The Copyright Office has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) regarding a new electronic submission process for websites and online services to designate agents to receive 512(c)(3) copyright takedown notices. The agent designation process is crucial to the 17…
You’d probably be hopping mad if Google manually kicked your website out of its search index; and if you’re an SEO company and Google also kicked all of your clients out, you’d probably feel pretty litigious. But courts have repeatedly…
This is an awesome parody account/First Amendment case. Todd Levitt is a self-described “badass lawyer” (this description comes from his since-deleted Twitter account) and an adjunct instructor at Central Michigan University (CMU). His Twitter account looked interesting, to say the…
The Supreme Court issued its opinion in Spokeo v. Robins. A six Justice majority reversed the Ninth Circuit’s decision on the basis that the Ninth Circuit did not sufficiently consider whether Mr. Robins’s alleged harms were “concrete.” On the question…
The nominative use doctrine allows third party references to trademark owners using the trademarks they chose as their preferred descriptors. Without a robust and well-functioning nominative use doctrine, trademark owners can have too much control over their brands–they can shut…
In April, I gave a talk at the University of Sussex on Section 230 as economy policy by encouraging consumer reviews that improve marketplaces. If this sounds vaguely familiar, you’re not imagining things. I’ve been working on this paper since…
Uber allegedly has over 300,000 drivers. In a population that large, inevitably some bad apples will do stupid or illegal things. Uber tries to curb such behavior by doing background investigations (which it has also been sued for) and removing…
This is a social media evidence ruling. Plaintiff filed a Fair Housing Act lawsuit alleging that a prospective landlord decline to rent an apartment after learning that two of plaintiff’s children would be living with her. The lease denial allegedly…
In April, I spoke at the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association (BILETA) annual meeting at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, England. BILETA is an academic work-in-progress conference series for British/Irish cyberlaw and IT/IP professors, so I…
John Fanning challenged the FTC findings that the website he developed, named Jerk.com, materially misrepresented its attributes. On appeal, the First Circuit affirms. Jerk.com resembled Ripoff Report, but for people. The court’s description of the site and its offerings are…