By Eric Goldman Fascinating contraposition of stories on the Google and Yahoo home pages run by the Washington Post and BusinessWeek, respectively. From BusinessWeek: Yahoo makes its home page decisions strictly by following user clicks. They capture user clickstreams across…
By Eric Goldman Some stories that caught my eye in September: * Digg users are gaming the Digg algorithm. Greg Linden’s take. Naturally, Digg is fighting back by tweaking its algorithm to reduce the effect of gaming and preserve some…
By Eric Goldman Rescuecom Corp. v. Google, Inc., No. 5:04-CV-1055 (N.D.N.Y. Sept. 28, 2006). You can find the ruling here (WARNING: 1.7MB file) Introduction and the 1-800 Contacts Precedent Last year, the Second Circuit issued a major ruling in the…
By Eric Goldman Pop Warner Little Scholars, Inc. v. New Hampshire Youth Football & Spirit Conference, 2006 WL 2591480 (D. N.H. Sept. 11, 2006) Metatag lawsuits befuddle me for two reasons. First, and most importantly, KEYWORD METATAGS ARE IRRELEVANT from…
By John Ottaviani High school students have been battling with and lampooning their assistant principals for generations. Last Spring, students in San Antonio, Texas, applied 21st century technology to the practice, when they allegedly set up a profile for their…
By Eric Goldman David Post, Scott Christie and I have filed an amicus brief in New York v. Direct Revenue LLC, No. 401325/06 (N.Y. Supreme Ct.), one of Spitzer’s office’s high-profile enforcement actions against adware companies. Among other aggressive positions,…
By Eric Goldman Durick v. eBay, 2006 WL 2672795 (Oho Ct. App. Sept. 11, 2006) I didn’t anticipate this being eBay Law Week, but these issues often seem to arise in cycles. Yesterday I blogged on the Nazaruk case, which…
By Eric Goldman Nazaruk v. eBay, 2006 WL 2666429 (D. Utah Sept. 14, 2006) Another lawsuit involving the eBay feedback forum. In this case, the pro se plaintiff alleges that eBay and the feedback submitter deprived her of her civil…
…I think plans A & B in an alleged commercial spammer’s legal defense (the Dormant Commerce Clause and First Amendment challenges) have now taken enough hits to be declared at least in the coffin, if not dead. Why? In the case of the Dormant Commerce Clause, it isn’t the slow accretion of adverse cases swaying the tide of legal thinking, as with First Amendment Cases, but an intuitively and legally obvious reason I explain below. While plans A&B lay near death, courts (much like they have been doing for the last 200-plus years) are still struggling with notions of jurisdiction. As a result, plan C (resisting the jurisdiction of an out-of-state court) looks to remain a source of continued litigation between spammers and those who would sue them…
By Eric Goldman Yesterday I gave a talk called “Internet Law Updates” at an event sponsored by the California State Bar’s IP Section. My slides.