Billy Barnes is a JD Candidate at the University of Toronto. A claim is being passed around online: that the Internet (Twitter, specifically) has beat the super-injunction. The claim is not quite true, but it’s another reminder that the best way to ensure that everyone knows about something is to try to prevent them from hearing […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. In a much publicized move, Amazon remotely deleted two books from users’ Kindle e-book readers. It causes one to wonder what rights we actually have in our digital possessions in this increasingly connected world. As you quickly learn when you start studying IP law, property […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Budweiser has begun selling beer cans in the colours of local college football teams in some markets in the US. For example, in parts of Michigan they are selling a maize (pale yellow) and blue “fan can” that matches the colours of Michigan State University. […]
Three years ago, Netflix released a database containing the movie preferences of 480,000 users. Last year, Google released information on the viewing habits of millions of YouTube users to Viacom. In both of these and many other similar cases, the data was anonymized first—fields containing personally identifying information were removed. According to a paper by […]
According to blogs such as Citmedia and mainstream news outlets like CNN and the New York Times, Wikipedia will soon begin requiring that all changes to articles on living people be approved by an aristocracy of established editors before going live. The move has been criticized in almost all these stories. I was working on […]
Google knows what I’m doing 88% of the time. I’ve voluntarily given Facebook details of many aspects about my personal, work and school lives. These two companies probably know more about me than I do. And I’m not scared. I doubt Mark Zuckerberg will be emailing a—hypothetical, I assure you—compromising photo from my Facebook profile […]
Does free speech overrule a trademark owner’s interest in a domain name? According to Sutherland Institute v. Continuative LLC, a recent case by a WIPO domain dispute arbitration panel, the answer could be yes. Maybe. The case is interesting for two reasons: its discussion of free speech protection and domain names, and the deference of […]
A recent decision (Julie Does II v. MySpace Inc.) by the Second Circuit Court of Appeal in California held that MySpace could not be held liable for sexual assaults on minors that started with a meeting online. The court found that MySpace was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). I believe […]
If you were looking for information on Jay Leno’s talk shows, what would you type into the browser’s URL bar? There are a number of possibilities, but odds are many people might try TheJayLenoShow.com as it is the name of his new show and the common name of his old show. It makes sense but […]
Click fraud is one of the largest problems faced by the online advertising industry, yet many ad vendor companies have largely remained content to fight it quietly. This may be about to change. Microsoft has recently announced that it will begin to actively pursue legal action against perpetrators of click fraud. The first attempt came […]