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Legally Speaking: Recent Legal News About Search – What’s up with legal issues and search engines? That’s what this session is about – filling you in on the always changing developments. From click fraud to copyright to privacy, this session will hit all the major areas that are seeing legal action. Sit back – court is in session!

Moderator: Sarah Bird, General Counsel, SEOmoz.org, Inc.

Q&A Moderator: Barry Smyth, Director, Search Strategies

Speakers:

Travis Crabtree, Member, Looper Reed & McGraw, P.C.
Eric Goldman, Professor, Santa Clara University School of Law
David Mink, Chief Legal Counsel for Dream Systems Media, Dream Systems Media

Travis Crabtree Speaking at SMX

Clarke Walton, Attorney-at-Law, Walton Law Firm

NOTES:

Travis Crabtree, Member, Looper Reed & McGraw, P.C.
Topic: Trademark Law for Internet Marketing

David Mink, Legal, SMX SMX, SMX West

The question is: Do individuals who post personal information on publicly available Web sites have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their identity? This same question was asked earlier this year in Sandler v. Calcagni, a case out of the District Court of Maine.

The facts condensed

Two high school friends/cheerleaders have a falling out that turns nasty. Their bickering leads to school suspensions, criminal mischief conviction, and eventually Calcagni enters a consent degree for a civil hate crime prosecution.

Calcagni’s parents believe their daughter was wronged so they launch a media campaign, which involved writing and publishing the book through Booksurge, to try and right the wrong. The book contained private information about Sandler.

Sandler sues Calcagni and a few others including Booksurge for defamation, privacy invasion, etc.

–Today I will only address Booksurge’s motion for summary judgment, which is simply their effort to get out of the lawsuit before it goes to trial–

David Mink, Legal, Social Media expectation of privacy

Last night, DSM had the unfortunate experience of learning that an independent contractor we were using for content creation was allegedly pirating other writer’s work. This incident has caused me to spend some time training the DSM staff as to what they can do to both prevent copyright violations and to police intellectual property use on the Internet. I thought I would pass on some of the tips I have shared with them. Let’s start with a short and very incomplete copyright tutorial.

START OF TUTORIAL

What is a copyright? It is an intellectual property protection for certain “expressive” works, including: music, art, poetry, writing, movies, and much more. In order for the work to be copyrighted the following criteria must be met, the work must:
1. Be original
2. Result from a creative effort on behalf of the author, artist, or originator
3. Be in a physical form, or a “tangible medium of expression”

David Mink, Legal policing copyright violations, preventing copyright violations

The Trend Micro blog writes that their are numerous fake celeb profiles on LinkedIn which contain links to malware. Bogus profiles of Beyonce Knowles, Kate Hudson, Salma Hayek, and others contain “tempting” links to see these stars naked. Once a user clicks on the link “he will end up on different malicious Web sites trying the classical social-engineering tricks of either the ‘missing video codec’ or of showing a fake AV scan and telling the user (that) his computer was infected with malware and offering a ‘free’ AV scanner software, which in fact is the real threat,” says the McAfee blog. See the following screen shot:

It appears that LinkedIn has been working to take down most of these bogus profiles since it was called out by Trend Micro on Monday (1/5/09). (If you go Google “Salma Hayek LinkedIn” you will see that the page did exist but is no longer available.) Good move as this kind of activity by spammers, malware authors, and other cybercriminals raises many legal issues including social media cybersquatting and possible defamation and trademark claims.

David Mink, Legal, LinkedIn cybersquatting, LinkedIn, Social Media

Cybersquatting (don’t you just love that word?) is defined by Wikipedia as:

Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.

Cybersquatting costs legitimate businesses untold amounts of money. It is about time one of us cost them some money!

Verizon just won over $33 million dollars in a cybersquatting lawsuit!

Verizon just struck a big blow for legitimate trademark and business owners everywhere when they won a record $33.15 million judgment against Internet domain registrar OnlineNIC for cybersquatting. That is A LOT of cash!

David Mink, Legal cybersquatters, cybersquatting

I received the following ‘hypothetical’ question by email this week. (*Disclaimer: This is a hypothetical question receiving a general information answer.)

The Question:

“If a person has an email list, about say classic trucks, and then that person hit’s the list with an affiliate promotion for a marketing product; Is that spam?”

I believe the question the reader is getting at is – Can people send non related offers (i.e. marketing product offer to a classic trucks enthusiasts list) to opt in lists?

The Answer:

It depends. The classic lawyer answer! OK, I will do better than that. With SPAM the answer almost always comes down to what is the purpose of the email. To arrive at that conclusion you should evaluate the following:

1. How were the addresses acquired?

David Mink, Legal CAN SPAM ACT

Chances are you hear several messages each day on ways to save money on legal fees. Companies like LegalZoom inundate the marketplace with advertisements for purchasing canned legal docs. I have a better solution – what about free canned legal docs? There is a fairly new social media site which aims to do just that. I am pleased to introduce all of you to Docstoc. To be fair, they provide more than just legal docs. In fact, you can find all sorts of helpful business documents at Docstoc.

So how does Docstoc work?

Docstoc is an online social community for finding and sharing professional documents. The platform provides an opportunity for users and businesses to upload and share their legal, business, financial, technology, educational, and creative documents. All documents on docstoc can be easily searched, previewed and downloaded for free.

Why would you take the time to upload documents to Docstoc?

David Mink, Legal free legal documents

One of the questions that many business owners share is “what types of contracts need to be in writing?” Many people actually assume that a contract has to be in writing in order for it to exist. While I agree that all contracts SHOULD be in writing, many do not HAVE to be in order to be enforceable.

The Statute of Frauds dictates that 6 types of contracts must be both written and signed. I am going to list the 6 types for you:

David Mink, Legal contracts, put contracts in writing

David Mink, Legal CAN SPAM ACT, spam laws, state anti-spam statutes

Yesterday, while talking with our utah web designer about business entities I once again realized how often people unexpectedly enter legal business partnerships. Why does this matter? Well to answer that you really have to know what it means to be part of a legal partnership.

Wikipedia defines a partnership this way:

In the commercial and legal parlance of most countries, a general partnership or simply a partnership, refers to an association of persons or an unincorporated company with the following major features:

• Created by agreement, proof of existence and estoppel
• Formed by two or more persons
• The owners are all personally liable for any legal actions and debts the company may face

I would add a few other features:

• In the absence of an agreement otherwise, general partners split profits equally
• In the absence of an agreement otherwise, losses follow profits

David Mink, Legal business partners