Monthly Archives: November 2011

Facebook reached a settlement with the FTC today regarding the FTC’s suit accusing Facebook of “unfair and deceptive” business practices concerning what some have described as the site’s alarmingly poor track record regarding user privacy. Our colleague Colin Zick over at our sister blog, Security, Privacy, and the Law, provides an overview of the settlement. Check it out!… More

Bills were introduced in both the House and the Senate earlier this month to increase the penalties for trafficking in counterfeit drugs. Both versions of the proposed “Counterfeit Drug Penalty Enhancement Act of 2011” (H.R. 3468 and S. 1886) would amend 18 U.S.C. § 2320, which criminalizes the use of counterfeit marks on or in connection with goods or services, to provide for enhanced penalties when the good in question is a drug.… More

The .xxx domain name registry was approved by ICANN and is now taking applications via your friendly neighborhood domain name registrar, so you would be forgiven for thinking that opponents of the .xxx domain are ready to move on and deal with the new regime.

To the contrary, pornography giants Manwin Licensing International (operator of YouPorn, Pornhub, xTube, and the various Playboy websites) and Digital Playground (one of the five biggest pornography studios,… More

On November 17, 2011, Senators Scott Brown and John Kerry sent a letter to David Kappos, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, urging him to consider Massachusetts as a location for one of the satellite patent offices that was authorized under the recently enacted America Invents Act.

The letter points out that Massachusetts is home to many world-class universities,… More

With the ICANN New gTLD Program train out of the station and running full speed ahead, there has been little hope among trademark owners of a further delay. The newly minted Coalition for Responsible Internet Domain Oversight (CRIDO) aims to change that. CRIDO, comprised of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and 87 major national and international business associations and companies,… More

Back in May, we wrote about MAFIAA Fire, a browser plug-in created by anonymous coders to counteract the government’s efforts to shut down copyright-infringing web sites by seizing the domain names.

We previously posted about Massachusetts District Court Judge Young’s order allowing copyright infringement plaintiff Liberty Media to discover (and thereby potentially reveal to the public!) the identity of 38 “John Doe” downloaders of “Amateur College Men Down on the Farm,” a pornographic film. But perhaps the most far-reaching implication of Judge Young’s opinion was a footnote. Judge Young noted that copyright protection was effectively unavailable anywhere for “obscene” material until the 1970s,… More

The recent case of Edgenet, Inc. v. Home Depot U.S.A., Inc. (7th Cir., No. 10-1335, 9/2/11) illustrates the principle that a copyright license without restrictions will be broadly construed to encompass all rights. The facts of the case were that Home Depot had contracted in 2004 with Edgenet for Edgenet to develop a classification system (called a “taxonomy”) that was to be used to organize Home Depot’s product database.… More

BitTorrent users now have even more reason to be concerned if they are targeted in “John Doe” lawsuits for copyright infringement. In a recent case, 38 BitTorrent users, known only by their IP addresses and identified as John Does, were sued as a group. Three of the John Does sought to quash the subpoenas issued to their ISPs seeking the names and contact information of the BitTorrent users. A Boston federal court judge denied the motions,… More

My partner Dave Broadwin, a business attorney and the head of my firm’s Emerging Enterprise Center, recently blogged about registering variations of one’s domain name as a strategy to prevent cybersquatting and trademark conflicts on the internet. He recommended that companies consider taking the following steps:

1. Register with the most popular top-level domains. Obviously, .com domains are the most popular by far, followed by .net and .org.… More