This past week, the Supreme Court denied the petitions for certiorari in two noteworthy Ninth Circuit decisions that had interpreted the scope of liability under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in the context of wrongful access of company networks by employees and in instances involving unwanted data scraping from publicly available websites. … Continue Reading
On May 16, 2017, the Ninth Circuit rejected a petition for cancellation of the GOOGLE trademark based on a “genericide” theory that claimed Google should lose its trademark protection because the word “google” has become synonymous to the public with the term “search the internet.” (See Elliott v. Google, Inc., 2017 WL 2112311 (9th Cir. … Continue Reading
With summer concerts and music festivals in full swing, many fans will be surprised to find $145 face value tickets reselling online for $3,000 to $11,000. On May 11, 2017, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman took the most recent step in dealing with this problem, and announced seven settlements in “ticket bot” enforcement actions, … Continue Reading
Screen scraping is a problem that has vexed website owners since the early days of e-commerce – how to make valuable content available to users and customers, but prevent competitors from accessing such content for commercial purposes. Even in the advent of social media, mobile commerce, and advanced software, the issue remains relevant to today’s … Continue Reading
A service provider seeking to take advantage of certain of the safe harbors under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is required to designate an agent to receive takedown notices. The service provider is required to post the DMCA agent’s contact information on its website and to provide such information to the Copyright Office. On … Continue Reading
This past summer, we wrote about two instances in which courts refused to enforce website terms presented in browsewrap agreements. As we noted, clickthrough agreements are generally more likely to be found to be enforced. However, even the enforceability of clickthrough agreements is going to depend, in part, on how the user experience leading to … Continue Reading
Last month, a New York district court refused to dismiss most of the copyright infringement claims asserted against a website operator based on an allegation that the website linked to an infringing copy of plaintiff’s software stored on a third-party’s servers. (Live Face on Web, LLC v. Biblio Holdings LLC, 2016 WL 4766344 (S.D.N.Y., September … Continue Reading
If your company sells a smart device to a consumer, can it later turn the device into a paid advertising platform? Can it do so without advanced disclosure? A recent court ruling suggests the answer is “yes,” at least in New York.… Continue Reading
UPDATE: On January 18, 2019, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the award of damages and injunctive relief in favor of Facebook. (Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc., No. 17-16161 (9th Cir. Jan. 18, 2019) (unpublished)). The California district court in 2017 had awarded Facebook almost $80,000 in CFAA damages, representing only the period after Facebook sent its … Continue Reading
Another court has contributed to the ongoing debate over the scope of the term “personally identifiable information” under the Video Privacy Protection Act – a statute enacted in 1988 to protect the privacy of consumers’ videotape rental and purchase history but lately applied to the modern age of video streaming services and online video viewing. … Continue Reading
In the wake of thousands of parental complaints about unauthorized in-app purchases made by their children, resulting in millions of dollars in disputed charges, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) brought suit against Amazon, Inc. (“Amazon”) in July 2014. The FTC sought a court order requiring refunds to consumers for unauthorized charges and permanently banning the … Continue Reading
Late last week, the Illinois state senate considered an amendment tacked onto to an unrelated bill that would have revised the Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, a law that has been the subject of much debate and litigation in the past year. This amendment had the potential to drastically affect the current litany of lawsuits … Continue Reading
The District Court for the Northern District of California recently issued what could be a very significant decision on a number of important digital law issues. These include: the enforceability of “clickwrap” as compared to “web wrap” website terms of use, the enforceability of a choice-of-law provision in such terms of use, and a preliminary … Continue Reading
We live in a world that has rapidly redefined and blurred the roles of the “creator” of content, as compared to the roles of the “publisher” and “distributor” of such content. A recent case touches on some of the important legal issues associated with such change. Among other things, the case illustrates the importance of … Continue Reading
As we have previously written about, there are several ongoing biometric privacy-related lawsuits alleging that facial recognition-based systems of photo tagging violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Add one more to the list. A Chicago resident brought a putative class action against Google for allegedly collecting, storing and using, without consent and in … Continue Reading
In a notable ruling last month, a California district court ruled that the HTML underlying a custom search results page of an online advertising creation platform is copyrightable. In Media.net Advertising FZ-LLC v. Netseer Inc., No. 14-3883, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 3784 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 12, 2016), the plaintiff, an online contextual-advertising service provider, brought … Continue Reading
The big data revolution is quietly chugging along: devices, sensors, websites and networks are collecting and producing significant amounts of data, the cost of data storage continues to plummet, public and private sector interest in data mining is growing, data computational and statistical methods have advanced, and more and more data scientists are using new … Continue Reading
Digital media marketers are aggressively increasing the use of so-called sponsored content, or native advertising to reach new customers. Particularly with the growing use of ad blockers on web and mobile browsers, marketers have sought to present advertising in a new form that can circumvent automated blocking and somehow capture the attention of users who … Continue Reading
As we have previously noted, there are several ongoing privacy-related lawsuits alleging that facial recognition-based systems of photo tagging violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The photo storage service Shutterfly and the social network Facebook are both defending putative class action suits that, among other things, allege that such services created and stored … Continue Reading
Courts continue to struggle with the application of CDA immunity to shield service provider defendants from liability in extreme cases. In this case, the Washington Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, affirmed the lower court’s decision to allow a suit to proceed against classified service Backpage.com surrounding the sexual assault of several minors by adult customers … Continue Reading
There is an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the impending shortage of IPv4 IP addresses (forcing tech companies and cloud providers to scramble to secure the remaining stock for U.S. users) and the IPv6 solution. Hate to say “I told you so” but…see our prior coverage here and here. But what should you … Continue Reading
After nearly 4 million public comments, and months of vigorous public, industry, and Congressional debate, the FCC, by a 3-2 vote, approved revised net neutrality rules to “protect the Open Internet.” As expected by the Chairman’s statements in the lead-up to the vote, the FCC’s Open Internet Order reclassifies broadband internet access as a “telecommunications … Continue Reading
Operators of public-facing websites are typically concerned about the unauthorized, technology-based extraction of large volumes of information from their sites, often by competitors or others in related businesses. The practice, usually referred to as screen scraping, web harvesting, crawling or spidering, has been the subject of many questions and a fair amount of litigation over … Continue Reading
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 law on scraping and linking … Continue Reading
