The Law Firm of the Future

An interesting article about legal services.

Also, an article about Twitter and law firms.

Internet Law Resource Centre

BNA has launched its Internet Law Resource Centre. It costs a heap of money, but there is a 15 day free trial.

Manipulating Google Search Results

The NY Times has a very good story about how JC Penney manipulated Google search engine results. Google did not catch this until the NYT pointed this out. Once Google decided to act, Google manually changed the results. For many searches, JC Penny went from 1st place to about 75th place.

See Search Optimisation and Its Dirty Little Secrets.

See also Search Engine Optimisation to Lure Readers

Google and Charity

Google Finds It Hard to Reinvent Philanthropy. See NY Times story.

LWN117 Offered in Semester 1, 2011

Cyberlaw and Policy LWN117 will be offered in first semester 2011 at QUT. See course details.

Is Law School A Losing Game?

See this story from the U.S. To what extent is the situation the same in Australia?

Online Surveys

See SMH

Google and Privacy

On Wednesday, the FTC closed its investigation of Google for its collection of data from unsecured wireless networks that may have violated privacy rules.  Google’s changes to its procedures and policies address the FTC’s concerns according to a letter from the FTC to Google:  http://www.ftc.gov/os/closings/101027googleletter.pdf 

No Copyright In This Headline

The Federal Court of Australia decided today that newspaper headlines are not protected by copyright. How will this impact Google News?

Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd v Reed International Books Australia Pty Ltd [2010] FCA 984 (7 September 2010)

See Mallesons Alert

The Australian

BusinessWeek

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.

Full story

Changes to Laws In Australia involving licensing software to consumers

Have a look at the Mallesons blog.

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

Is the software installed on your computer something you own -- or did you simply buy a "license" to use it? That's the issue at the heart of Vernor v. Autodesk Inc., a case argued Monday before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that represents a broad challenge to the software industry's fundamental business model.

See law.com

U.S. Patent Office Guidelines for patentable subject matter

See article at this U.S. law firm website.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) published Interim Guidance on 27 July 2010, for evaluating method claims for subject-matter eligibility under § 101 of the Patent Act. This guidance follows the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bilski v. Kappos.

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.

Business Method Patents - U.S. Supreme Court takes wide view

See today's decision in the Bilski case.

NYT article

YouTube and DMCA

YouTube wins copyright case, and found to be protected by DMCA.

See Mallesons and NYT

Last Class

The last class is Monday night, 31 May.

The class will go for about an hour, then we may go for a drink/pizza etc.

In this class, I can answer any questions that you may have.

We will also discuss legal issues concerning eBay and (if time) Facebook.

Please read:

• ebay User agreement
• ebay U.S. user agreement
• Privacy Policy
• U.S. Privacy Policy
• Rules About IP
• Prior Posts

eBay - reimbursement re bankruptcy of seller

Have a look at:

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/internet/20100527-ebay-australia-sets-up-special-fund-for-victims-of-collapses-online-travel-company.html

in light of

this note.

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

Two top Democratic legislators said Monday that they would begin a process to modernize telecommunications laws that were last overhauled in 1996 but barely mention the Internet.

NY Times

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.”

See NY Times for full story.

ISP Liaibility

The main reading for the class on Monday, 24 May is the iiNet case:

• decision
• case note
• iiNet press release
• Appeal lodged

Also: The Bunt case

High level note

Privacy - Proposed New Law in U.S.A.

U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher (VA-09), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, and Cliff Stearns, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee, released a discussion draft of legislation to assure the privacy of information about individuals both on the Internet and offline.

Details

References

This website has some useful links and references:

http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/article-index/rights-and-laws-of-the-internet/

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."

Full story in NYTimes

Copyright class

This lecture will give a brief overview of copyright law generally. For some background, see:

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

On Monday, 10 May 2010, we will be looking at patents.

Some reading for this class:

1. History

• History of Software Patents
• Do Internet Process Patents Threaten E-commerce?

2. State Street Bank decision

• Decision

3. Bilski

• Court of Appeals Decision
• Wikipedia summary
• U.S. Supreme Court Oral Argument
• In re Ferguson

4. Australia

• Real Time

• Grant v Commissioner of Patents [2005] FCA 1100

• Comment

5. Protests

• End Software Patents
• Wiki summary

Google v. Groggle

See this article, including an audio interview.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/are-google-and-groggle-really-similar-339302819.htm

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