Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2005 Passes House Judiciary Committee
The Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2005 (HR 683) has passed the House Judiciary Committee on March 9. A number of amendments were made to the bill, but the bill still remains very favorable to trademark owners. The bill still…
Microsoft v. Zamos (and Zamos v. Microsoft)
Amusing story in the Register about David Zamos, a Kent State chemistry student, who bought a discounted educational version of Microsoft Windows XP Pro and Office XP Pro at the school bookstore. He decided he didn’t want it, tried to…
What Ever Happened to DotComGuy?
I had reason to investigate what happened to DotComGuy. You may remember him as the guy who lived in his apartment during all of 2000, ordering all of his needs from the Internet and webcasting his life. In 2004, he…
Seattle Times series on InfoSpace
The Seattle Times did a remarkable multi-part expose of InfoSpace. The series is particularly unflattering to Naveen Jain, InfoSpace’s founder and chief huckster. There’s a thin line among entrepreneurs between visionary and crook, and the Seattle Times marshals plenty of…
Copy of Marvel v. NCSoft Ruling
CE Petit has posted a copy of the court’s March 9 opinion in Marvel Enterprises v. NCSoft Corporation (CV 04-9253-RGK). The opinion is rather unremarkable—mostly it deals with motions to dismiss, so the standard for upholding the pleadings is pretty…
Ruling in Marvel v. NCSoft
NCSoft has won some favorable rulings in its lawsuit with Marvel. Marvel sued NCSoft because users could use NCSoft’s software in its City of Heroes MMORPG to generate characters that looked like Marvel characters. From the news/press reports, it appears…
My Experiences with AdSense
USA Today article discussing AdSense. I’ve been using AdSense on my blog and website for the past couple of weeks. In general, I’m pretty happy with it—the AdSense ads are usually fairly relevant to my audience. In some cases, where…
FTC v. CartManager
The FTC obtained a settlement from CartManager. CartManager operates shopping cart functionality as a service for third party website customers. CartManager used personal information from the shopping carts in conflict with customers’ privacy policies presented to users. We have seen…
Google Punishes Itself for Cloaking
See eWeek article. My previous post. Thanks to Slashdot for the followup.
Regulating Data Brokers
The recent hacks into ChoicePoint’s and Lexis’ personal information databases has led to calls for further regulation of data brokers. While I don’t want to minimize the consequences of these hacks, including the severe consequences of identity theft, limiting data…