Free for a Fee

By Guest Blogger Sruli Yellin

[Eric's introduction: In the course of blogging over the past 8+ years, I've read hundreds or even thousands of cases. This case ranks in my top 1% of most interesting and memorable cases.

Today, we'd call this a cyberbullying case, but when the online attack occurred in 2004, we didn't have that terminology. The principal plaintiff, DC, was a high school student and an aspiring actor. He had a promotional website for his acting career, including a guestbook. His classmates discovered the website and posted hateful and threatening messages in the guestbook. In 2005, DC and his parents sued the school, the students who posted messages and their parents. A lot has transpired in the past 9 years, and I've found it hard to track everything and keep things straight. In this post, my RA Sruli Yellin sorts through the numerous developments.]

D.C. v. R.R. spans more than eight years in court; two appeals (including one to the California Supreme Court); a side suit for malpractice; and an expensive trip to arbitration. Prof. Goldman blogged the case twice (here and here) and discussed it in a recent talk on high schoolers using the Internet. To get a sense of how long this case has been running, it has already lasted over 1/3 of the lives of some of the litigants who were minors when the case was filed.

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By Eric Goldman

Habush v. Cannon, 2013 WL 627251 (Wisc. App. Ct. Feb. 21, 2013)

Can you imagine someone buying Google ($GOOG) AdWords keyword advertising triggered by your name?  Most of us wouldn’t dream of it, usually because our names just aren’t valuable enough for anyone to bother.  In contrast, some professional service providers, such as lawyers and doctors, tout their names in expensive advertising campaigns to consumers—and have competitors who would love to piggyback on that advertising to reach the same consumers.  In a novel and persuasive ruling, a Wisconsin appellate court recent rejected a professional service provider’s attempt to use publicity rights to shut down a competitive keyword advertiser.

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2013/02/buying_keyword.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

By Eric Goldman

Multi Time Machine, Inc. v. Amazon.com, 2013 WL 638888 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 20, 2013).  The complaint.

No retailer does a better job of cross-selling to its customers than Amazon.com ($AMZN).  Amazon is quite effective at exposing customers to complementary—and competitive—goods along with the products a customer initially considers.  Many of us have had the experience of going to Amazon to buy one thing but checking out with a huge shopping cart of items that we didn’t initially seek—or even know were available.  Amazon’s merchandising often benefits Amazon’s customers, but trademark owners who lose sales to their competition due to it aren’t as thrilled.  Fortunately for Amazon, a California federal court recently upheld Amazon’s merchandising practices in its internal search results.

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2013/03/amazons_merchan.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.