Last night, the House passed the Consumer Review Fairness Act. The Senate passed the nearly identical Consumer Review Freedom Act back in December. I’ll discuss in a moment the minor variations between the two. Because of these differences, the Senate…
[Note: Venkat represented Yelp in this case but was not involved in the preparation of this post.] For all of the drama associated with Section 230 jurisprudence this year–including in the Ninth Circuit–it’s easy to forget that Section 230 still…
This is a copyright lawsuit over real estate photos. This genre of litigation has surprising vitality! Stross is a photographer and broker who participates in multiple listing services (MLSs).He alleges that Redfin infringed because (1) it used “Stross’s photographs of sold…
Knutsson was a technology reporter and creator of the “CyberGuy” persona. He worked for TV station KTLA between 1996 and 2011. In 2005, he entered into an agreement with KTLA to be paid an annual salary of $325,000 a year…
Arkansas has a statute that prohibits: use a telephone for the purpose of offering any goods or services for sale, or for conveying information regarding any goods or services for the purpose of soliciting the sale or purchase of the…
You recall the Ninth Circuit’s Doe v. ModelMayhem (Doe #14 v. Internet Brands) ruling from earlier this year. It held that a website couldn’t invoke Section 230 against a claim that the site should have warned its users about potential…
The holy grail of trademark owners is to obtain enforceable trademark rights for the standard ways people talk to each other. If achieved, the trademark owner can put up a toll gate on ordinary conversation and thwart or even shut…
Four years ago, I joined Forbes’ “contributor” program, which lets independent authors publish/blog through Forbes’ network without editorial pre-review. Jonathan Glick at Re/Code called these programs “platishers”, a portmanteau of “platform” and “publisher.” (Personally, I’d vote for “platisher” as one…
[Eric’s introduction: ever since the Ninth Circuit mishandled the already-muddled definitions of “clickwrap” and “browsewrap” in the Nguyen case, we’ve seen a steady decline in the coherence of the law of online contract formation. Judges can’t figure out whether or…
This is a personal jurisdiction case, so I’ll get right to the point. If an AdWords advertiser buys keywords that contain geographic terms, the advertiser might face a greater risk of personal jurisdiction in those geographies. It’s likely that buying…