A blog relating to Internet legal issues by Professor John Swinson, University of Queensland
Adsense HTML
No Copyright In This Headline
Fake Consumer Reviews
On the consumer protection front, the FTC settled charges that a public relations agency engaged in deceptive advertising “by having employees pose as ordinary consumers posting game reviews at the online iTunes store, and not disclosing that the reviews came from paid employees working on behalf of the developers. This activity was in violation of the FTC's Revised Endorsement Guidelines which require disclosure. The PR firm, Reverb Communications, is required to take down the fraudulent postings and bars them from making similar postings in the future without appropriate disclosures.
Press release: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2010/08/reverb.shtm
Links to Complaint and Consent Order: http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0923199/index.shtm
Information on the FTC's Revised Endorsement Guidelines (16 CFR Part 255): http://ftc.gov/multimedia/video/business/endorsement-guides.shtm
Google and Privacy
A video cartoon featuring Google's chief giving away ice-cream to snoop on children aired on a giant screen in Times Square today as a privacy group continued to hound the internet giant.
Consumer Watchdog took its gripes with Google to the centre of Manhattan, where it paid to have a "Don't be evil?" animated clip shown on a "Jumbotron" screen above the masses coursing through Times Square.
Changes to Laws In Australia involving licensing software to consumers
Who does this affect?
The new laws raise issues for all software licences with Australian end-customers where either:
- the software is "of a kind ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic or household use or consumption"; or
- the amount paid or payable for the software is $A40,000 or less.
Those end-customers are taken to be "consumers" by the ACL, even if they are multinational corporations or government entities well-equipped to negotiate to protect their interests.
Software Licensing
U.S. Patent Office Guidelines for patentable subject matter
Manifesto on internet policy and regulation
The IIA recently launched its "manifesto on internet policy and regulation, with principles and recommendations to guide decision making".
A PDF copy of the guide is available at
http://iia.net.au/images/resources/pdf/manifesto-2010.pdf
"We'll be requesting political parties to respond to its recommendations over the coming weeks," IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos, said.
"It asks the question, under what circumstances can the Internet in Australia be advanced or hobbled by politicians today."
The report argues that the speed of technological change
outstrips the ability of legislation and legislators to keep up.
"Should or can they, regulate the internet to tackle social
policy challenges arising in the wake of rapid technological
change without damaging our capacity to innovate and compete?
If laws are passed, can they be enforced?
Is technology to blame or are we really dealing with age old
human problems that neither laws nor technology can regulate?
These are questions implicit in this document," Coroneos said.
The document offers a reality check to the internet policy debate by urging a return to first principles such as where Australia stands against our western counterparts. It argues we tend to over-regulated in content matters for often symbolic political reasons.
"We lack a local research base to support proposals notably in areas of cyber crime and cyber safety," he said.
Last Class
Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo
Facebook, MySpace Messages Are Protected: Judge
A district judge has reversed a magistrate judge's ruling that fashion house Christian Audigier Inc. can subpoena the Facebook Inc. and MySpace Inc. communications of an artist who sued the designer for copyright infringement, finding that messages on the social networking sites are protected information.
Yahoo, Facebook Back Google In YouTube IP Case
Facebook Inc., eBay Inc., IAC/InterActiveCorp and Yahoo Inc. have urged a federal judge to rule against Viacom International Inc. in its copyright lawsuit against Google Inc. over video-sharing website YouTube Inc., arguing that a victory for Viacom in the case would hurt online commerce.
Communications Law to be Reviewed
Break Up Google?
Google is the “arbiter of every single thing on the Web, and it favors its properties over everyone else’s,” said Mr. Reback, sitting in a Washington cafe with the couple. “What it wants to do is control Internet traffic. Anything that undermines its ability to do that is threatening.”
Privacy - Proposed New Law in U.S.A.
Google Says It Collected Private Data by Mistake
"Google said on Friday that for more than three years it had inadvertently collected snippets of private information that people send over unencrypted wireless networks. The admission, made in an official blog post by Alan Eustace, Google’s engineering chief, comes a month after regulators in Europe started asking the search giant pointed questions about Street View, the layer of real-world photographs accessible from Google Maps. Regulators wanted to know what data Google collected as its camera-laden cars methodically trolled through neighborhoods, and what Google did with that data."
Copyright class
Berne Convention
Australian Copyright Council
Copyright Act
There have been a number of interesting Australian cases dealing with copyright infringement, see for example:
Kazaa
MP3s4free
Stevens v Sony
The iiNet case will be discussed in detail in the Liability of ISPs lecture.
We will also discuss how other countries treat piracy:
US - Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and the case of Napster
UK - Ditigal Economy Bill, and the recent case of Newzbin
Patents Class
Some reading for this class:
1. History
Google Keywords
"There is no stopping Google selling trademark terms as keywords. That is the message from the US courts this week. A judge from the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia has dismissed Rosetta Stone's case against the search giant, effectively killing off once and for all the conventional method of attacking the AdWords programme.
Rescuecom had already dropped its case against Google (in order to fight a suit on exactly the same issue but where it is the defendant). But the fact that a court has now dismissed this type of case is very surprising, as it shows that they cannot even get to court anymore. The message is that mark owners will be wasting their time suing Google for trademark infringement. The Court of Justice of the European Union recently said the same thing, although it left the door open for mark owners to sue those third-party advertisers that purchase competitors' trademark terms as keywords.
While the Best Buy v Rescuecom case will be tried from this particular angle, it appears that Google is off the hook. Users of the AdWords programme may sue each other, but the view of one US court at least is that there's no point suing Google. If trademark counsel want to stop the sale of their trademark terms to their competitors, they need to switch tactics. Fast."
Source: World Trademark Review
iCyte
Domain name disputes and cyberquatting
What are the common elements of domain name dispute resolution process?
For a good overview of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Process (UDRP), and the factors relevant to each element, see the WIPO website.
The Australian Dispute Resolution Process for domain names (managed by auDA), can be found here.
What are the differences between these two policies.
We will be discussing some of the following cases, which would be good to review before class:
brisbane.com
q1resort.com
"sucks" cases - red bull and bakersdelightlies
personal names
Who should win in this case?
We will also discuss the proposal for new top level domains.
Online Contracting
Online contracting
How do you determine when an electronic communication is sent/received? What are the possibilities?
Vienna Convention on the Sale of Goods (incorporated into
Guidelines for operating websites
Australian Treasury Guidelines for e-commerce
Terms of use
What are the common clauses / differences between these Terms of Use?
Clickwrap / Shrinkwrap agreements
What can you do to try and make a clickwrap agreement enforceable?
How will unfair terms legislation affect these agreements?
Enforcing Click Wrap Agreements
Tiffany v. eBay
EBay Inc did not engage in trademark infringement and dilution by selling counterfeit Tiffany & Co goods on its website, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday, but it ordered further review of the jeweler's claim of false advertising.
Tiffany and other luxury brands have long argued that counterfeit merchandise bearing their names is sold on eBay. The Web commerce company, which does not itself put the goods up for sale, says it has spent millions of dollars to track down counterfeiters and remove such listings.
Who can regulate the Internet?
The DC Circuit court recently vacated the FCC's order imposing sanctions on Comcast Corp. for its network management practices. It held that the Commission failed to tie its assertion of ancillary regulatory authority over Comcast's Internet service to any "statutorily mandated responsibility."
"In this case we must decide whether the Federal Communications Commission has authority to regulate an Internet service provider’s network management practices. ..."
Here is the opinion: http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/common/opinions/201004/08-1291-1238302.pdf
How I Got Sued by Facebook
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/
How I got sued by Facebook
...Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained.
Pete Warden vs. Facebook: a case of too much data access
... Pete Warden had a really great idea: to map the friendship interactions of Facebook users to aid with geospatial analysis of user relationships. Facebook's lawyers had a different view.
Hot News
"Breathing some new life into the “hot news” doctrine, Judge Cote of the Southern District of New York recently issued a permanent injunction requiring the Internet-based financial news site TheFlyOnTheWall.com (Fly) to delay its reporting of stock recommendations from Wall Street research analysts. ..."
Meta-tags and Google Keywords - TM infringement
How should damages be assessed for privacy and cybersecurity breaches
Listen to this podcast where I discuss how damages should be assessed in privacy and cybersecurity lawsuits. The Lawyers Weekly Show host J...
-
The United Nations intellectual property agency (WIPO) is the latest front in the US-China trade war. http://www.theage.com.au/world/sad-am...
-
The issue of content regulation in China was mentioned in this blog last year . In the last few weeks, this issue has once again pushed into...
-
Finally, what is called direct registration of domain names is coming to Australia. See https://www.auda.org.au/statement/australias-interne...