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…
Microsoft Will Be an Adware Vendor
By Eric Goldman Microsoft is considering migrating some of its software titles to an ad-supported model instead of a consumer licensing fee model. This isn’t exactly a new idea–this development has been anticipated for at least a decade. However, if…
California Anti-Phishing Law–Cal. B&P Code Sec. 22948
By Eric Goldman Going through my stack, I came across Cal. Business & Professions Code Sec. 22948-22948.3 (SB 355), California’s recently enacted anti-phishing law. In general, compared to other state anti-Internet behavior laws, this law is relatively targeted and unobjectionable….
Jill, Meet Best Buy’s Friendly Human Shopbot/Profiler
I’m a little surprised this article hasn’t generated more discussion. Last week, the Washington Post ran an article about Best Buy’s efforts to segment and target its customer base. They have developed a set of consumer profiles that they describe…
Search Tidbits from ABA Annual Meeting
At the ABA Annual Meeting, I was on a panel with Rose Hagan of Google and Allison McDade of Dell. A couple of tidbits from the presentations that caught my attention: 1) Rose said that Google has now been sued…
eBay, the Search Engine
Is eBay a search engine? Of course it is. eBay is acknowledging as much. As the NY Times reports, “In a conference call, Ms. Whitman also described the importance of improving eBay’s search capability, calling the service as much a…
AOL Advertises on Competitors to Get Traffic to AOL.com
To build traffic for AOL.com, AOL is buying search ads on Google and Yahoo. The article says: “AOL had initially considered spending as much as $50 million on television ads to promote the portal. But that changed after the company…
Do You Want Pictures With That Download?
By John Ottaviani OK, maybe it’s just a slow news day, or maybe it’s because I’m working on a presentation for next week on the implications of open source software for attorneys involved in mergers and acquisitions of software companies,…
Supreme Court on Interstate Shipment of Wine–Granholm v. Heald
Granholm v. Heald, 544 U.S. __ (May 16, 2005). The US Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, has declared that states cannot discriminate between out-of-state wineries and in-state wineries in allowing direct-to-consumer sales. Such discrimination violates the dormant commerce clause….
Economist on the Long Tail
Good article from the Economist explaining the Long Tail in a basic and understandable way. The article even addresses the thorny organizational/marketing problem implicit in the Long Tail. (Thanks to the Long Tail blog for the pointer).