Free for a Fee

By Eric Goldman

Phan v. Pham, 2010 WL 658244 (Cal. App. Ct. Feb. 25, 2010)

This is the first 230 case I’m blogging about in 2010 (see my 2009 recap), and what a nice ruling to start the year. The facts are crisp and clean: An email author wrote an allegedly defamatory email about plaintiff Phan and sent it to a group of recipients, including defendant Pham. Pham then forwarded the email with the following additional comments to at least one recipient:

more.

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The New Kid on the Block
Tuesday the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook patent number 7,669,123, covering “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.”

Behold the Mini-Feed
What is “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”? What it is not is a general news feed. The patent is much narrower than that, covering what it describes as a “mini-feed.” A mini-feed is a user-defined set of news feed inputs filtered by the reader. I might create a mini-feed of my family. I can filter the feed by just those activities they undertake relating to an upcoming family reunion, and automatically filter the results chronologically. If my sister joined the Trout Family Reunion fan page, the mini-feed I created and follow would reflect that.

Word on the Street
Pundits are up in arms over this patent, saying it goes “against everything that the patent system is supposed to do,” calling it the most significant social web patent since the six degrees patent issued in 2001 and arguing it could lead to a royalty windfall from the likes of Google and Twitter. Things are not merely so dire. While those forecasts may indeed have merit, they do not comport with my read of the scope of Facebook’s new patent.

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By Eric Goldman

Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 5:07-cv-03783-JF (N.D. Cal. Feb. 25. 2010)

In the lawsuit over the allegedly bogus takedown of a YouTube video of a baby dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” (previous blog coverage), Judge Fogel has defined some standards for computing damages in a 17 USC 512(f) case, which creates a cause of action for sending certain types of bogus copyright takedown notices. I can’t recall another case discussing the damages requirements of a 512(f) claim–the only other definitive 512(f) plaintiff’s win was Online Policy Group v. Diebold (also before Judge Fogel), which settled for $125k before Judge Fogel reached damages. As a result, I believe this is a novel ruling which could have significant implications for future 512(f) cases.

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Activision Blizzard has made, by most accounts, a boatload of money on the Guitar Hero franchise. Now a group is claiming that Activision falsely advertised the games, including DJ Hero, claiming that it had patents pending notation when there weren’t patents being applied for, and for listing patents not connected with the products. With a possible fine of up to $500 per product sold, a finding of wrongdoing could be very expensive.

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The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/02/activision-blizzards-guitar-hero-patent-claims-tested.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

DNA, the storage bank of genetic information for all living organisms, is challenging scientists and policy makers to reconsider the issue of privacy. With the completion of the human genome and advancements in DNA sequencing technologies, a person’s DNA can potentially be tested for risks related to a number of genetic diseases. This progress is promising for personalized medicine, but ethical and policy issues are coming to the forefront as well. After all, can DNA data ever be truly private and anonymous when DNA itself can also act as a unique identifier?

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