One unintended consequence of the accelerating popularity of HTML5 for mobile app development is an ability to skate past Apple’s App Store restrictions on in-app sales.  So I put this question to Piotr Steininger of Tapangi Consulting: There’s talk out there about being able to use HTML5 to get around Apple’s App Store ban on [...]

Kate Tummarello is a Research and Social Media Intern with Mirsky & Company and a reporter at Roll Call/Congressional Quarterly.  Follow Kate on Twitter @ktummarello. Apple’s App Store is full of subscription-based content providers. Whether you’re watching a movie on the Netflix app, reading a book through the Kindle app or streaming a TV show using [...]

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] In today’s podcast, we discuss copyright issues, specifically the distinctions – practical and legal – between “inline” or “hot” or “embedded” links and downloaded images.  This comes up usually in the context of using video, but the principles should apply to any uses of images on websites, blogs, [...]

Trumpets Ryan Chittum in the Columbia Journalism Review, “Yes, this is that serious. [The news media] needs to wrest back control of its speech from Apple Inc.  It’s easy to do it now while the press has leverage over Apple.  If the iPad becomes a significant driver of media revenue, and Apple decides to crack [...]

NPR’s Lynn Neary reported last week on the value of e-books (“No Ink, No Paper: What’s The Value Of An E-Book?”), illuminating the nuance about pricing of electronic books. Because books – electronic or otherwise – are still almost entirely issued by old-line publishing houses under the same decades-old operational model, a publisher’s cost of operations still has to be recouped. And for publishers, the sole source of that recoupment remains the consumer purchaser of a book, regardless of the medium of a book’s distribution or purchase or presentation. From this perspective, a more alarming (from the publishing industry’s perspective) competitive threat on the market today is the low-cost pricing of hardcover books (including current bestsellers) at places like Target, Costco and Walmart.

Sales tax on online retail sales has been a confusing area of the law since the earliest forays into internet sales.  Recent attempts by the states to aggressively interpret the meaning of a business “nexus” with the state (which is the basis of a state’s claim to sales tax jurisdiction) have been fueled both by [...]

Can you trademark a domain name?  Amazon.com is a registered US trademark of the company by the same name, including not just the word “Amazon”; but also the dot com.  There are numerous examples of this, although they have in common the brand value of the name inclusive of the dot com appendage. How many [...]