Gripe and Review Sites

Decline and fall of the dumb copyright trick

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One of the dumbest things people — overlawyered, and, sadly, mainly professionally-licensed people — have tried to do to avoid negative online reviews is to find ways of claiming some kind of copyright in any review posted by a former client, then suing the negative reviewer for copyright infringement.  Eric Goldman has a nice survey of that business here, in a post that happens to also be about the case that is the focus of…

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Ron Coleman

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Posted on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®

J.D. Supra, Facebook …. and the Word

Bob Ambrogi: The document-sharing site JD Supra is launching an application for Facebook today that lets its members stream their documents and professional profile information into their Facebook profiles. This means that if you contribute documents to JD Supra, you can get additional exposure by having them show up in Facebook. Sounded interesting to us!  After some back and forth with “JD Twitt” on Twitter (oh, yeah, you can get LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® on Twitter),... Read more

Posted on Copyright Law

No more free ride

Attributor is a new program that online publishers can and do use to trace their verbal content across the Internet and see who is using how much of their stuff without paying or attributing. Reading the articles (this one sent to me by my brother, software engineeer Glenn Coleman) it seems clear that most media outlets are interested in getting credit, and links back to their sites, for typical use of their materials, i.e., use... Read more

Posted on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®

Fakers rising

Brandweek: Ersatz goods selling on Canal Street isn’t exactly news in New York, even though Mayor Mike Bloomberg staged an impressive photo op amid a mountain range of purses. But the size and stealth of the raid on what cops called “Counterfeit Triangle” seemed to verify a change that many in the brand community have sensed for some time. Counterfeiting is no longer a localized nuisance akin to Three-Card Monte games. Thanks largely to the... Read more

Posted on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®

Stop by Cardozo for lunch and get a tan!

Our [ahem, adjunct] law professor days are behind us, it appears, but we’ll be giving a presentation at the Intellectual Property Law Society at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law tomorrow on the topic of how intellectual property law is being used and abused in the service of anticompetitive practices.  Asked to focus on a specific industry, we threw darts at a copy of the Wall Street Journal and, wouldn’t you know it, we... Read more

Posted on Fee Shifting

Frivolous copyright claims don’t automatically merit fee awards

The New York Law Journal reports that my old friend Southern District Judge Denise Cote has turned down Fox Entertainment Group’s attempt to recoup almost $280,000 in attorney’s fees (pursuant to the copyright statute) it spent staving off a copyright suit that Fox had demonstrated was frivolous (it involved an allegation that a Fox TV program was a “ripoff” of another program). Judge Cote has an interesting take on the issue: Although both sides agreed... Read more

Posted on Keyword Advertising

The target keeps moving on keyword advertising

Searchengineland: Eric Goldman reports that a US District Judge in Florida ordered an advertiser using a trademark term to use the negative keyword option, to ensure that they would no longer bid on that term in the future. The judge ordered the defendant to stop using the word “ORION” in their search ad campaigns, by adding that keyword to the negative keyword filter in AdWords. Here are the exact words of the court order, found... Read more

Posted on Blogging

Likelihood of Reciprocation

LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®’s “blogroll” policy has not really changed, even though LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® is bigger and better than ever, but it may be useful to clarify it, because I do get inquiries, and there have been some refinements.  Namely, ones that I just made up. And this blog is now “big” enough in our micro-sub-niche that it is reasonable to assume that some people might care to know what the rules are considering that,... Read more

Posted on Domain Names

There’s NoSpace like home

At least for MySpace.com, which has lost a key domain name battle in England over the domain myspace.co.uk. According to Bell Denning, solicitors for the respondent: Both the first and the appeal decisions held that the vast majority of MySpace’s claims had no merit – not least because the UK ISP had legitimately registered the name some 6 years before the social networking site had been formed and the Stockport based ISP had been using... Read more