Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006

By Eric Goldman No one is better at coughing up legislative hairballs than Congress. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (grafted to the end of the SAFE Port Act) was passed over 2 months ago, but my repeated…

Nov. 2006 Quick Links

By Eric Goldman My monthly roundup of noteworthy tidbits: * Yesmail, an email outsource vendor, was busted by the FTC under CAN-SPAM for failing to honor opt-out requests because Yesmail’s incoming email filters blocked those opt-out requests as spam. This…

Griping Blog Post Leads to Lawsuit–BidZirk v. Smith

By Eric Goldman BidZirk, LLC v. Smith, 2006 WL 3242333 (D.S.C. Nov. 7, 2006) Despite all of the hype about blog law, the reality is that we’ve had comparatively few blog-specific lawsuits. As a result, we give extra attention to…

October 2006 Quick Links

By Eric Goldman * All the media wants to do is talk about Google. All Google, all the time. Three major pieces in the span of three days: The NYT on lawsuits against Google. The WSJ on Google’s hiring practices….

Must Websites Comply with the ADA (and State-Law Equivalents)? National Federation of the Blind v. Target

By Eric Goldman National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corp., No. C 06-01801 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 6, 2006) This case got a fair amount of attention when it first came out, so I’m a little late to this party….

Texas Assistant Principal Sues Students and Parents Over Defamatory Profile on MySpace.com

By John Ottaviani High school students have been battling with and lampooning their assistant principals for generations. Last Spring, students in San Antonio, Texas, applied 21st century technology to the practice, when they allegedly set up a profile for their…

Google Child Porn Lawsuit Withdrawn–Toback v. Google

By Eric Goldman Sensing that his 15 minutes of fame was up, Jeffrey Toback has withdrawn his lawsuit against Google regarding Google’s alleged facilitation of child pornography. This withdrawal is hardly surprising given the lawsuit’s complete lack of merit. Nevertheless,…

Congress to Make Search Engine Bias Illegal?

By Eric Goldman Like we couldn’t see this coming. To make the point that the content providers are playing with fire, one member of Congress has proposed to sweep them into the Net Neutrality legislation (see the text). Ha ha….

“Must Carry” Lawsuit Against Search Engines–Langdon v. Google

By Eric Goldman Langdon v. Google, 1:06-cv-00319-JJF (D. Delaware complaint filed May 17, 2006) Omigosh, will these lawsuits over search engine editorial discretion ever cease? Earlier this week I reported on (yet another) lawsuit against Google for dropping a website…

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…