New Media and Technology Law : New York Technology & New Media Lawyer & Attorney : Proskauer Rose Law Firm : Manhattan

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued its opinion today in Satterfield v. Simon & Schuster, Inc., a case involving the applicability of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to text messages sent to cellular phones. The appeals court reinstated a TCPA claim against Simon & Schuster and remanded the case for resolution of disputed fact issues. But not before delving deeply into the dictionary to construe some of the critical terms in the statute and in the agreement pursuant to which the subject text message was sent.

Significantly, the appeals court concluded that because a "call" can include a text message, not just a voice call, the TCPA applies to a text messages sent to a cellular phones. The appeals court also narrowly construed the contractual term "affiliate," which defined the scope of consent on the part of Satterfield, the text message recipient in this case. But whether the particular text message sent to Satterfield violated the TCPA is subject to the resolution of disputed fact issues on remand.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Deleting information in the digital world can be a problematic issue. A Web site that appears to a viewer to present unitary pages of text and images actually consists of text and graphic elements that can be drawn from a variety of sources. For a variety of technical reasons, it is not unusual for text elements included in a Web page to be stored on one server and the images to be stored on another, even where the Web page, the text and image elements are all the property of a single entity. When references to text or images are deleted from the HTML code that makes up a Web page, the text and image files themselves may remain exactly where they were, still accessible directly via their original URL addresses, or via a search engine.

Security researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK recently studied this issue in the context of social networking sites. They found that for a variety of reasons, when users delete references to images that they have uploaded to social networking sites, those images may remain accessible for a period of time after they have been "deleted" by the user.

A recent judicial opinion also briefly addressed the phenomenon of "zombie" photos, in the context of a dispute between a law firm and a group of its former associates, and a claim of violation of the right of publicity.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In 2007, Ticketmaster brought a multi-count complaint against RMG Technologies, a software company that supplied ticket brokers with software that enabled them to automatically and rapidly access Ticketmaster’s Web site, to the detriment of ordinary users seeking tickets to popular events. The Ticketmaster v. RMG complaint was notable for stating a series of claims that leveraged the allegation that RMG’s access to the Web site for the purpose of creating its software, as well as the subsequent use of the software, violated the Ticketmaster Terms of Use and was thus unauthorized. Ticketmaster’s claims included breach of contract, copyright infringement, violation of the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Based on these claims, Ticketmaster succeeded in obtaining a preliminary injunction against the distribution of the software and a $18.2 million default judgment against RMG.

In December 2008, Facebook filed a similarly framed complaint against Power Ventures, the operator of Power.com, an online service that allows social networking users to access all of their accounts through one interface. In Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc. (N.D. Cal. May 11, 2009), Judge Jeremy Fogel denied Power Ventures's motion to dismiss Facebook’s claims of copyright infringement, violation of the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA, and violation of federal and state trademark infringement laws for failure to state a claim. Judge Fogel acknowledged the similarity of Facebook’s copyright claims against Power Ventures to the claims in Ticketmaster’s litigation against RMG. Slip op. at 5.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

On May 20, the Free Software Foundation announced the settlement of its copyright litigation with Cisco Systems over the inclusion of open source software in certain Linksys products. The settlement includes undertakings by Cisco with respect to compliance with the requirements of "free software licenses." Here's some of what the FSF had to say about the settlement (the full text of the FSF press release is available here):

Cisco has agreed to appoint a Free Software Director for Linksys, a subsidiary of Cisco, to supervise Linksys' compliance with the requirements of free software licenses such as the GPL (the GNU General Public License). The Free Software Director will report periodically to the FSF regarding Linksys' compliance efforts. Cisco has further agreed to take certain steps to notify previous recipients of Linksys products containing FSF programs of their rights under the GPL and other applicable licenses, to publish a licensing notice on the Linksys website, and to provide additional notices in a separate publication. In addition, Cisco will continue to make the complete and corresponding source code for versions of FSF programs used with current Linksys products freely available on its website. Cisco will also make a monetary contribution to the FSF.

The parties recognize Cisco's ongoing obligations under the GPL and other free software licenses. The FSF will continue to independently monitor Linksys' compliance with these licenses, and work with Linksys to resolve any new issues that may arise.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks

UPDATE:  The Ninth Circuit issued an amended opinion on June 22, 2009, see discussion below. The amended opinion included an order denying the parties' petitions for rehearing and rehearing en banc.

Many attempts have been made to plead around the immunity provided to interactive computer services under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and only a very few such attempts have succeeded. Here's one that has succeeded at least to the point of getting a remand back to the district court. The appeals court concluded that the victim of the "incedent" false profiles posted on Yahoo! by a spurned boyfriend may have a cause of action against Yahoo! for allegedly promising to remove the profiles, then failing to do so.
 
Barnes v. Yahoo!, Inc., No. 05-36189 (9th Cir. May 7, 2009).

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A primary purpose of a Web site's "Terms of Use" ("ToU") is to reserve to Web site owners the ability to regulate undesirable conduct. But should that ability be extended to third parties? Can users of a site assert that they are third-party beneficiaries of that Web site's ToU, and invoke the provisions of the ToU against another user of that site? In Jackson v. American Plaza Corp., 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 35847 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 28, 2009), the district court said that at least in the case of Craigslist, a user could not claim third-party beneficiary status under the Craigslist ToU.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In A.V. v. iParadigms, LLC, 2009 U.S. App. LEXIS 7892 (4^th Cir. Apr. 16, 2009), the Fourth Circuit concluded that the archiving of high school student term papers by a plagiarism detection service is protected by the fair use doctrine. Having so ruled, the appeals court did not address the district court's analysis of the enforceability of the clickwrap agreements executed by the minor students when they submitted their papers to the service.  The district court ruling on the issue of enforceability is, therefore, left intact.

The district court opinion offers some other general points of interest with respect to clickwrap agreements.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The copyright lawsuits brought by record company plaintiffs to redress file-sharing have yielded many decisions of first impression. However, the recent ruling by the First Circuit in In re Sony BMG, Inc. (1st Cir. Apr. 16, 2009)  is one of the few that is of interest not just to copyright litigators, but scholars of appellate procedure as well. The ruling includes a discussion of the contours of federal court of appeals mandamus jurisdiction and the circumstances under which prerogative writs should be issued to the lower federal courts. A rarefied discussion indeed.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Second Circuit decided to celebrate the one year anniversary of the oral argument in Rescuecom v. Google by issuing its long-awaited opinion. The court reversed the district court's dismissal of the trademark owner's Lanham Act claims, holding that "Google’s recommendation and sale of Rescuecom’s mark to Google’s advertisers, so as to trigger the appearance of their advertisements and links in a manner likely to cause consumer confusion when a Google user launches a search of Rescuecom’s trademark, properly alleges a claim under the Lanham Act."

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks