E-Commerce Law

E-Commerce Law Briefs: Week of May 21, 2007

In response to complaints from universities, Google has decided not to accept advertisements from companies that sell essays or dissertations. "Google's forthcoming ban on adverts for ‘academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations’ means that essay websites join a blacklist of ‘unacceptable content’ including adverts for weapons, prostitution, drugs, tobacco, fake documents and ‘miracle cures’."

(Link: Google bans essay writing adverts at BBC News)

More and more people are declaring "email bankruptcy." The volume of email traffic has nearly doubled in the last two years, resulting in an unmanageable number of inbox messages for many email users. Increasingly, overwhelmed folks are swearing off of email or deleting their inboxes and starting over.

(Link:  E-Mail Reply to All: 'Leave Me Alone' at washingtonpost.com)

E-Commerce Law Briefs is a weekly feature appearing each Friday afternoon on E-Commerce Law. Each week, E-Commerce Law Briefs will provide a brief summary and commentary on recent legal news affecting e-commerce businesses.

Technorati Tags:  Google, email

No Bidders for Pony Express Marks

Update to Pony Express Marks Being Auctioned Online.

Last month we told you that  Pony Express Worldwide, LLC was auctioning off its rights to six trademarks, including PONY EXPRESS, THE PONY EXPRESS, and designs of the first pony express riders at ipauctions.com.  The auction was to occur from April 23-30, 2007.  Now, the auction is closed and it appears that no one was willing to come up with the required starting bid of $250,000.

Technorati Tags:  pony express, trademark

MySpace Will Turn Over Sex Offender Information to State Attorneys General

Update to E-Commerce Law Briefs for the Week of May 14, 2007.

After receiving a letter from eight state attorneys general requesting data pertaining to registered sex offenders who are users of the popular social networking site, MySpace initially declined the request, citing federal privacy laws.  Today, MySpace has announced that it will provide the requested information and will even permit law enforcement agencies direct access to its Sentinel Safe software, which assists the site in locating and removing the profiles of convicted sex offenders.

(Link:  MySpace will turn over names of sex offenders at CNN.com)

Update (6/8/2007):  MySpace seeks advice in sex offender investigation at CNET News.

Technorati Tags:  MySpace, sex offender

E-Commerce Law Briefs: Week of May 14, 2007

This week, it’s all about MySpace.

MySpace has announced a new "feature called ‘Take Down, Stay Down’ that would prevent copyrighted content from being re-posted after it has been taken down by the copyright owner."

(Link: MySpace adds new anti-piracy feature at SilliconValley.com)

Eight state attorneys general have asked MySpace to turn over data pertaining to registered sex offenders who use the social networking site. The attorneys general of Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania made the request in a letter sent on Monday. The letter indicated that the attorneys general suggested that there were "thousands" of registered sex offenders using MySpace "to lure children into face-to-face encounters and other dangerous activities."

On Tuesday, MySpace issued its formal response, indicating that it was doing everything it legally could to discover and remove the profiles of registered sex offenders. However, MySpace has declined to provide the requested information, citing concerns that complying with the request would violate the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). MySpace offered to produce the requested information, but only if its production did not violate the law.

(Links: State AGs to MySpace: Turn over sex offender data and MySpace responds to states' request for sex offender data at CNET News).

E-Commerce Law Briefs is a weekly feature appearing each Friday afternoon on E-Commerce Law. Each week, E-Commerce Law Briefs will provide a brief summary and commentary on recent legal news affecting e-commerce businesses.

Technorati Tags:  MySpace, sex offender

Law Firm Growth Management Seminar Recap

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Law Firm Growth Management Conference at the Harvard Club in New York. I was part of the panel on "Legal Blogs and Other Technology" with fellow bloggers Arnie Herz, Jim Hassett, and Peter Marx.

You may know Arnie Herz from Legal Sanity or Legal Blog Watch. He’s an attorney in New York who also runs a successful training business which focuses on the art of relationships. (As a side note, Arnie’s Legal Sanity blog hosted Blawg Review #108 this week.)

Jim Hassett provides sales training for attorneys and blogs at Law Firm Business Development. His company, LegalBizDev, provides business development workshops and coaching for larger law firms.

Peter Marx is the president and co-founder of Legal Insight Media, Inc., which helps law firms create multimedia marketing and recruiting presentations. His blog is the Law Firm Media Blog.

We addressed a number of blog-related issues of interest to attorneys and law firm business development directors and, while we didn’t always agree, it was interesting to tap into the combined legal and marketing experience of the panel. Highlights of the session included discussions of:

• The legal risks associated with blogging and the protections afforded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 affords online publishers fairly broad protection against liability for content authored solely by third parties. With that exception, Internet publications, like blogs, have the same risks associated with them as any other form of mass communication.

• The benefits of legal blogging: primarily credibility and visibility.

• The current state of legal blogging and its prospects for the future. Legal blogs still make up a small minority of existing blogs, though more and more attorneys are entering the blogosphere.  Of course, attorneys blog more than the general population.

• The logistics of legal blogging. Although the panel noted that most current legal blogs are authored by a single attorney, we generally agreed that it would be most beneficial to blog as a practice area or department. Arnie was particularly supportive of involving younger associates in the blogging process, in both the research and writing, noting that it saves the time of more senior (and, therefore, higher billing) attorneys and helps to promote the associate.

All in all, it was an interesting and educational experience. If you happened to be in the audience on Tuesday, drop us a comment and let us know what you thought.

Technorati Tags:  CDA, blawg

E-Commerce Law Briefs: Week of May 7, 2007

There were two significant MySpace news items this week. First, it was reported that MySpace has agreed to acquire Photobucket, the leading online photo-sharing service. It’s said to be a $250 million deal.

Readers may recall that last month, MySpace and Photobucket were engaged in a fairly public battle in which MySpace blocked images and videos hosted by Photobucket, alleging that Photobucket had violated the MySpace terms of use by encouraging users to include advertisements in the slide shows they posted to MySpace. The battle ended with both sides agreeing to strengthen lines of communication and commentators suggesting that MySpace blocked Photobucket images and videos to drive down the sales price in an imminent acquisition.

(Link: MySpace to acquire Photobucket image-sharing site at CNET News)

In an unrelated item, Fox is seeking advertisers to buy spots for next year’s Super Bowl by offering to host the ads on a special area of MySpace.

(Link: Fox teams with MySpace in making online Super Bowl pitch at SilliconValley.com)

E-Commerce Law Briefs is a weekly feature appearing each Friday afternoon on E-Commerce Law. Each week, E-Commerce Law Briefs will provide a brief summary and commentary on recent legal news affecting e-commerce businesses.

Technorati Tags:  MySpace, Photobucket, Super Bowl

E-Commerce Law Briefs: Week of April 30, 2007

A report published this week says that cybersquatting, domain kiting, phishing, and click fraud are major threats to recognized commercial brands. "A four-week survey of public Web sites completed early in April found cybersquatting posed the greatest threat to brands. Phishing--the criminal use of e-mail to trick consumers into divulging passwords, credit cards and other personal details--and domain "kiting"--the rapid registering and dropping of similar-sounding Web site names--are on the rise. The study tracked daily mentions on 134 million public Web records for the world's top 25 brands, along with major brands from eight industrial categories such as autos, apparel, food and high tech. The study ran from March 9 to April 6." During the four-week study, each of the brands suffered an average of 286,000 instances of cybersquatting; 50,743 examples of click fraud; 21,093 instances of e-commerce fraud; and 11,015 examples of domain kiting.

While this study may have addressed only the top brands worldwide, its results illustrate the problems faced, on a somewhat smaller but no less dangerous scale, by companies with nationally or regionally recognized brands. In the Internet Age, the importance of diligently and aggressively enforcing a company’s intellectual property rights cannot be underestimated.  To survive, e-commerce businesses must have strategies in place to protect their domain names and other trademarks, to enforce their copyright rights pertaining to original content, and to protect themselves from click fraud.

(Link: Major brands see rise in online fraud at CNET News)

Google has stopped the online advertisements "hijacked" by online criminals who used them to obtain banking and other personal information from Internet users. "The ads, linked to 20 popular search terms, directed those who clicked on them to a booby-trapped site where their information could be captured."

Computer security experts doubt that the criminal use of the advertisements will affect Google’s AdWords program which accounts for the vast majority of the search giant’s revenue and $1 billion dollars for the first quarter alone.

(Link: Google halts `hijacked' ads used to steal personal data at SilliconValley.com)

An online pharmacy in Minnesota has agreed to pay $300,000 in fines for filing prescriptions that did not comply with federal regulations. "The settlement resolves a civil lawsuit filed by the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin against Falk's Woodland Pharmacy Inc."

(Link: Internet pharmacy agrees to $300,000 fine at the Milwaukee Business Journal)

E-Commerce Law Briefs is a weekly feature appearing each Friday afternoon on E-Commerce Law. Each week, E-Commerce Law Briefs will provide a brief summary and commentary on recent legal news affecting e-commerce businesses.

Technorati Tags:  branding, trademark infringement, Google, online pharmacy