A Jury Verdict That Competitive Keyword Advertising Isn’t Trademark Infringement–College Network v. Moore
By Eric Goldman College Network, Inc. v. Moore Educational Publishers, Inc., 2010 WL 1923763 (5th Cir. May 12, 2010). The jury verdict form from January 2009. The district court’s final judgment from June 2009. In December, I blogged about the…
Troubling Ruling About 47 USC 230 and Moderators–Cornelius v. DeLuca
By Eric Goldman Cornelius v. DeLuca, 2010 WL 1709928 (D. Idaho April 26, 2010) I blogged about this case last year. In that post, I described the situation: DeLuca runs bodybuilding.com, a fitness website and online retailer. The plaintiffs sell…
Facebook Gets Partial Win in Click Fraud Lawsuit
By Eric Goldman In re Facebook PPC Advertising Litigation, C 09-3043 JF (HRL) (N.D. Cal. April 22, 2010). My blog post on the complaint filing. This is an unexpectedly hard-to-parse ruling in a click fraud lawsuit against Facebook. Facebook sought…
Amazon Wins Keyword Advertising Suit–Video Professor v. Amazon
By Eric Goldman Video Professor, Inc. v . Amazon.com, Inc., 1:09-cv-00636-REB-KLM (D. Colo. April 21, 2010) Video Professor has been involved in a few interesting legal scrapes. For example, you may recall that in 2007 they launched a major crackdown…
FTC Drops Investigation of Advertiser Who Gave Gifts to Bloggers
By Eric Goldman Although the FTC’s revised Endorsements and Testimonials Guidelines were inscrutable overall, a few things were, in fact, clear from the FTC’s announcements: 1) The FTC believes shill blogging is out of control 2) They blame advertisers for…
Online Publishers, Advertising and Privacy Considerations
By Eric Goldman I recently spoke at OMMA Global on a panel entitled “Can Publishers Take Ownership of Privacy?” This panel focused on the role of online publishers in the marketing-and-privacy discussions. Most of the privacy angst has focused on…
FTC Endorsement and Testimonials Guidelines Notes from SMX West
By Eric Goldman Last month, I spoke at SMX West about the FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Guidelines. My talk notes: Beatles fans routinely parsed the meaning of John Lennon’s lyrics, which irritated him. When Lennon released “I am the Walrus,”…
eBay Mostly Beats Tiffany in the Second Circuit, but False Advertising Claims Remanded
By Eric Goldman Tiffany (NJ) Inc. v. eBay Inc., 2010 WL 1236315 (2d Cir. April 1, 2010) In a subtle opinion with potentially significant implications, eBay has preserved most of its big 2008 district court victory in the long-running Tiffany…
March 2010 Quick Links
By Eric Goldman Internet Exceptionalism * Stern v. Sony Corp., CV 09-7710 PA (C.D. Cal. Feb. 8 2010) “to the extent Plaintiff is suing Sony as a manufacturer of video games, and the provider of online services, Sony is not…
Google Gets Favorable ECJ Opinion, But Will It Prove to Be a Hollow Victory?
By Eric Goldman The European Court of Justice issued its long-anticipated decision in the three Google AdWords cases (C-236/08, C-237-08 and C-238/08) referred to it by the French Cour de Cassation. The ruling only answers the questions posed to it…