This is a trademark infringement lawsuit. Plaintiff alleges that defendant improperly uses plaintiff’s brand name to sell infringing or counterfeit products “entirely online through [an] Amazon merchant account.” Defendant used the merchant account named “Co2Crea,” and defendant also applied to…
The plaintiffs are publishers that participated in the Google AdSense program. They outsourced much of their content development to a service called TextBroker that pays authors between 0.7 and 5 cents per word (i.e., a 1000 word article makes between…
by guest blogger Elizabeth Townsend Gard, Professor of Law (Tulane Law School); Lepage Faculty Fellow (A.B. Freeman School of Business); and host, Just Wanna Quilt podcast Quilts are a little bit in the (copyright) news. What is a quilt? There are three parts…
Courts, at least in the Ninth Circuit, have collapsed the distinction between Sections 230(c)(1) and 230(c)(2). As a result, (c)(1) now routinely protects a service’s content filtering and account restriction decisions, which is nominally the job of (c)(2). This is…
by guest blogger Alexandra Jane Roberts When does using a competitor’s trademark as a hashtag create a false impression of association? While plenty of cases have assessed whether a company’s use of competitors’ marks in its advertisements constitutes trademark infringement,…
Boston enacted a law against short-term housing rentals that included these provisions: (1) a $300/violation/day fine for booking illegal short-term rentals (the “penalties” provision), (2) a city-wide ban on booking agents that don’t honor notice-and-takedown or verify vendor licenses (the…
In 2018, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals issued a bizarre opinion suggesting that plaintiffs could avoid Section 230 by targeting the service’s design and operation. The authoring judge seemed confident that he had spotted a statutory interpretation flaw that hundreds…
I’m pleased to announce my essay, The Complicated Story of FOSTA and Section 230. This essay tries to simplify a very complicated set of topics and summarize it in a fairly short and readable piece. I hope this essay provides one-stop-shopping…
I’m finally blogging this Airbnb/HomeAway 230 ruling from 6 weeks ago. Why so long? Honestly, I lacked the emotional fortitude to blog it. The outcome isn’t novel—it reaches the same conclusion as the Airbnb v. San Francisco ruling from 2016 (a…
This is another ownership dispute over a Twitter account. We last blogged this topic several years ago, and none of the disputes we’ve seen have resulted in any definitive rulings. Plaintiff publishes trade publications in the agricultural sector, including “The…