Search Engine Strategies Copyright and Trademark Panel

By Eric Goldman Today I participated in the Copyright and Trademark panel at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, along with Clarke Walton, Eve Chaurand-Fraser of Ask, Mary Berk of Microsoft and Debra Wilcox of Baker & Hostetler. As usual,…

Roommates.com Plaintiff’s Reply to EFF Brief

By Eric Goldman The Fair Housing Councils have filed a reply to the EFF et al amicus brief (which I joined) in favor of an en banc hearing in the Roommates.com case. In it, the plaintiffs admit that aspects of…

American Airlines Sues Google Over Keyword Ads

American Airlines v. Google, 4:07-cv-00487 (N.D. Tex. complaint filed Aug. 16, 2007) [Warning: 4.4MB file] “American Airlines does not bring this lawsuit lightly.” (para. 6) Well, this is interesting. It’s not unusual for a trademark owner to sue Google for…

Lemley on Online Safe Harbors

By Eric Goldman Mark Lemley, Rationalizing Internet Safe Harbors Mark Lemley has weighed in on an topic near and dear to my heart–secondary liability online. He advances two principal arguments in his paper. First, it would make sense to harmonize…

2007 Cyberspace Law Syllabus

By Eric Goldman I’ve posted my 2007 Cyberlaw syllabus. Unlike the past few years, which were a little slow cyberlaw-wise, the past 12 months saw a lot of important developments. Let me recap some of changes I made to my…

Bracha Responds re. Search Engine Regulation

By Eric Goldman Last week I blogged on the new paper by Frank Pasquale and Oren Bracha advocating for substantive regulation of search engine operations. In my critique, I said: My biggest beef with the paper is that it focuses…

Pasquale & Bracha on Regulating Search Engines

By Eric Goldman Oren Bracha and Frank Pasquale, Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness and Accountability in the Law of Search Frank Pasquale has written several interesting papers on search engine regulation. See, e.g., my blog post on a prior work…

Food Tastes Better When Branded “McDonalds”

By Eric Goldman Recently I blogged on a study showing that consumers like search results more when they are branded as coming from Google, even if the search results are substantively identical. We now have a similar study, this time…

CAN-SPAM Defendant Awarded $111k in Fees/Costs–Gordon v. Virtumundo

By Eric Goldman Gordon v. Virtumundo, 06-0204-JCC (W.D. Wash. Aug. 1, 2007) I believe this ruling represents the first time that a CAN-SPAM plaintiff has been ordered to pay attorneys’ fees and costs to a defendant. As a result, it’s…

Taking Intangible Electronic Files is Criminal Fraud–NM v. Kirby

By Eric Goldman New Mexico v. Kirby, 2007-NMSC-034 (N.M. June 13, 2007) This is a very confusing case, so maybe you can help me figure out what it means. At minimum, this case highlights the problems that can be arise…