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Court enforces forum selection clause in web hosting agreement

Posted on November 24, 2008
Bennett v. Hosting.com, Inc., 2008 WL 4951020 (N.D. Cal. November 18, 2008) Bennett filed an astounding 30-count complaint against defendant Hosting.com. Though the Managed Hosting Agreement designated Jefferson County, Kentucky to be the sole and exclusive venue for actions brought in connection with the agreement, Bennet brought the action in federal court in Northern California...

Results of Internet searches helpful in earthworm trademark case

Posted on November 17, 2008
Cascade Mfg. Sales, Inc. v. Providnet Co. Trust, 2008 WL 4889716 (W.D. Wash. November 12, 2008) Cascade Manufacturing makes and sells composting bins in which earthworms “enhance and accelerate the composting process.” Cascade owns a federal trademark registration for WORM FACTORY...

Government spam blocking not a violation of First Amendment right to petition

Posted on November 06, 2008
Ferrone v. Onorato, No. 07-4299, 2008 WL 4763257 (3rd Cir. October 31, 2008) The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has held that a county government did not violate a citizen’s First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of greivences when the county set its spam filters to block all email from the citizen’s [...

No judicial notice for Wikipedia entry

Posted on October 27, 2008
Flores v. State, No. 2008 WL 4683960 (Tx. App. October 23, 2008) Not surprisingly, a Texas appellate court has held that it should not take judicial notice of a Wikipedia article. Defendant was tried and convicted for cocaine possession. He appealed his sentence, arguing the trial court improperly admitted two oral statements the defendant made while [...

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Court allows U.S. lawsuit over video posted on Mexican website

Posted on October 25, 2008
Rapper 50 Cent’s Lanham Act claim against Cancun night club survives motion to dismiss Jackson v. Grupo Industrial Hotelero, S.A., No. 07-22046, 2008 WL 4648999 (S.D. Fla. October 20, 2008) Defendant owns Coco Bongo, a popular Cancun nightclub. Coco Bongo allegedly used rapper 50 Cent’s likeness as well as one of his registered trademarks in some Spring [...

Divorce spyware case moves forward

Posted on October 21, 2008
Court refuses to dismiss ECPA, SCA and CFAA claims against ex-spouse accused of delivering malicious code. Becker v. Toca, No. 07-7202, 2008 WL 4443050 (E.D. La. September 26, 2008) Plaintiff Becker sued his ex-wife, one Ms. Toca, claiming that Toca installed on Becker’s home and office computers a Trojan Horse that could steal passwords and send them [...

No injunction against transferring student over violent YouTube video

Posted on October 17, 2008
O.Z. v. Board of Trustees of Long Beach Unified School Dist., 2008 WL 4396895 (C.D. Cal. Sept. 9, 2008) While school was out of session for spring break, seventh grader O.Z. collaborated with a classmate to make a slide show video dramatizing the murder of the students’ English teacher...

Useful tool for locating UDRP decisions

Posted on October 16, 2008
Enrico Schaefer of Traverse Legal sent me a link to a tool called DomainFight.net, which promises to be very useful. It’s a simple interface to allow one to easily search for decisions under the UDRP issued by both the National Arbitration Forum and the World Intellectual Property Organization...

Court enjoins transfer of trademarks associated with domain name booty

Posted on October 07, 2008
1st Technology v. Bodog Entertainment Group, S.A., No. 08-0872, (W.D. Wash. September 30, 2008). After plaintiff 1st Technology won a $46 million default judgment against defendant BEGSA, 1st Technology began its collection efforts by seeking to obtain possession of thousands of BEGSA domain names registered through the Washington-state based registrar eNom...

Kentucky settles banned blogger?s First Amendment challenge to Internet filtering policy

Posted on June 18, 2008
Ed. note: This is a guest post by Greg Beck, an attorney at Public Citizen in Washington, DC. Greg works on a variety of issues at Public Citizen, mostly involving Internet free speech, anonymity, and intellectual property. He was lead counsel for Mark Nickolas in his challenge to Kentucky’s ban on blogs...

UMG and Motley Crue sued for infringement of band photos

Posted on June 18, 2008
Toma v. Motley Crue et al., No. 08-3479 (N.D. Ill., Filed June 17, 2008) The purported owner of the copyright in photos taken of members of Motley Crue way back in 1981 has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleging that the band, Universal Music Group and Singatures Network [...

Negligence claim allowed in laptop theft case

Posted on June 18, 2008
Ruiz v. Gap, Inc., 540 F.Supp.2d 1121 (N.D. Cal. March 24, 2008) In 2006, Ruiz applied for a job at the Gap and was required to provide his Social Security number. A vendor hired by the Gap for recruiting stored Ruiz’s information on a laptop which, as luck would have it, was stolen...

No standing to sue Microsoft under XP EULA

Posted on June 16, 2008
Johnson v. Microsoft Corp., No. 06-900, 2008 WL 803124 (W.D. Wash. March 21, 2008). A number of plaintiffs filed suit against Microsoft in federal court in Washington state, alleging, among other things, that the installation of Windows Genuine Advantage (”WGA”) (which enforces the validity of a user’s version of XP) violated the XP end user license [...

Company may be liable under Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for targeting and directing competitor?s employee to violate the Act

Posted on June 14, 2008
Binary Semantics Limited v. Minitab, Inc., No. 07-1750, 2008 WL 763575 (M.D. Pa. March 20, 2008) Plaintiff Binary Semantics Limited is a company with expertise in promoting and selling software in India. Defendant Minitab, Inc. is a software development company that for several years had an agreement with Binary whereby Binary would promote and sell Minitab’s [...

No initial interest confusion in metatag and sponsored listing case

Posted on June 12, 2008
Designer Skin, LLC v. S & L Vitamins, Inc., No. 05-3699, 2008 WL 2116646 (D. Ariz. May 20, 2008) It’s always a bit nerve wracking to write about decisions when I know that counsel of record is probably going to be reading the post. That’s the situation with the recent Designer Skin v...

California?s anti-SLAPP statute not applied to request for subpoena

Posted on June 12, 2008
Request for subpoena to unmask anonymous defendants in prospective Internet defamation case did not set forth “cause of action” or initiate judicial proceedings. Tendler v. www.jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com, No. H031130, 2008 WL 2352497 (Cal...

Internet law seminar this Friday in Chicago

Posted on June 11, 2008
This Friday (6/13/08) starting at 2pm at the Chicago Bar Association building [map], there will be an interesting 3-hour seminar titled “Management and Enforcement of Digital Rights on the Web.” The CBA’s Cyberlaw and Data Privacy Committee (which I’ll be chairing next year) is a co-sponsor of this event...

A look back at Doe v. MySpace

Posted on June 10, 2008
Court of Appeals upholds Section 230 immunity for MySpace. Social networking provider not subject to suit for negligence for failing to implement technological measures to weed out underage users. Doe v. MySpace, Inc., — F.3d —-, 2008 WL 2068064 (5th Cir...

Ben Stein?s ?Expelled? film permitted to use clip from Lennon?s ?Imagine?

Posted on June 09, 2008
Judge Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled last week that use of portions of the song ?Imagine? in the film ?EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed? were protected as fair use. Plaintiffs Yoko Ono and record label EMI sued Defendants (the producers of the film) for copyright [...

Resale on eBay o.k. under First Sale Doctrine?

Posted on May 26, 2008
Last week the U.S. District Court in Seattle denied Defendant Autodesk?s motion to dismiss Plaintiff Vernor?s case, and held that under the circumstances, the sale of AutoCAD on eBay was protected by the First Sale Doctrine. Vernor makes a living reselling goods on eBay...

What?s the story on the MySpace suicide indictment?

Posted on May 17, 2008
The media has given a lot of attention to the indictment by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles of the mother who allegedly set up a bogus MySpace account to harass one of her daughter’s 13 year old friends. That friend later hung herself in the closet, purportedly because of the harassment...

Liveblogging the 2008 INTA Annual Meeting

Posted on May 16, 2008
Internet Cases contributor Brian Beckham is attending the 130th annual meeting of the International Trademark Association in Berlin, Germany May 17-21 and will be liveblogging important events. Follow along at http://inta.internetcases.com.

Court reconsiders ?making available? in file-sharing case

Posted on May 16, 2008
A U.S. District Court judge in Minnesota presiding over the case of Capitol Records Inc. v. Jammie Thomas has issued an Order breathing new life into the Defendant’s case. Thomas was found liable for copyright infringement for activities over the KaZaA network, and had moved for either a new trial or lowering of damages on the [...

A guide to registering the copyright in your blog

Posted on April 29, 2008
The required procedures for registering claims of copyright in the United States Copyright Office don’t match up well with the practicalities of modern web publishing. It would be almost a full time job to file new copyright applications each time a blog is updated, let alone prohibitively expensive...

Emails held sufficient to amend employment contracts in NY

Posted on April 26, 2008
[Brian Beckham is a contributor to Internet Cases and can be contacted at brian.beckham [at] gmail dot com.] The New York Court of Appeals, 1st Division recently upheld a lower court ruling that a series of ?signed? emails is a sufficient writing to modify a contract...

Borat movie plaintiff not successful in image appropriation case

Posted on April 23, 2008
[Brian Beckham is a contributor to Internet Cases and can be contacted at brian.beckham [at] gmail dot com.] Lemerond v. 20th Century Fox, No. 07-4635, 2008 WL 918579 (S.D.N.Y. March 31, 2008) In the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the fictional Kazakh character (alter ego of comedian Sacha Cohen) [...

The vexing linkage between access and protection in DMCA anticircumvention analysis

Posted on April 18, 2008
A couple of days ago David Donoghue wrote about the recent case of Nordstrom Consulting, Inc. v. M&S Technologies, Inc., No. 06-3234, 2008 WL 623660 (N.D. Ill. March 4, 2008). Dave’s post gives a very thorough treatment of all aspects of the case, which involve primarily allegations of infringement of the copyright in software...

Former band members? use of service mark is not so Chic

Posted on April 14, 2008
Rogers v. Wright, No. 04-1149, 2008 WL 857761 (S.D.N.Y. March 31, 2008) The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has issued a permanent injunction restricting the use of the service mark CHIC in connection with musical performances by two former members of the musical group of the same name...

On Shyftr and copyright infringement

Posted on April 13, 2008
Over the past few days a discussion has erupted about the recently-noticed RSS feed aggregator slash social networking site called Shyftr. The gist of the discussion — which can properly be characterized as a controversy — is about how Shyftr republished entire posts from others’ RSS feeds without obtaining prior consent...

Apple vs. the Big Apple charity over apple-shaped logos

Posted on April 08, 2008
Apple, Inc. is seeing red over New York City’s attempts to register a trademark for green-friendly services, and the dispute challenges one of Apple’s trademark registrations for its ubiquitous logo. Apple has filed an Opposition (No. 91/181,984) with the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board against NYC & Company, Inc...

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