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…

By Eric Goldman Utah SB 236 (the “Trademark Protection Act”), enacted March 19, 2007 Legislators enact stupid laws all of the time, but some laws transcend mere stupidity and produce a single 3 letter response: WTF? And no legislature has…

By Eric Goldman Perfect 10, Inc. v. CCBill LLC, No. 04-57143, 04-57207 (9th Cir. March 29, 2007) The Ninth Circuit issued an important but characteristically quirky opinion in Perfect 10 v. CCBill. This omnibus opinion covered a lot of disparate…

By John Ottaviani The Free Software Foundation posted draft 3 of GPL3 on its website today. The General Public License (GPL) is one of the most widely used open source licenses. Version 1 was released in 1981, and Version 2…

By John Ottaviani Various sources are reporting that EMI has agreed to settle its copyright infringement lawsuit against Bertelsmann AG related to Bertelsmann’s investment in Napster. The settlement removes the last large record label with claims against Bertelsmann in the…

By Eric Goldman Twentieth Century Fox Films Corp. v. Cablevision Systems Corp., No. 06-Civ. 03390 (SDNY March 22, 2007) Not infrequently, copyright defendants argue that they are offering a service that passively implements consumer directions to infringe. In some cases,…

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,…

By Eric Goldman I gave a talk to a group of local entrepreneurs on general IP issues in the process of being an entrepreneur. For most of you, this talk is very, very basic, but if you’re interested, here are…

By Eric Goldman KinderStart.com LLC v. Google, Inc., C 06-2057 JF (N.D. Cal. March 16, 2007) Copy of the opinion dismissing the lawsuit Copy of the opinion granting sanctions against KinderStart’s counsel Gregory Yu Google has won big in the…

By Eric Goldman Person v. Google, C 06-7297 JF (RS) (N.D. Cal. Mar. 16, 2007) As expected, Judge Fogel dismissed Person’s antitrust lawsuit against Google but gave Person one more chance to refile a complaint. It would be foolish for…