The DMCA was enacted in 1998 to preserve “strong incentives for service providers and copyright owners to cooperate to detect and deal with copyright infringements that take place in a digital networked environment.” As part of this implicit bargain, Title II of the DMCA offers safe harbors for qualifying service
Online Content
Emergence of Live Streaming Apps Brings Up Copyright, Privacy, Legal Concerns
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
The big fight may be over, but the implications of Mayweather vs. Pacquiao with respect to real-time, one-to-many streaming of video through apps like Meerkat and Periscope are still rippling through the media industry. In short, livestreaming apps allow anyone with a smartphone to effortlessly broadcast live video to social…
California Supreme Court Denies Review of Ruling Allowing Restaurant Owner’s False Advertising Claims to Proceed Against Yelp
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
On November 12, 2014, the California Supreme Court denied review of the California Court of Appeals decision in Demetriades v. Yelp, Inc., 2014 WL 3661491 (Cal. App. July 24, 2014), which allowed a restaurant owner to proceed with false advertising and other claims against the consumer review site Yelp based…
Website Marketing Statements: The Achilles’Heel to CDA Protection?
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
It’s no secret that local directory/consumer review websites are popular among consumers looking for recommendations before dining out, hiring a contractor, or even picking a dentist or day spa. Yelp reported around 138 million monthly unique visitors in the second quarter of 2014, searching among over 61 million local reviews. …
Sixth Circuit Reinforces CDA Immunity – Reverses Lower Court in Jones v. Dirty World
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
On June 16th, 2014, the Sixth Circuit reversed the lower court’s holding that the gossip site, TheDirty.com, was responsible for its users’ defamatory posts and could not rely on immunity under CDA Section 230. The appeals court ruled that even though the gossip site selected and edited user-generated…
Staving Off Scrapers of User-Generated Content with Electronic Copyright Transfers… A Legal (But, Perhaps Not a Practical) Solution
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
It’s a problem that has vexed website owners since the days of the dot-com boom – how to make certain user-generated content available to users or subscribers, but also prevent competitors and other unauthorized parties from scraping, linking to or otherwise accessing that content for their own commercial purposes.
The…
Trade Dress Can Be Viable Means of Protecting Websites from Competitor’s Look-Alike Sites
By Jessica Goldenberg on
Somewhere between a well-recognized website design like Google’s home page and a fledgling e-commerce venture built with free web building software lives most other websites. Depending on the investment in the development and the operator’s design ethic, some websites may display unique, distinctive portals that are key to attracting and…
The First Amendment Goes Digital – Clicking “Like” on Facebook is Speech
Posted on
With around 1.15 billion members, Facebook is a massive, global forum for communicating with friends and the world. For many users, it often feels as if their news feeds are clogged with vapid comments about the weather, meal choices or the ever-present need for coffee. But under other circumstances, such …
New California Law Impacts Use of Information from Minors, Offers Right to Delete
By Charley Lozada & Jeffrey Neuburger on
Law Targets Sites and Mobile Apps Directed to Minors, Offers “Online Eraser”
Likely to Have Nationwide Effect
On July 1st of this year, new amendments to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule) came into effect, with perhaps the most pronounced changes being the expansion of COPPA…
Sixth Circuit Affirms ‘Dirtiest Hotel’ Defamation Ruling
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
We previously wrote about a Tennessee district court’s decision holding that a hotel’s inclusion at the top of the 2011 TripAdvisor “Dirtiest Hotels” list constituted hyperbolic opinion and rhetorical exaggeration, and thus was not actionable under Tennessee defamation law. This past month, a circuit court upheld the ruling.
On appeal,…