Regulating “Stealth” Marketing
By Eric Goldman I’ve never understood the legal distinctions between “editorial content” and “marketing.” To me, content is content. Certainly, content can have problematic/harmful attributes, such as false content. And often I want to know more about the identity of…
Miva Securities Litigation Rejects Most Click Fraud/Syndication Fraud Claims
By Eric Goldman In re Miva, Inc. Securities Litigation, 2007 WL 809686 (M.D. Fla. Mar. 15, 2007) Stockholders of Miva (formerly FindWhat) sued Miva, alleging that Miva had inflated its stock price by making false public statements. In this ruling,…
Affiliate Spam Liability is Fact Question–US v. Cyberheat
By Eric Goldman U.S. v. Cyberheat, Inc., 2007 WL 686678 (D. Ariz. March 2, 2007) This case deals with one of the great unresolved Cyberlaw questions: when is an online advertiser liable for the downstream behavior of its media outlets?…
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…
Advertisers Settle NY Anti-Adware Action
By Eric Goldman Earlier this week, the New York Attorney General’s (NYAG) office issued a press release with the blazing all caps headline: GROUNDBREAKING SETTLEMENTS HOLD ONLINE ADVERTISERS RESPONSIBLE FOR DISPLAYING ADS THROUGH DECEPTIVELY INSTALLED “ADWARE” PROGRAMS Groundbreaking…or groundless? After…
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…
Google Wins Publisher’s Lawsuit over AdSense Termination–Bradley v. Google
By Eric Goldman Bradley v. Google, Inc., 2006 WL 3798134 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 22, 2006) I’m struggling with developing a policy regarding blogging about pro se lawsuits (i.e., lawsuits brought without a lawyer) against major companies like Google. On the…
Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years
By Eric Goldman [UPDATE: I put together a more formal assessment of Wikipedia’s challenges in my 2010 article, Wikipedia’s Labor Squeeze and its Consequences.] About a year ago, I predicted that Wikipedia will fail in 5 years. My logic: *…