March 2nd 2010
INTA, the International Trademark Association, is a group of nearly six thousand trademark professionals in 190 countries. They protect the world’s brands. They’re being Twitter-squatted. There’s no pretty way to say it. In 2007, someone apparently seized their name as a Twitter handle and posted one five letter word, “srrrr”. This looks like a case […]
February 22nd 2010
This week the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Boston Police Department for using “wiretapping” laws to prevent citizens from taking video footage of police arrests. Some would naively think such laws were passed to protect the people from the authorities, not vice versa. (details in Law.com) Following Training? Boston police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll rejected […]
January 31st 2010
I don’t need to tell you, its a tough time to be a young lawyer. This dark send-up of lawyer advertising suggests that the economy may bring our best and brightest to promote themselves using desperate measures. This sketch is from Almost Live a local comedy show based in Seattle. As you can imagine, Aurora […]
November 2nd 2009
Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has produced his own “Downfall” parody video, making fun of the fact that Constantin Films has issued DMCA notices to remove all of the “Downfall” parody videos from YouTube. This little-known film has become an Internet sensation and, as I note below, Constantin Film’s […]
October 30th 2009
In a season where teen vampires are all the rage, can a drama following a real-life band of teen burglars looting celebrities be far behind? (For Halloween, I’ll be dressed as them!) The Net was their accomplice. The teens tracked the movements of stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and broke into their […]
August 12th 2008
My local transit agency, the MBTA, gained a restraining order to keep a group of MIT students from presenting their discovery of just how easy it is to forge credits on the subway’s fare cards. But since the MBTA filed the students’ paper as part of their complaint, the full text of what they sought […]
August 4th 2008
If you manufactured automobiles, you’d also likely need to make keys so that your customers could start their engines. Ubisoft, publishers of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2, recently missed the equivalent of that second step when they released their game for sale as a downloadable file on the Internet. Unfortunately, the security program surrounding […]
June 25th 2008
This week, ICANN waded into the issue of providing Internet addresses in non-roman characters. BusinessWeek has detailed coverage of the politics and complexity of countries with multiple languages and dialects who want Internet addressing translated to their native characters and words. The BBC calls this “the biggest Internet shake-up in decades.” Ask a Dumb Question, […]
June 16th 2008
A giant legal dope slap seems headed from Barbie to the makers of The Bratz. As you may know, Mattel accused the manufacturer of the Bratz line of dolls, MGA, of essentially stealing the idea for the Bratz from Mattel. The Bratz are estimated to generate 2 billion dollars of revenue for MGA annually. The […]
June 3rd 2008
Its kind of the opposite of, “do unto others”. When Universal Music lost an infringement case to Bridgeport Music, it did an unexpected thing. It apparently made a successful case that punitive damages tacked on to statutory damages are unconstitutional. As a plaintiff, Universal has argued in other cases for very high fines. It is, […]
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