ICANN Not a State Actor
McNeil v. VeriSign, Inc., 2005 WL 741939 (9th Cir. April 1, 2005). The Ninth Circuit ruled (in an unpublished opinion) that ICANN is not a state actor. According to my research, I’ve found the following cases holding that private Internet…
Cairo v. Crossmedia Services
Cairo, Inc. v. Crossmedia Services, Inc., 2005 WL 756610 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 1, 2005). Cairo runs a search engine listing advertised sales. CMS has a database of advertisements. To build its search database, Cairo’s robot crawls CMS’s servers, which CMS…
Anti-Spoofing Protocol
A spammer makes unauthorized use of a company’s trademarks in an email promoting the purchase of goods/services. This isn’t a phishing email per se; it’s not trying to disgorge personal statistics for identity theft or outright theft (although it may…
Slate Exhibit on Breast Enhancement Patents
Slate has a “revealing” (sorry) look at patents related to breast enhancements throughout history. We tend not to think of the patent database as a great porn resource, but there’s plenty of titillation for those who know where to look….
Grokster Oral Arguments
If you haven’t seen it elsewhere, the transcript from the oral arguments in Grokster.
Talk on 47 USC 230 at Michigan State
I’m going to be talking tomorrow about derivative liability at a conference at Michigan State University Law School. You can see a preview of my talk. Unquestionably, my perspective is colored by my experiences at Epinions!
Talk at Stanford on Online Trademark Law
I’m giving a talk at Stanford on Saturday about online trademark law. You can get a sneak preview of my outline. (This talk is largely cribbed from my Deregulating Relevancy paper).
German Meta-Search Engine May Be Liable for Defamation
Einstmann v. Sharelook Beteiligungen GmbH, LG Berlin, No. 27 O 45/05, 2/22/05. Sorry I’m a little late in picking this up, but a German court has held that a meta-search engine could be liable for defamation. According to the news…
ACLU Considering Challenge to Utah Anti-Internet Porn Law
The ACLU of Utah is considering a constitutional challenge against Utah’s most-recent anti-Internet porn law. Despite Rep. Dougall’s defensiveness, this law is almost certainly unconstitutional, and I’m confident that it will be struck down when scrutinized by the courts. We…
Data Mining and Attention Consumption
My short book chapter, Data Mining and Attention Consumption, has finally hit SSRN (it took almost a month to go through the SSRN review process–not sure why it took so long). The abstract: “This Essay challenges the prevailing hostility towards…