Click Defense Lawsuit Update
By Eric Goldman Click Defense v. Google, No. 5:05-cv-02579-RMW (N.D. Cal.). The Click Defense lawsuit is one of three pending click fraud actions (the other two being the Lane’s Gifts and CLRB Hanson Industries LLC cases). After launching the lawsuit…
Yale Regulating Search? Conference Recap
By Eric Goldman I attended the Regulating Search? conference at Yale Law School this weekend. This post contains the notes I took at the conference. A couple of meta-observations: * almost everyone on the various panels spoke against government regulation….
New Metatag/SEO Lawsuit–Salu, Inc. v. Pitts
By Eric Goldman Salu, Inc. v. Pitts (E.D. Ca. complaint filed Nov. 17, 2005). Introduction Salu operates skinstore.com, a website that sells skin care products. (With that name, I was totally expecting to find a porn site, but the website…
DMCA Online Safe Harbor Empirical Study by Urban and Quilter
By Eric Goldman Jennifer Urban of USC and Laura Quilter have released a working report entitled “Efficient Process or “Chilling Effects”? Takedown Notices Under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” To my knowledge, this is the first empirical…
Yale “Regulating Search?” Symposium
By Eric Goldman On December 3, Yale is sponsoring a symposium on regulating search engines. Although search engine issues have come up at plenty of other symposia, I think this is the first major law school symposium dedicated to the…
Google Launches Affiliate Programs
By Eric Goldman Google has launched 2 new affiliate programs. The first pays $100 for referring a new AdSense publisher who generates $100 in AdSense earnings. The second pays $1 for each new FireFox install containing the Google Toolbar. When…
Keyword Lawsuit Between Office Depot and Staples
By Eric Goldman Office Depot, Inc. v. Staples, Inc., No. 05-80901 (S.D. Fla. complaint filed Oct. 4, 2005 and answer/counterclaims filed Oct. 18, 2005). The WSJ picked up this story a few weeks ago, but I finally got my hands…
Search Engine Indexing Case–Newborn v. Yahoo
By Eric Goldman Newborn v. Yahoo, Inc., 2005 WL 2416336 (DDC Sept. 27, 2005) We got a new case on search engine liability for indexing content. The importance of the topic makes the case blog-worthy, even though this particular case…
My Very Own Search Engine Spam Page
By Eric Goldman I know that aggressive marketers develop what’s commonly referred to as “spam pages”–low-value-added web pages that are intended to be indexed by the search engines and receive a low amount of traffic. Even with a low amount…
Why I hope Google loses
By Mark McKenna The blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of the Authors Guild’s lawsuit against Google. See here, here, and here, in addition to Eric’s post here. UPDATE: this post collects the reaction of a number of commentators. I don’t…