E-Commerce Law Briefs: Week of April 20, 2009

The Wikipedia Foundation has demanded that the artists responsible for Wikipedia Art surrender the domain name wikipediaart.org.  "Last February, [the artists], working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia’s standards of credibility and verifiability. The work was intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. [However, Wikipedia editors shut down the project]  within fifteen hours for being insufficiently 'encyclopaedic.'"  The artists obtained the domain name wikipediaart.org and created a website to document the project which the Foundation seeks to shut down because it uses the "Wikipedia" trademark.

The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas has applied traditional contract principles to find that Blockbuster Online's website Terms and Conditions are unenforceable.  "The crux of the Plaintiffs’ arguments were that since Blockbuster reserved the right to modify the Terms and Conditions at their “sole discretion” at “any time” to be effective immediately on their site, the contract was thus illusory.  The Court found the contract was illusory because Blockbuster had the power to unilaterally change the contract whenever they wanted to do so. The only 'limit' was the new terms would not be effective until posted online."

"Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million."

Google has upgraded a little-used feature that permits users to create profile pages with their name, photo, contact information, and other information.

"In February, a Texas jury awarded Orix Capital Markets, LLC $12.5 million in damages in a defamation case involving statements published on the . . . 'gripe site' Predatorix.com."

"Students have suffered another defeat in their legal fight against the company that runs a plagiarism-detection tool popular among professors.  A federal appeals court last week affirmed a lower court’s decision that the Turnitin service does not violate the copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of their essays in the database that the company uses to check works for academic dishonesty."  The copyright infringment suit was brought by two Mclean, Virginia high school students after Turnitin was hired by their school to catch cheaters.

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

Comments

[Brian Sherwin @ Myartspace Blog]

I've been close to the Wikipedia Art story since day one. You might want to read my interviews with the two artists. Are the artists 'trolls'as Jimmy Wales has called them? I don't think so-- not anymore than some of the longtime Wikipedia editors who mark articles about artists as not notable even though the subjects of the articles have exhibited in museums and so on.

On Wikipedia a baseball player who only played one game is considered notable, a politician who never won an election can be notable without question-- but artists who have exhibited in a few museums often have articles about them questioned or speedy deleted unless they have been reviewed in the New York Times or one of the longstanding art magazines. That appears to happen often.

Read:

http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2009/02/wikipedia-art-virtual-fireside-chat.html

http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2009/04/art-space-talk-scott-kildall-and.html