., No. C 06-01801 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 6, 2006) This case got a fair amount of attention when it first came out, so I’m a little late to this party….
Online Word of Mouth Presentation
By Eric Goldman Today I was in Pittsburgh presenting a work-in-progress talk called “Online Word of Mouth and Its Implications for Trademark Law.” My slides. Frank Pasquale’s and Rebecca Tushnet’s comments on the presentation.
Yahoo and Google Home Pages
By Eric Goldman Fascinating contraposition of stories on the Google and Yahoo home pages run by the Washington Post and BusinessWeek, respectively. From BusinessWeek: Yahoo makes its home page decisions strictly by following user clicks. They capture user clickstreams across…
Sept. 2006 Quick Links
By Eric Goldman Some stories that caught my eye in September: * Digg users are gaming the Digg algorithm. Greg Linden’s take. Naturally, Digg is fighting back by tweaking its algorithm to reduce the effect of gaming and preserve some…