The plaintiff alleges that Avvo provides editorial benefits to lawyers who advertise on Avvo, which causes the advertisers to get prospective clients who would have chosen the non-advertising lawyers. There are some parallels to the lawsuits against Yelp alleging pay-to-play,…
In August, I reported on the Florida Bar’s continued angst about regulating competitive keyword advertising by lawyers. Read my post, “The Florida Bar and Competitive Keyword Advertising: A Tragicomedy (in 3 Parts),” for the full background. The short story is…
A putative class claimed Blue Diamond “mislabeled its almond beverages as ‘almond milk’ when they should be labeled ‘imitation milk’ because they substitute for and resemble dairy milk but are nutritionally inferior to it.” The lawsuit fails. The court responded…
The parties compete for the provision of health services related to traveling, like immunizations. The defendant Avance bought keyword ads triggered on the plaintiff’s trademark “Passport Health.” In 2013, the trademark owner complained, and Avance apparently dropped the Google ad…
This is a copyright infringement lawsuit. Hirsch, a professional photographer, took a photo of Santino Boderick, who was an associate of a well-known hiphop artist, Bobby Shmurda. Hirsch licensed the photograph to the New York Post, where it appeared in…
While we wait for the next big Section 230 ruling (so many cases are on appeal!), today I’m recapping two recent pro se cases. Scott v. Carlson. The complaint alleges that: Carlson created online content to attack Scott; Moon published Carlson-submitted…
I’ve bashed the initial interest confusion doctrine for decades. It’s one of the worst doctrinal “innovations” in trademark law–ever. However, you might have noticed that I haven’t blogged many initial interest confusion cases recently. Why? Because the phrase rarely shows…
This ruling doesn’t break a lot of new doctrinal ground. Another 512(f) case fails–nothing new. I’m blogging mostly for completeness and as a follow up to my May post remarking that a 512(f) case survived a motion to dismiss. At…
by guest blogger Stacey Lantagne Memes implicate many legal issues, one of the major ones being copyright infringement and fair use. The copyright dispute here revolves around a photograph of Willie Nelson taken by the plaintiff, Philpot, and posted to…
I blogged about Big Fish, who had a trip to the Ninth Circuit and was denied a bid to arbitrate claims against it based on its waiver of the right to arbitrate. As a follow up, I also blogged about…