April 7th 2009
Occasionally, one finds a website that does something a little different or a little better than everybody else. Recently, a friend pointed me towards a website whose Terms of Service (ToS ) makes a good-faith effort to explain in layman’s terms what the heck they are talking about. At Aviary.com, an online image editing service, […]
April 3rd 2009
Do you know what the domain is for Google Books? Those who’d guess the obvious, www.GoogleBooks.com, would unfortunately be wrong. Instead of finding the real Google Books, they’d arrive at a domain squatter selling tools for joining them in that business and using a Google’s good name in their domain to take revenue from Adwords and […]
April 2nd 2009
The EU has started an investigation into “customer profiling” on the internet. This is where online services and advertisers collect data on anything from preferences to behavior. From a recent article in the Financial Times: Officials say they will collect evidence from consumers and industry on the information commercial websites are collecting and how it […]
March 31st 2009
You may recall that last year I wrote about how holiday e-cards are a window into brands and how companies think about customers. I spend much more time on e-newsletters, and just like holiday cards, there’s a difference that separates the few with vision from pointless marketing blather. Mark Brownlow illustrates this in his video […]
March 30th 2009
Siding with the American Civil Liberties Union, Judge James M. Munley has barred the Wyoming County District Attorney from pursuing threatened felony charges against teenage girls he has accused of sending explicit photographs over their cell phones. The controversial case over so-called “sexting” was filed by the ACLU, along with the parents of three girls, […]
March 30th 2009
While commenting on New Zealand copyright law, Google makes some interesting facts known about the DMCA. According to an article in New Zealand PCWorld: Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one […]
March 26th 2009
Recently we’ve seen an employer charged with defamation for making true disclosures that would hurt a former employee, and Medical Justice which seeks to prevent online defamation by prohibiting patients from participating in social media. Now, a New York teenager has sued Facebook and a handful of its users for discussing her in a private […]
March 24th 2009
According to the EU Data Retention Directive, ISPs in the EU are required to store customer internet traffic for up to 12 months. Predictably, the UK government wants to go even further with its “Interception Modernisation Programme” or IMP. IMP will monitor all web communications of UK citizens using deep-packet inspection. The information will be […]
March 20th 2009
Imagine if everything you discussed with your physician was required to be kept private. Not just information about you, the patient, but that information about your treatment by the physician had to be kept private too. The blog e-patients describes how the firm Medical Justice is helping doctors avoid consumer ratings, and the prospect of defamatory […]
March 19th 2009
The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has denied a petition to rehear the case that found that truthful statements in email can constitute defamation if they are made with malice. See our earlier post on Noonan v. Staples. The appeals court held that Staples failed to adequately raise the constitutional issue: Staples now […]
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