Arkansas has a statute that prohibits: use a telephone for the purpose of offering any goods or services for sale, or for conveying information regarding any goods or services for the purpose of soliciting the sale or purchase of the…
You recall the Ninth Circuit’s Doe v. ModelMayhem (Doe #14 v. Internet Brands) ruling from earlier this year. It held that a website couldn’t invoke Section 230 against a claim that the site should have warned its users about potential…
The holy grail of trademark owners is to obtain enforceable trademark rights for the standard ways people talk to each other. If achieved, the trademark owner can put up a toll gate on ordinary conversation and thwart or even shut…
Four years ago, I joined Forbes’ “contributor” program, which lets independent authors publish/blog through Forbes’ network without editorial pre-review. Jonathan Glick at Re/Code called these programs “platishers”, a portmanteau of “platform” and “publisher.” (Personally, I’d vote for “platisher” as one…
[Eric’s introduction: ever since the Ninth Circuit mishandled the already-muddled definitions of “clickwrap” and “browsewrap” in the Nguyen case, we’ve seen a steady decline in the coherence of the law of online contract formation. Judges can’t figure out whether or…
This is a personal jurisdiction case, so I’ll get right to the point. If an AdWords advertiser buys keywords that contain geographic terms, the advertiser might face a greater risk of personal jurisdiction in those geographies. It’s likely that buying…
By guest blogger Prof. Alexandra Jane Roberts [Eric’s intro: the Rio Summer Olympic games may be over, but the legal wranglings from the games will keep going and going–even longer than the bike road race (and perhaps with as many…
2016 has been a tough year for Section 230 jurisprudence, and the nadir (so far) was the appellate court ruling in Hassell v. Bird. As you recall, the case involves some negative Yelp reviews about an attorney, Hassell. Hassell sued…
Court Benchslaps Trade Secret Plaintiff and Counsel For Bad Faith Litigation–RBC Bearings v. Caliber
As you know, for the past year I’ve been railing against the Defend Trade Secrets Act’s unprecedented and ill-advised ex parte seizure provision. The good news is that, as far as I know, there’s only been one request for a…
In April, I gave a talk in Israel at an inaugural event to celebrate the life and work of Avron Gabrieli, one of Israel’s most venerable and well-known IP lawyers who died in 2015. Initially, the talk topic was styled…