Terminated eBay Vendor Gets Day in Court Against eBay–Crawford v. Consumer Depot
By Eric Goldman Crawford v. Consumer Depot, Inc., 05-3242 (Tenn. County Ct. Dec. 9, 2009) Essex and Consumer Depot are competitors in the eBay consignment business. According to the court, prior to 2005 Essex used to allow its employees to…
Top Cyberlaw Developments of 2009
By John E. Ottaviani (Thanks to Eric for letting me post this list here!) [Eric’s note: some of you may recall John, a regular blog guest contributor from 2005-07. It’s great to have another contribution from him.] Eric will post…
October 2009 Quick Links
By Eric Goldman Just a reminder that I am posting most of these types of links exclusively to my Twitter feed. * Tricome v. eBay, Inc., 2009 WL 3365873 (E.D.Pa. Oct 19, 2009). Court upholds eBay user agreement’s venue selection…
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 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…
CAN-SPAM Doesn’t Preempt CA Privacy Law–Powers v. Pottery Barn
by Ethan Ackerman On Sept. 19th, a California state appellate court held that CAN-SPAM doesn’t categorically trump state laws that may address email. Defendant retail store Pottery Barn was hoping it would agree with the initial ruling of the California…
Resale of International Textbooks to US Students Not Protected by First Sale Doctrine–Pearson v. Liu
By Eric Goldman Pearson Education, Inc. v. Liu, 2009 WL 3064779 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 25, 2009) As a complement to Venkat’s excellent post on Vernor v. Autodesk from this morning, it turns out that we are celebrating First Sale Doctrine day…
Yahoo Subpoenas Expedia in American Airlines Lawsuit
By Eric Goldman Yahoo and American Airlines are still tussling over Yahoo’s sale of American Airlines’ trademarks as keyword triggers (see background at 1, 2, 3). According to Yahoo, American Airlines is arguing that online travel agencies such as Expedia…
2009 Cyberspace Law Syllabus and Some Comments
By Eric Goldman I have posted my syllabus for this semester’s Cyberspace Law course. This blog post describes the changes from my 2008 course reader. For more on my pedagogical approaches to the course, see my Teaching Cyberlaw article. Trademark…
State of the Net West Recap
By Eric Goldman Yesterday, the High Tech Law Institute and the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus co-sponsored the Third Annual State of the Net West event at Santa Clara University. The featured participants were 3 members of Congress…