Denver IP Summit Presentation

By Eric Goldman I attended the Denver Summit on Intellectual Property and Digital Media. The audience was principally cable industry participants, but there were plenty of content creators (and legal academics) in attendance. I spoke about the various ways that…

Search Engines Awarded Legal Fees in Unmeritorious Copyright Case–Newborn v. Yahoo

By Eric Goldman Newborn v. Yahoo, 2006 WL 1409769 (D.D.C. May 23, 2006) I blogged about this case in November 2005. At that time, the plaintiff sued Yahoo and Google under copyright and trademark law because the search engines had…

NYT on Fair Use and Documentaries

By Eric Goldman The NY Times runs an article on documentaries and fair use. It describes the thicket of copyright clearances necessary to reuse film clips in documentaries, which can be fatal to a documentary project. It gives one example…

O’Reilly and the “Web 2.0” Trademark

By Eric Goldman O’Reilly Media is a publisher of technical books. They also operate some technical conferences, including the “O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference.” They are in the process of registering a trademark in the phrase “Web 2.0” for Arranging and…

Online Message Board Protected by 47 USC 230–DiMeo v. Max

By Eric Goldman DiMeo v. Max, No. 06-1544 (E.D. Pa. May 26, 2006) In my world, it’s not a party until someone spills something. But in Anthony DiMeo’s world, it appears that it’s not a party until someone brings a…

Merck v. Mediplan Redux–Keyword Purchases Really Aren’t Trademark Use

By Eric Goldman Merck & Co. v. Mediplan Health Consulting, Inc., 2006 WL 1418616 (SDNY motion for reconsideration denied May 24, 2006) In late March, the legality of the search engine keyword advertising industry got very murky due to two…

Teenager Busted for Creating Fake “News” Story

By Eric Goldman It seems like every day there are new stories about teenagers doing stupid things online, but this story still struck me as interesting and unusual. The incident involves a website, Cheezus.com, that asks the user to submit…

Edina Realty v. TheMLSOnline Settles

By Eric Goldman The Edina Realty v. TheMLSOnline case, which held (among other things) that purchasing a trademarked keyword was a trademark use in commerce, has reportedly settled, according to the Associated Press. That leaves in place the conflict between…

Cynical Consumers and Brand Antipathy

By Eric Goldman Interesting article in the NYT about negative consumer attitudes towards brands. The article says that “cynical consumers [desire] not simply to avoid companies and brands they dislike but also to punish them.” Thus, consumers may use their…

KinderStart v. Google Motions to Dismiss and Strike

By Eric Goldman KinderStart.com LLC v. Google, Inc., No. C 06-2057 RS (N.D. Cal. motions to dismiss and strike filed May 2, 2006) You may recall the pending lawsuit by KinderStart against Google for Google’s downgrade of KinderStart’s PageRank. My…