Revisiting If Suing Bloggers For Copyright Infringement Can Be Profitable–BWP v. Mishka

Ever since the Righthaven debacle, I’ve been wondering about the profitability of copyright enforcement actions against bloggers. Bloggers aren’t the deepest pockets, and numerous copyright doctrines make wins and big judgments expensive and unlikely, plus a single 505 fee shift…

Copyshop Covered By “Non-Commercial” Creative Commons License–Great Minds v. FedEx

Great Minds developed a math curriculum called Eureka Math. It commercializes the Eureka Math materials itself but also released the materials pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike (CC BY-NC-SA) 4.0 license. Great Minds discovered at least two circumstances where school…

YouTube Defeats Another Remove-and-Relocate Case–Darnaa v. Google

YouTube has been sued a few times for removing a video based on its spam policies and then relocating it to a new URL because remove-and-relocate breaks in-bound links (and any associated marketing investments) and resets the view counter. This…

Illinois Anti-SLAPP Law Doesn’t Apply To Law Firm Blog Posts–Bock & Hatch v. McGuireWoods

We’re revisiting the important and entirely self-referential issue of defamation liability for blogging about judicial opinions. As I’ve discussed before (this post is perhaps my most heartfelt), blogging about judicial opinions is automatically risky because at least one side has…

Ellen DeGeneres Defeats Lawsuit Over Breast Pun--TiTi Pierce v. Warner Bros

Ellen DeGeneres Defeats Lawsuit Over Breast Pun–TiTi Pierce v. Warner Bros

The Ellen Show, featuring Ellen DeGeneres, runs a periodic segment called “What’s Wrong with These Signs? Signs.” In Feb. 2016, the segment included a sign for “Nipple Convalescent Home” followed by the plaintiff’s real estate yard sign, displaying her name…

University Rejection of Students' Marijuana-Themed T-Shirt Violates First Amendment--Gerlich v. Leath

University Rejection of Students’ Marijuana-Themed T-Shirt Violates First Amendment–Gerlich v. Leath

Iowa State (ISU) officially recognizes a student chapter for NORML, a marijuana advocacy group. All ISU student groups can use ISU trademarks on merchandise if they comply with the “Guidelines for University Trademark Use by Student and Campus Organizations,” as…

Copyright Office Q&A Session About The New Online DMCA Designated Agents Directory

By guest blogger Franklin Graves Last week, at the ABA’s Midyear Meeting in Miami, Florida, the Section of Intellectual Property Law’s Computer Program & New Technologies Committee hosted a Q&A event with the U.S. Copyright Office to discuss the new online DMCA Designated…

First Amendment Protects Google’s De-Indexing of “Pure Spam” Websites–e-ventures v. Google

e-ventures does SEO. Google determined that e-ventures “egregiously” violated its webspam guidelines. As a result, Google de-indexed all of e-ventures’ sites. e-ventures claims Google had bad motivations for the de-indexing decisions. The evidence didn’t support this claim: “e-ventures’ own consultant…

Melania Loses Defamation Lawsuit on Jurisdiction Grounds–Trump v. Tarpley

As we know, our president frequently threatens defamation lawsuits, only occasionally delivers on those threats (remember the guarantee to sue the women who accused him of sexual assault?), sometimes brings SLAPPs when he does actually sue for defamation (remember when…

Amazon Defeats Lawsuit Over Its Keyword Ad Purchases–Lasoff v. Amazon

Lasoff owns Ingrass, which makes artificial turf. He claims he’s losing business to “cheaper, counterfeit” versions of Ingrass. (The opinion uses the term “counterfeit,” though it probably means knockoffs). He objects to the fact that Amazon runs keyword ads for…