Announcing the 2016 Edition of ‘Internet Law: Cases & Materials’
I’m pleased to announce this year’s edition of my Internet Law casebook, Internet Law: Cases & Materials. It’s available for sale as a PDF at Gumroad for $8, as a Kindle book for $9.99, and in hard copy at CreateSpace…
WARNING: Copyright Office Resurrects Troubling Plan To Strip Websites Of 512 Safe Harbor
The Copyright Office has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) regarding a new electronic submission process for websites and online services to designate agents to receive 512(c)(3) copyright takedown notices. The agent designation process is crucial to the 17…
Amazon Defeats Publicity Rights Lawsuit Over ‘A Gronking To Remember’ Book Cover (Forbes Cross-Post)
Greg McKenna writes as a woman using the pen name Lacey Noonan. In 2014, McKenna wrote the book “A Gronking to Remember,” an erotic “fan fiction” book about New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski. He self-published the book digitally…
Court Orders Uber To Control Its Google Search Results
What happens when national trademarks, used on the borderless Internet, conflict with regional trademarks? This is one of the most venerable topics in Internet Law; see, e.g., the Blue Note case from 20 years ago. More recently, Jake blogged about…
High Schooler’s “Murder” Tweet Isn’t “Cyberstalking”–State v. Kohonen
Ruh roh. Teens and Twitter. What could possibly go wrong? In 8th grade, SG reported Jessica Kohonen’s behavior, which led to her suspension. [Note: the court uses the alias JK in the opinion but the caption has Jessica’s full name….
Surveying Ten Years Of Top Internet Law Developments (Forbes Cross-Post)
I’ve been writing an annual list of top Internet Law developments for a decade, so I thought it might be fun to look back at my #1 ranked development in each of the past 10 years. Let’s take a stroll…
Top 10 Internet Law Developments of 2015 (Forbes Cross-Post)
I’m pleased to present my annual list of top Internet Law developments from the past year. As the years go by, increasingly the most important Internet Law developments/crackdowns are occurring internationally, but I tried to focus on U.S. developments. 10)…
Online Dating Services Must Give California Users a “Cooling Off” Period–Howell v. Grindr
California has a statute applicable to dating contracts that gives consumers the right to cancel within 3 days of signing up. Companies must advise clients of this and provide a cancellation mechanism and a full refund. Grindr, an online dating…
Court Says Yelp Reviewers Aren’t Employees (Forbes Cross-Post)
Way before sharing economy labor practices fueled presidential candidate soundbites, there have been allegations that users contributing content and services to websites were employees. For example, an employment lawsuit over AOL’s “Community Leader” program from the late 1990s led to…
The Long-Term Promise of Privacy Federalism, Part 2
Yesterday, guest blogger Bilyana Petkova summarized some of her arguments in favor of “privacy federalism,” i.e., temporary state-level regulation of privacy matters, a topic she addresses more fully in a forthcoming article on SSRN. In helping her prepare her post,…