July 30th 2010
Recently, numerous political groups have been quite upfront about their intent to exert authority over different parts of the online world. It seems everybody want to rule the Web. Dept of Justice moves to regulate Web through accessibility standards. FCC proposes to regulate Web access via broadband, claims it’s part of regulating telcos. Commerce Dept […]
April 1st 2010
Last month, the mayor of Topeka, Kansas, stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. Now Google has honored that gesture by changing its name name to Topeka for April Fools’ Day. This makes Bill Bunten the Mayor of Google and Eric Schmidt the CEO of Topeka, Inc. Of course, […]
March 25th 2010
New Haven law firm Stratton Faxon sued Google for selling competitor ads triggered by searches on their name. Specifically, they alleged that these ads interfered with the firm’s business relations with clients, were an unfair business practice under Connecticut state law, and resulted in unjust enrichment. Read the details on Lawyers and Settlements. Note the […]
February 15th 2010
Presidents Day and Valentine’s Day came together in Fortune Magazine’s feature story. This cover featured an inspired visual melding of brands, and the title promises something juicy along with tech policy. The article chronicles Google’s shift, like much of Silicon Valley, from being blind to government policy to building a lobbying arm to participate in politics […]
February 11th 2010
The most frequent response to my question about what online law issues our readers are most concerned about centered on the still undetermined law around the use of trademarks as to trigger advertising in search engines. The issue is both prominent and vexingly permanent in the minds of both IP layers and and search marketers. […]
November 26th 2009
First They Came for the German Marketers… Continuing my theme that regulation should be a much higher concern to digital marketers and their professional associations, I submit that one core digital marketing tool may already be illegal in the world’s third largest economy. Zeit Online reported today that numerous German privacy officials are convinced that […]
November 24th 2009
Seth Godin may not want comments on his blog, but Google does. Google’s Sidewiki service allows anyone with their tool installed to post and view comments in a frame right beside web content. I’ll provide a few examples of how this service is taking root, and some options for your Sidewiki strategy, including the choice […]
September 10th 2009
Finding videos via search isn’t new, but playing them inside ad listings is. For example, if you enter the word “Fame” in Google, you may have the option to play the movie trailer, which will roll surrounded by all the other search results. Google expects increasing video in ad results. This gets searchers to video […]
July 10th 2009
There is a growing disconnect between the legal staff who write terms of use for websites, those who operate the site, and site visitors. I’ve come to believe that each level of disconnection introduces new sets of legal risks, which this story only start to illustrate. Chris Soghoian observed in CNET that Google’s terms of […]
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