January 13th 2009
Tim Stanley, Carl Malamud, and the the team at Altlaw.org are tenacious, creative and on a mission. Individually, each is finding creative ways to make America’s vast quantity of legal documents available over the Internet at no charge to the public. Together, they are opening up America’s legal system to the public through the Internet. […]
January 11th 2009
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the heroes of this blog. My friends who have made this effort both possible and fun, Carolyn and Brandon, also admire EFF. And if you’re reading this, I suspect you may dig EFF too. So, in honor of all that, for each new subscriber to UsefulArts.us from now until […]
January 7th 2009
The Consumer Law & Policy Blog describes a case of arguably false advertising, in which a “face lift” firm paid for keywords relevant to people complaining about their trademarked service, but connected them to a site singing its praises. Their apparent intent was to draw those seeking information for detractors to a forum which only […]
January 6th 2009
The RIAA has dumped one of its main enforcement units (and I mean “enforcement” as in “Frank Nitty“) by firing MediaSentry. MediaSentry was used by the RIAA to supposedly gather information on suspected illegal file sharers and report the data back to the RIAA. But the tactics used by MediaSentry have caused outrage from various […]
January 5th 2009
The sky is falling on ICANN’s ill-considered gTLD policy. I’ve been a skeptic of ICANN due to its incredibly slow response to fixing its own rules enable domain tasting.Also, last year its own domain was hacked, which didn’t increase anyone’s opinion of its chops as the world’s domain authority. I’ve read in disbelief as this […]
December 30th 2008
A quick look at our log shows which stories visitors viewed most in 2008 on Useful Arts. I had forgotten how important, and frequently bizarre, this year’s topics were. Three posts towered above the others: CAN-SPAM, teens behaving badly online, and Tiffany’s contributory infringement case against eBay. January: Catherine Douglas started the year off with […]
December 23rd 2008
Holiday cards are perhaps the purest opportunity for marketers to put brands on center stage without pesky offers or product data messing getting in the way. It lets us see pure branding and get some sense of how firms think of their clients and themselves. Here are three examples from internet marketing companies, the very people who […]
December 22nd 2008
In what could have been a last-second shakedown effort, the RIAA has seen fit to ignore a judge’s order preventing the use of names determined through the discovery phase of Motown Record Company vs. John Doe from being used for anything beyond simple discovery. “The disclosure of such information is ordered pursuant to 20 U.S.C. […]
December 21st 2008
Software as a Service (SaaS) market leader and service provider Salesforce.com recently hosted a presentation by Bessemer Venture Partners, which has funded many of my favorite SaaS enterprises, including LinkedIn, Postini, Keynote, Eloqua, Skype, Force.com, and PTC. Since this presentation is locked up in a hard-to-search format, I’m republishing its insights for your enjoyment here, […]
December 19th 2008
The Wall Street Journal reports that the RIAA has decided to shift an ISP-focused enforcement approach, which would result in prosecution of individual P2P sharers only in extraordinary circumstances. Since 2003, the recording industry has opened legal proceedings against 35,000 people, including children, single mothers, and a dead person. It’s been a PR nightmare, inspired animosity […]
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