By Eric Goldman The FTC has extended the COPPA rule unchanged. Most significantly, the rule continues to preclude non-authenticated email as a way of obtaining parental consent. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about COPPA much any more….

By Eric Goldman Associated Press runs a retrospective/status report on Congress’ battle against Internet porn. Believe it or not, this battle recently entered its second decade–Congress’ first effort, the Communications Decency Act, was passed in February 1996. After that law…

By Eric Goldman Robert Thomas of Milwaukee and Jared Bowser of Jacksonville have been indicted under the ART Act for pre-releasing four songs by Ryan Adams in August 2005, a month before the commercial release of Adams’ album. Allegedly, the…

By Eric Goldman The Smoking Gun runs an interesting feature on movie budgets. Among the goodies include the entire line-by-line budget for the movie “The Village,” and various excerpts from other budgets of movies by M. Night Shyamalan. Very interesting…

By Eric Goldman Google announced that it is near a settlement in the Lane’s Gifts class action lawsuit over click fraud. The way I read the announcement, the parties have agreed to the terms, so the settlement just needs the…

By Eric Goldman Frank Pasquale has posted an article called The Law and Economics of Information Overload Externalities to SSRN. I’m not sure the title really captures the article, so don’t make the decision to read/not read it based on…

By Eric Goldman Congress has an unresolved love-hate attitude towards the Internet. Through the 1990s, Congress frequently said that the Internet should be left alone from a regulatory standpoint. Indeed, in some cases, Congress affirmatively deregulated the Internet; 47 USC…

By Eric Goldman I’m presenting my latest article, A Coasean Analysis of Marketing, at University of San Francisco on March 15. The talk is free and open to the public. Although the title suggests that the talk will be heavy…

By Eric Goldman NCSoft has been sued in South Korea for allowing users to improperly register Lineage/Lineage 2 accounts in other people’s official Korean ID number (I’m inferring this is similar to a social security number). More than 3,500 people…

By Eric Goldman It’s been a while since I’ve blogged on the Trademark Dilution Revision Act, HR 683 (now the Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006). The bill keeps chugging along. In February, it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously…