eBay Isn’t Liable for Patent-Infringing Marketplace Sales–Blazer v. eBay
Blazer owns patent 8,375,624 for “Carpenter Bee Traps.” He filed NOCIs with eBay alleging the sale of infringing items on eBay. The court says “eBay has a policy to quickly remove listings when a [patent] NOCI provides a court order,…
Constitution Protects Publication of Politicians’ Home Address/Phone Number–Publius v. Boyer-Vine
Doe Publius (nice alias) runs the “The Real Write Winger” blog, hosted by WordPress. He was unhappy about California’s ammunition purchase registry, which publishes “the driver’s license information, residential address and telephone number, and date of birth for anyone who…
New Paper: “The Defend Trade Secrets Act Isn’t an ‘Intellectual Property’ Law”
Congress worked on the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) for years, yet the final product has a number of rough edges and curiosities. One example is the following sentence: This section and the amendments made by this section shall not…
Section 230 Protects Grindr From Harrassed User’s Claims–Herrick v. Grindr
This is a well-constructed and thoughtful Section 230 ruling. If this case keeps going in the same direction, it has the potential to become a major Section 230 precedent. Herrick claims that ex-boyfriend JC used Grindr to launch a vicious…
Copyshop Covered By “Non-Commercial” Creative Commons License–Great Minds v. FedEx
Great Minds developed a math curriculum called Eureka Math. It commercializes the Eureka Math materials itself but also released the materials pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike (CC BY-NC-SA) 4.0 license. Great Minds discovered at least two circumstances where school…
YouTube Defeats Another Remove-and-Relocate Case–Darnaa v. Google
YouTube has been sued a few times for removing a video based on its spam policies and then relocating it to a new URL because remove-and-relocate breaks in-bound links (and any associated marketing investments) and resets the view counter. This…
Copyright Office Q&A Session About The New Online DMCA Designated Agents Directory
By guest blogger Franklin Graves Last week, at the ABA’s Midyear Meeting in Miami, Florida, the Section of Intellectual Property Law’s Computer Program & New Technologies Committee hosted a Q&A event with the U.S. Copyright Office to discuss the new online DMCA Designated…
First Amendment Protects Google’s De-Indexing of “Pure Spam” Websites–e-ventures v. Google
e-ventures does SEO. Google determined that e-ventures “egregiously” violated its webspam guidelines. As a result, Google de-indexed all of e-ventures’ sites. e-ventures claims Google had bad motivations for the de-indexing decisions. The evidence didn’t support this claim: “e-ventures’ own consultant…
Amazon Defeats Lawsuit Over Its Keyword Ad Purchases–Lasoff v. Amazon
Lasoff owns Ingrass, which makes artificial turf. He claims he’s losing business to “cheaper, counterfeit” versions of Ingrass. (The opinion uses the term “counterfeit,” though it probably means knockoffs). He objects to the fact that Amazon runs keyword ads for…
Section 230 Helps Snapchat Defeat Personal Injury Claim Due to ‘Speed Filter’–Maynard v. McGee
Snapchat (a/k/a “Snap,” though I can’t say that name without thinking first of this and this) has a “speed filter,” an app that tracks users’ speed. Complaints emerged online that the filter motivated Snapchat users to drive recklessly. The complaint…