When In Doubt, Spell it Out — The Hazards of Using E-Mail to Amend Contracts
By John Ottaviani Although the First Circuit’s May 23 opinion in Campbell v. General Dynamics Government Systems Corp. arises in the employment context, any company that engages in the practice of amending the terms of use, a privacy policy or…
Madison on Creative Commons
Mike Madison provides a thoughtful post on why some copyright owners might resist Creative Commons. UPDATE: John Dvorak writes a powerful critique of Creative Commons. Some of John’s arguments are wrong as a matter of law, but his points are…
Does AskJeeves Have a Spyware/Adware Problem? Diller Says No. I Say…
Ben Edelman leveled two charges at AskJeeves on Monday. First, Ben asserts that AskJeeves targets kids for toolbar downloads. Second, Ben asserts that an AskJeeves distributor exploits security holes to install the toolbar without consent. This follows on the heels…
Antitrust Attack on the GPL
By John Ottaviani In the latest attack on open source software and the General Public License , Daniel Wallace, acting as his own attorney, has sued the Free Software Foundation in the United States District Court for the Southern District…
Cairo v. Crossmedia Services
Cairo, Inc. v. Crossmedia Services, Inc., 2005 WL 756610 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 1, 2005). Cairo runs a search engine listing advertised sales. CMS has a database of advertisements. To build its search database, Cairo’s robot crawls CMS’s servers, which CMS…
An AFP Licensee Tells His Story of Being Kicked Out of Google News
I mentioned before that content licensors in practice cannot prevent licensees from indexing the content in search engines. There are two reasons why this is true. First, content licensees may depend on search engine traffic to pay the bills, and…
Eye-Tracking Studies and Mandatory Disclosures
In writing about the Eyetools eye-tracking technology, Chris Sherman says: “In one study, for example, Eyetools inserted gibberish into E*Trade’s homepage to illustrate that content in a “visual dead zone” doesn’t get read and might as well not exist. Some…
Microsoft v. Zamos (and Zamos v. Microsoft)
Amusing story in the Register about David Zamos, a Kent State chemistry student, who bought a discounted educational version of Microsoft Windows XP Pro and Office XP Pro at the school bookstore. He decided he didn’t want it, tried to…
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…
Edelman on P2P Disclosures
Ben Edelman released a report entitled “Comparison of Unwanted Software Installed by P2P Programs.” The report evidences Ben’s typical skill and thoroughness, and it’s a worthy read. However, the report struggles with the appropriate standards for measuring a workable disclosure…