Webloyalty.com, Inc. v. Consumer Innovations LLC, 73 U.S.P.Q. 2d 1898 (D. Del. Jan. 13, 2005). The parties compete in the online club membership business, selling packages of services that combine price discounts, insurance-esque protections and other low-value services that consumers…
If you’re in the Bay Area and interested in adware/spyware, you should consider the Boalt conference on spyware on April 1 (this coming Friday). Boalt has a history of putting together superior events on emerging intersections between law and technology,…
NYT article on new technologies allowing more precise targeting of television advertising. I think this sentence captures the evolving environment: “The television commercial – a blunt instrument that often reaches as many disinterested people as desired ones – is beginning…
What’s left to complete the portalization of Google? It seems like in the past couple of months, they have significantly expanded the number of times I see Google-sourced content at the top of the search results list. Search for “Milwaukee…
Ben Edelman’s latest research describes various efforts by software vendors to curtail characterizations of their software as spyware (or a synonym). These bigfoot letters often attempt to distort the information marketplace by forcing the removal of unflattering but potentially accurate…
Tonight I looked through donotcall.gov, the FTC-operated website where people can register telephone numbers for the Federal do-not-call list. Two observations: 1) There is zero authentication that the person registering a phone number actually is the subscriber for that number….
ICANN finally approved the .eu domain. When I joined Epinions in February 2000, a board member suggested that one of my top priorities as general counsel should be to secure the epinions.eu domain. Over five years later, does anyone even…
I mentioned before that content licensors in practice cannot prevent licensees from indexing the content in search engines. There are two reasons why this is true. First, content licensees may depend on search engine traffic to pay the bills, and…
I still have no idea how Google decides which news sources are among the 4,500 indexed in Google News. Google News’ FAQ has the following: “What if I don’t see my favorite news source in Google News? We’re as shocked…
Who owns the letter “Q” in connection with autos? Nissan claims it does and Audi doesn’t. Update: Detroit Free Press story (quoting Schwimmer) [but I’m pretty sure that Apple does not own the prefix “i”, so I’ll chalk that up…