By Eric Goldman So many good links this month, I’m breaking up this quick links post into two installments. The first installment: * When Internet start-ups want to hire their first lawyer, they typically have three immediate legal needs—they want…
By Eric Goldman Marianna Moss (a friend/wife of my former colleague) has written an article entitled Trademark “Coexistence” Agreements: Legitimate Contracts or Tools of Consumer Deception?, 18 Loyola Consumer Law Review 197 (2005). To my knowledge, this is the first…
By Eric Goldman Novotny v. Chapman, 2006 WL 2335598 (W.D. N.C. Aug. 9, 2006) Chapman prepares a video showing how to cut women’s hair. Novotny obtains a license to stream the video via the web. Later, Chapman has a change…
By Eric Goldman I’ve posted the syllabus for my Fall 2006 Cyberspace Law course. As I have done for the past 11 years, I prepared my own materials. To do so, I cull through all of the action from the…
By Eric Goldman Yesterday, at the IP Scholars Conference at Boalt, I presented my paper currently titled “Brand Spillovers.” This is the evolution of my project from last year I was calling Trademark Adjacency. I’m still trying to think through…
By Eric Goldman Whitney Information Network v. Xcentric Ventures, 2006 WL 2243041 (11th Cir. Aug 1, 2006) I previously blogged on this case, where the operators of ripoffreport.com and ripoffrevenge.com won a 230 defense in district court. However, the judge…
By John Ottaviani Blackboard, Inc. v. Desire2Learn Inc., No. 9:06-cv-00155-RHC (complaint filed July 26, 2006) Although this story does not seem to have hit the mainstream press yet, there has been a firestorm in the academic and open source communities…
By Eric Goldman Jews for Jesus v. Google, Inc., 05-CV-10684 (SDNY voluntary dismissal filed July 26, 2006) You may recall the lawsuit filed by Jews for Jesus against Google in December. The lawsuit involved a BlogSpot user who created a…
By Eric Goldman Sturm v. eBay, No. 1-06-CV-057926 (Cal. Superior Ct. July 27, 2006) [sorry, my copies are pretty poor: page 1, page 2] Your mother always said “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” This…
By Eric Goldman Almeida v. Amazon.com, Inc., 2006 U.S. APP. LEXIS 17989 (11th Cir. July 18, 2006) Introduction Product photos on e-commerce websites’ product pages are a notorious liability trap. During my tenure at Epinions, product page photos were the…