A little-appreciated requirement for trademark owners is a duty to monitor and police their trademarks.  This duty applies to owners of unregistered trademarks as much as federal registered marks, since registration is not necessary to claim many trademark rights. What types of activities must be monitored and policed?  Infringement and dilution.  Or in other words, [...]

FTC enforcement of its new blogger guidelines has involved typically high-profile actions against Anne Taylor LOFT (FTC ultimately taking no action) and Reverb Communications (for allegedly deceptive postings of positive reviews on iTunes for games produced by Reverb clients). While premature to draw any broad conclusions on the enforcement environment for the new rules, a philosophical [...]

An interesting case comes out of the West earlier this month under Copyright law’s “first sale” doctrine, involving computer software under a license agreement. Copyright’s “first sale” doctrine The “first sale” doctrine involves this concept: If you buy a copyrighted work (say, a painting, or a book, or – as in this case – software [...]

What is the legal significance of a website’s privacy policy? That question lingers when reviewing such policies for legal compliance and for consistency with a company’s actual practices.  Problem is, lawsuits involving claims of breaches of privacy policies have failed even in cases of clear and egregious violations by the service provider, where there was [...]

(Thomas Yarnell contributed research and writing to this blog post.) Copyright law preempts certain state law personal rights, including misappropriation of someone’s likeness or identity.  For example, the right of an individual to prevent a third party from exploiting that person’s image or voice is trumped when that third party purchased the rights to the [...]

[Thomas Yarnell contributed to research and drafting on this post.] Google’s popular and dominant advertising service, AdWords, allows companies to place auction-style bids on search keywords.  If a company bids the highest amount on a keyword, that company’s ad comes up first when someone searches the keyword.  The company then pays Google on a pay-per-click [...]

I wrote last week about the proliferation of the law of libel on the internet, but the same explosion of opportunities for litigation – and risks to would-be publishers – applies via the internet to all forms of speech.  Libel is still libel, but more cases are pushing arguments that speech is conduct that can [...]

I recently wrote about the dust-up following the awarding of a Pulitzer for political commentary to online cartoonist Mark Fiore, when it was revealed that Apple had rejected Fiore’s proposed iPhone App several months before Fiore’s Pulitzer fame.  As had been widely reported, Apple subsequently invited Fiore to re-apply, which Fiore promptly did and now, [...]

Eric Felten brilliantly skewers the supposed credibility of the online “marketplace of ideas” when he recently wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal: Spend any time on the Internet and – like the naif in the ‘Casablanca’ gambling room dumbfounded when the wheel comes up 22-black twice in a row – one’s bound to [...]

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 [...]