February 17th 2010
Your Digital Papers, Please? Last week at the Davos World Economic Forum, Microsoft’s chief research and technology officer floated what to date has been an obviously bad idea: that Internet users should be licensed. The suggestion is covered and advanced in a Time Magazine article that takes the familiar dystopic theme of the Net as the […]
February 1st 2010
Last week I asked UsefulArts.us readers what they think may online law trends for 2010. Here’s the first of what looks like a half dozen responses to that question. The Coulrophobia Epidemic of 2010: trademark owners’ fear of clowns may be rational. When a competitor uses your mark and pretends to be your company, that’s […]
January 20th 2010
A few years ago I showed my wife a t-shirt from Marketo, the San Mateo-based lead generation company. They were revolutionary, and to underscore that they had a manifesto, and their shirt featured an image of Che Guevara. My wife is a marketer who has lived in Central America; she immediately noted the use of […]
January 13th 2010
Back in 2007, I suggested that snitching was one of the killer apps of Web 2.0. Since then, WikiLeaks.org, the site for snitching secrets about governments and corporations, has been a success. How do you measure success? Perhaps by the zeal with which legislators seek to investigate the website. Of course, judges have quickly raised […]
December 28th 2009
What will they know of China, who only “.cn” know? The Associated Press reports that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has posted requirements that all “.cn” china domains be issued only to registered businesses. AP’s coverage also says that any sites that have not registered with the ministry will be “taken off the […]
November 21st 2009
In April, the FDA sent warning letters to 14 companies, including Eli Lilly and Co and Merck & Co Inc., about their drug marketing online, saying that ads for certain products were misleading and did not contain any risk information. But it’s hard to include risk information when your Twitter post is limited to 140 […]
November 7th 2009
Discussions of regulating digital marketing were just below the surface at New York Ad:Tech. My last post gave an overview of efforts to regulate digital marketing. Now, here’s an interview at Ad:Tech by reporter David Spark with Ted Murphy, CEO of Izea, the company that makes the paid blogging service Social Spark. Ted’s been in […]
October 11th 2009
When the government tells someone to shut up, we call it censorship and the First Amendment requires the government to defend its regulation. But what if the government just says, “Shhhh… could you please turn that down?” Rep. Anna Eshoo’s Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (HR 1084) would do just that: require the FCC to issue […]
August 20th 2009
Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka at the Tech Liberation Front have outlined a first draft defining what it is to be a cyber-libertarian: Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some […]
August 15th 2009
Eric Goldman at the Technology & Marketing Law blog recounts a hysterically misguided ruling in Colorado, which holds a hospital liable for trademark and copyright infringement because they mention the ranking they received from a health quality website. You can’t copyright a number Imagine enjoining rock bands from saying Billboard ranked them #1, because that […]
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