Google AdWords Contract Upheld (Again)–Feldman v. Google

By Eric Goldman Feldman v. Google, Inc., 2007 WL 966011 (E.D. Pa. March 29, 2007) Yet another click fraud lawsuit, this time involving one of the 556 plaintiffs that opted out of the Google click fraud settlement. In my prior…

New Discussion Draft of GPL3 is Posted

By John Ottaviani The Free Software Foundation posted draft 3 of GPL3 on its website today. The General Public License (GPL) is one of the most widely used open source licenses. Version 1 was released in 1981, and Version 2…

Click Fraud Lawsuit Survives Motion to Dismiss–Payday Advance v. FindWhat

By Eric Goldman Payday Advance Plus, Inc. v. Findwhat.com, Inc., 2007 WL 760437 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 12, 2007) The high-profile click fraud lawsuits against Google and Yahoo settled last summer, but other lesser-known lawsuits appear to be in the pipeline, such…

Dumb Domain Name Dispute Du Jour–Korb v. Maxmedia

By Eric Goldman Korb v. Maxmedia, Inc., 2007 WL 734423 (E.D. Mich. Mar. 9, 2007) I rarely blog on domain name disputes for two reasons. First, there are too many of them, and each one tends to look like the…

Can A Spider Enter Into A Binding Contract?–Internet Archive v. Shell

By John Ottaviani Can a spider enter into a binding contract when the terms and conditions on the website declare that copying or distributing anything on the site indicates an agreement to or acceptance of terms, and the spider copies…

University Report on Tech Transfer and the Public Interest

By Eric Goldman Twelve academic institutions have released a white paper entitled In the Public Interest: Nine Points to Consider in Licensing University Technology. The report purports to articulate “best” practices by universities in the technology transfer business. The report…

February 2007 Quick Links

By Eric Goldman * The California Highway Patrol (which, for reasons unclear to me, has investigatory power here) has concluded that the Angelides campaign did not break any laws when they reverse-guessed URLs on Schwarzenegger’s website and found an unrestricted…

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

By Eric Goldman Langdon v. Google, Inc., 2007 WL 530156 (D. Del. Feb. 20, 2007). My write-up on Langdon’s complaint from last summer. Langdon is a griper. He sought to buy ads on the major search engines to advance his…

January 2007 Quick Links

By Eric Goldman * Marketers (including Microsoft) are paying authors to write Wikipedia entries. Surprised?! * Also on the topic of Wikipedia and marketers, Wikipedia has tagged all of their pages NOFOLLOW so that there’s no way a marketer or…

December 2006 Quick Links

By Eric Goldman * JP Enterprises, Inc. v. HDVE, LLC, 1:06-cv-01046-REB-PAC (D. Colo.). In June 2006, JP Enterprises sued Yahoo for selling its trademarks for keyword-triggered ads. In December, JP Enterprises and Yahoo stipulated a dismissal of the case against…