A recent jury verdict of $770,750, in statutory damages for secondary trademark infringement against Bright Builders, a Web hosting and SEO service provider, will serve as a reminder to service providers that there is no statutory safe harbor for contributory online trademark infringement. Unlike  the copyright infringement safe harbor provisions…

Cellco Partnership, doing business as Verizon Wireless, filed a lengthy complaint on March 7, 2011, against mobile marketing entities that have conducted short code marketing campaigns on its network. The complaint alleges that these entities failed to comply with the Mobile Marketing Association’s Consumer Best Practices Guidelines for Cross Carrier…

** UPDATE March 22, 2011:  On March 18, the court dismissed Righthaven’s copyright action against the Center for Intercultural Organizing on the grounds of fair use.**

Righthaven LLC is an intellectual property enforcement firm that was formed by a group of copyright attorneys and Stephens Media, the publisher of the Law Vegas Review-Journal. The company has been making a name for itself; since early 2010, has brought two hundred copyright infringement suits in the District of Nevada alone against Web site owners, forum operators and bloggers alleged to have unauthorized copies of the Review-Journal’s articles on their sites. Recently, it has added other media company clients and expanded its enforcement efforts to other federal districts.
Righthaven is also drawing considerable fire from critics who have denounced the company as a copyright troll, and an attack dog. The criticism is directed at Righthaven’s business model.

The lawsuits target individuals and small, usually non-profit entities and other Web sites that have failed to take advantage of the DMCA safe harbor protection against liability for material posted by a third party. Righthaven makes no takedown demands prior to filing its complaints, which seek not only damages but transfer of the defendant’s domain name. The company then presses for a quick settlement.

So far, about half of the Righthaven lawsuits have settled, probably for the low four figures. Righthaven Lawsuits, a Web site that tracks the Righthaven litigation, estimates that Righthaven has taken in about $364,000 thus far.  But some Righthaven targets are fighting back, raising defenses such as copyright fair use and implied license, in several cases with the assistance of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Righthaven’s lawsuits in the District of Nevada have so far yielded two rulings on the copyright fair use defense and the doctrine of implied license, and may soon yield further rulings on those issues. These opinions should be noted by content owners. The opinions in Righthaven v. Klerks and Righthaven v. Realty One Group suggest a broad view of the fair use doctrine in the online context, and perhaps a potentially even broader view of the application of the doctrine of implied license.

The lame duck Congress that reconvened following the November elections wasn’t expected to do much, but some legislation got pushed out at the eleventh hour (or perhaps, the one-hundred-and-eleventh hour), including the “Restore Online Confidence Act,” S. 3386 (111th Cong., 2d Sess. 2010), sponsored by Sen. John D. Rockefeller, IV.…

Playing World of Warcraft, the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), can be, well, a drag. As the parents, teachers and spouses of gamers know all too well, playing through the 70 or more levels of the game in order to amass desired virtual currency, weapons and armor can be extremely time-consuming. So some gamers have resorted to the use of bots (automated game-playing software robots) to make their way more quickly from the more tedious early levels of the game to the more interesting upper levels. Michael Donnelly developed WoW bot software (Glider) for his own use and it worked so well that he decided to sell it to other gamers. And that worked well, too. In a few years, Donnelly (incorporated as MDY Industries) had gross revenues of $3.5 million from sales of Glider licenses.

For Blizzard Entertainment, the distributor of WoW software and the operator of the servers that enable online game play, bots are, well, a drag. Other gamers complain that they constitute cheating, and Blizzard potentially loses revenue when gamers finish the game sooner rather than later. So Blizzard added a provision to the WoW Terms of Use prohibiting the use of bots and similar third-party software. WoW also deployed a software solution, WoW Warden, that checks gamers’ computers for prohibited software and prevents their access to the server if it is present. Warden works only so-so at blocking Glider-using players, though, and it costs a lot of money to deploy and maintain.

So Blizzard also sent its lawyers to Donnelly’s home to personally demand that he cease selling the Glider program. (Whether he called them Worgen and tried to repel them with his Corpse-Impaling Spike is not part of the record.) Donnelly subsequently filed an action seeking a declaratory judgment that his sale of the Glider program did not infringe Blizzard’s copyrights, and Blizzard responded with counterclaims under copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and state law.

Game on.

Both Congress and the two federal agencies have recently taken action aimed at making technological advances accessible to individuals with hearing and visual limitations. These initiatives coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

In some respects, these actions overlap on various…