Copy of Marvel v. NCSoft Ruling
CE Petit has posted a copy of the court’s March 9 opinion in Marvel Enterprises v. NCSoft Corporation (CV 04-9253-RGK). The opinion is rather unremarkable—mostly it deals with motions to dismiss, so the standard for upholding the pleadings is pretty…
Ruling in Marvel v. NCSoft
NCSoft has won some favorable rulings in its lawsuit with Marvel. Marvel sued NCSoft because users could use NCSoft’s software in its City of Heroes MMORPG to generate characters that looked like Marvel characters. From the news/press reports, it appears…
My Experiences with AdSense
USA Today article discussing AdSense. I’ve been using AdSense on my blog and website for the past couple of weeks. In general, I’m pretty happy with it—the AdSense ads are usually fairly relevant to my audience. In some cases, where…
FTC v. CartManager
The FTC obtained a settlement from CartManager. CartManager operates shopping cart functionality as a service for third party website customers. CartManager used personal information from the shopping carts in conflict with customers’ privacy policies presented to users. We have seen…
Google Punishes Itself for Cloaking
See eWeek article. My previous post. Thanks to Slashdot for the followup.
Regulating Data Brokers
The recent hacks into ChoicePoint’s and Lexis’ personal information databases has led to calls for further regulation of data brokers. While I don’t want to minimize the consequences of these hacks, including the severe consequences of identity theft, limiting data…
SPY Act Passes House Committee
The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the SPY Act, sending it to the House floor. The article illustrates continuing definitional problems with the bill.
iDownload’s Latest Letters
iDownload backs off of its legal threats to bloggers who characterized its software as spyware. If they were going to backpedal like this, why bare their fangs in the first place?
Google AutoLink and Copyright Law–A Fuller Explanation
There’s been a lot of discussion about Google’s AutoLink tool, including some questions about why I think it might violate copyright law. I can understand why this is confusing, particularly because the AutoLink tool raises two discrete questions. First, what…
Does Google Cloak?
Threadwatch has a story alleging that Google uses cloaking. If true, this would be ironic because Google bans cloaking. However, I’d like to hear Google’s side to this story before assuming it’s true. Also, I think it’s easy to overreact…