Q4 2014 & Q1 2015 Quick Links Part 4 (Potpourri)

Commerce

* NAD tells CheapoAir that it can’t run keyword ads showing the lowest priced flight in its database if it can’t deliver that fare to the consumer.

* United Airlines sues 22-year-old who found a method for buying cheaper plane tickets. The complaint.

* 9th Circuit says the Americans With Disabilities Act doesn’t apply to eBay (Earll v. eBay) or Netflix (Cullen v. NetFlix). Compare to the Vermont district court ruling in NFB v. Scribd case.

* Time: The Rise and Fall (and Rise and Fall) of eBay

* Wired: How Etsy Alienated Its Crafters and Lost Its Soul

* NY Times: Alibaba Will Help Curb Export of Recalled Items. Related blog post.

* Recorder: FedEx Says It Can’t Face Charges for Illegal Drug Shipments

* MacKinnon v. IMVU, Inc., 2014 WL 306842 (Cal. App. Ct. Oct 30, 2014). Depriving consumers of virtual assets may be actionable.

* Cracked: 21 Tricks Stores Use to Control Your Brain

* Associated Press: How Restaurants Get You to Spend More

* Cracked: 5 Weird Things I Learned Selling My Used Panties on Reddit. The Internet makes markets more efficient.

Silk Road

* Wired: Not Just Silk Road 2: Feds Seize Two Other Drug Markets and Counting

* Wired: How a Russian Dark Web Drug Market Outlived the Silk Road (And Silk Road 2)

* Wired: How the Dark Web’s New Favorite Drug Market Is Profiting From Silk Road 2’s Demise

* Fusion: 5 other insane things a corrupt DEA agent did while allegedly stealing Bitcoin from Silk Road

Uber

* Farhad Manjoo: Uber, a Start-Up Going So Fast It Could Miss a Turn

* BuzzFeed: What Uber Drivers Really Make (According To Their Pay Stubs)

* WSJ: Uber Laws: A Primer on Ridesharing Regulations

* Wired: There Are Good Reasons Why People Love to Sue Uber

Trespass

* Facebook v. Grunin (N.D. Cal. Jan. 8, 2015)

Facebook is entitled to default judgment on the Section 1030(a) and Section 502(c) claims because the complaint alleged, inter alia, that after Grunin’s access was terminated and after he received two cease-and-desist letters, Grunin intentionally accessed Facebook’s computers and servers to obtain account credentials, Facebook credit lines, Facebook ads, and other information, causing more than $5,000 in losses to Facebook. Grunin intentionally circumvented Facebook’s technical measures by impersonating others to obtain Facebook accounts to run ads which were never paid for.

* Law360: Craigslist Submits $2.1M Judgment Deal In Site Scraping Suit. Related post.

* Medium: The Troll’s Lawyer.

Contracts

* NJ.com:  What happens when a ‘thirty-seven-fifty’ bottle of wine really costs $3,750. Related blog post.

* Craigslist’s second amended complaint against 3Taps.  Prior blog post.

* NY Times: One-Third of Top Websites Restrict Customers’ Right to Sue

* Joshua Mitts, “How Much Mandatory Disclosure is Effective?“: “three warnings had little impact on contracting decisions but six warnings caused 20-30% fewer participants to choose the warned-of provider regardless of the discount size. Three and six warnings equally led to an improvement of 9-10% in consumer understanding, suggesting that a long list of disclosures induces cognitive overload.”

* Sacchi v. Verizon: “Whether or not amendments posted to Verizon’s website provided sufficient notice to Plaintiff, the fact remains that Plaintiff subsequently received other forms of notice that adequately informed him of the amendments and that clearly provided that continued use of Verizon’s services would be deemed acceptance of the new terms.”

* Washington Post: Teen volleyball player takes her dispute to another kind of court

Idea Protection

* Star Trek TOS, second season, I, Mudd episode:

MUDD: Yes, well, I organised a technical information service bringing modern industrial techniques to backward planets, making available certain valuable patents to struggling young civilisations throughout the galaxy.
KIRK: Did you pay royalties to the owners of those patents?
MUDD: Well, actually, Kirk, as a defender of the free enterprise system, I found myself in a rather ambiguous conflict as a matter of principle.
SPOCK: He did not pay royalties.
MUDD: Knowledge, sir, should be free to all.

* Yahoo: The U.S. Government Has a Secret System for Stalling Patents. WTF?

* BNA: The Plant Variety Protection Act—An Increasingly Important Form of Intellectual Property Protection for Plants

* The Recorder: Publicly Traded NPEs Take Investors for a Bumpy Ride

* Section 8.5 of Amazon’s AWS contract purportedly gives Amazon a perpetual patent license to its customers’ patents. Really?

* NY Times: During Bakery Break-In, Only Recipes Are Taken

* NY Times on how home contractors are being required to sign NDAs before working on the homes of tech execs.

* Jim Bessen: How Companies Kill Their Employees’ Job Searches

Email

* NY Times: Vague Email Rules Let Federal Agencies Decide When to Hit Save or Delete

* Gizmodo: Senator on Internet Policy Subcommittee Has “Never Sent an Email”. NY Times: Storing Emails From These Senators Will Be Easy, if They Ever Send One.

Crime

* WaPo: Holder limits seized-asset sharing process that split billions with local, state police. Related: WSJ: Legislation to Curb Civil Forfeiture Advances in States

* Wired: The Sneakiest Way Prosecutors Get a Guilty Verdict: PowerPoint

* Washington Post: Why livestreaming apps like Meerkat and Periscope will be a huge boon for cops

Litigation

* The Atlantic on a way to bypass restrictions on class action lawsuits (spoiler: use technology to coordinate individual claims).

* Katz v. Lester Schwab Katz & Dwyer (NY Sup Ct Dec 10, 2014). Bloggers’ reporting on case proceedings is privileged.

Lawyers

* ABA Journal: 100 innovations in law

* ABA Journal: When making things free means gaining more interest (about free online document generators offered by big law firms).

* ABA Journal: Lawyers of Reality TV

* Mental Floss: 11 Legal Cases with Crazy Names

Miscellaneous

* NY Times: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life. I tested on her story in my Fall 2014 Internet Law exam.

* Washington Post: Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right.

* WSJ: Policing Vanity License Plates Is No Job for an EJIT

* Washington Post: Barbie sales are nose-diving. Maybe they should revive their ad campaign where they use the Aqua ‘Barbie Girl’ song?

* Why does Comcast’s customer “service” suck so bad? Cracked has the answers.

* Oddee: 10 Incredible Instagram Fails

* Cracked: 8 Things That Broke the Internet in 2014 (for a Minute)

* Cracked: 6 Insane Details of Corrupt Politics That Movies Get Wrong