On May 11, 2022, the Fifth Circuit reinstated Texas state law HB 20 which allows private parties to sue tech platforms with 50M+ MAUs for their censorship of user-generated content based on “the viewpoint of a user or another person”. On May 13, technology lobbying groups NetChoice and the Computer...
As of yesterday, Google’s new policy concerning registration of trademarks as keywords for triggering contextual advertisement in many European countries went into effect. The new policy, which strongly relies on the recent ECJ decision on Google’s potential liability for TM infringement via its...
I’m late to the party, but I wanted to say a few things about the District Court’s decision in the Viacom v. YouTube case this week and. This will be a four-part post, covering:
1. The holding
2. The economic principle behind it
3. The next steps in the case
4. A review of the errors in legal...
Representatives from the US, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand will convene this Monday in Lucerne for the Ninth round of ACTA negotiations. President Obama has expressed his commitment to “conclude these negotiations soon.”
Last week, a group of 90 academics...
As the Wall Street Journal is already reporting, today eBay sustained an important win in its long-running dispute with Tiffany over counterfeit goods sold through its marketplace. (The full opinion is available here.)
I wrote about this case as my leading example of the legal problems that appear at...
I had a long interview this morning with the Christian Science Monitor . Like many of the interviews I’ve had this year, the subject was Google. At the increasingly congested intersection of technology and the law, Google seems to be involved in most of the accidents.
The interview got me thinking...
The closely watched battle over the use of trademarks as keywords for purpose of triggering advertisements on Google’s search result pages (AdWords) reached high peak today with the release of the European Court of Justice’s ruling on the French cases. In what appears to be a resounding win for...
The German Constitutional Court (GCC) this morning struck down a law that imposed on private telecom operators and service providers such as ISPs and telephone companies comprehensive duties to keep record of all communication data, including Internet activity, e-mails, SMS, MMS etc., for six months...
I don’t usually blog “personal” stories, but this one is irresistible. It raises disturbing questions at the border of digital and physical life, and legal problems of trademark and the emerging issues of cloud computing and data liability.
EBay, as everyone knows, has been struggling to improve...
I write today on CNET (see "Gripes over Google Books go Technical") about the Department of Justice's filing last week in the Google Books case. The Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA), released in November, will be discussed by the parties at a fairness hearing on Feb. 18th.
The DoJ continues to...
I’m starting to feel like the only person who thinks the Google Books settlement with authors and publishers is a good deal. One voice that seems not to be heard, however, over the din of Google competitors, panicky law professors, and regulators who wouldn’t know a workable solution to a copyright...