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In the past few months, a flurry of gift card scams leveraging such high-profile brands as Best Buy, Whole Foods and IKEA have emerged on Facebook. These scams often use the brand's logo, website URL, or general "look and feel" on Facebook "fan" pages to give the impression that these offers are legitimate. Some scams are even bold enough to include bogus, non-interactive fan comments to add a greater sense of authenticity to the gift card offer. To date, these scams have been successful at tricking tens of thousands of consumers. In just one day, for example, a fan page titled "IKEA Get a FREE $1000 IKEA Gift Card! (ONLY AVAILABLE 1 DAY)" registered 40,000 fans before being shut down. more
Google has released a government requests tool. It's highly illuminating and may end up being quite disruptive. That's what surprising data visualizations can do for us. ... The tool allows us to see the number of requests from different countries that Google received during the last six months of 2009. More than 3600 data requests from Brazil during those six months and more than 3500 from the US. But just 40 or so from Canada and 30 from Israel. more
There have been many news stories lately about ebook readers. The New York Times said that they were prominently featured at the Consumer Electronics Show. Amazon is pushing its Kindle; Barnes and Noble has its Nook. There are many other aspirants, either on the market now or waiting in the wings. For now, though, I'm sitting on the sidelines. more
While I like John Ottaviani's perspectives on 2009's top Cyberlaw developments a lot, I independently developed my own top 10 list that has a different emphasis. You might enjoy the contrasts. My list... more
The FCC has posed a number of provocative questions to AT&T regarding the fact that iPhone subscribers cannot download and use the Google Voice application. AT&T should stifle every motivation to play cute or clever with the FCC. Apple adopted such a strategy when it suggested to the Library of Congress and others that it would be curtains for the free world if iPhone owners could hack, jailbreak, tether, and otherwise use their handsets without fear of violating the prohibition on circumventing copyright laws contained in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. more
A report released today by Public Knowledge points out that their recent analysis indicates filtering Internet content, as advocated by media companies, will not be effective and in fact harmful to the Internet. An accompanying 60-page whitepaper contains the full report including a number of reasons why the user of copyright filters should not be allowed, encouraged or mandated on U.S. Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks. more
A Swedish court on Friday found all four defendants guilty in a copyright test case involving one of the world's biggest free file-sharing websites. "The Stockholm disctrict court has today found guilty the four individuals that were charged with accessory to breaching copyright laws," the court said in a statement. "The court has sentenced each of them to one year in prison." more
Potential trademark Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPM) at the 2nd level can be divided into three main areas -- each defined by their time relative to Top-Level Domain (TLD) launch... Of these, we believe the third, "After Launch," is the most fruitful path to explore. We believe it offers the most potential to protect the rights of trademark holders, the best balance between TM rights and the legitimate rights of others who may want to register names , and the most benefit to the trademark community at the lowest cost to them... more
The Wall Street Journal and others are reporting that the Recording Industry Association of America is adjusting its strategy for combating the massive infringement occasioned by the sharing of music files over the internet. Since 2003, that strategy has been to pursue copyright infringement cases against individual file sharers. The RIAA now says it will focus less on pursuing infringement litigation and more on working with internet service providers to shut down the accounts of individuals suspected of illegally trading files. more
It is ICANN's responsibility to make sure domain names do not infringe on trademarks. To determine infringement, ICANN should rely in the short term on predictive models. Thus, domain name and trademark owners must start putting pressure on ICANN to assume its trademark responsibility. more
As ICANN introduces new generic top level domains (gTLDs) and separates itself from US oversight, it has the opportunity to distance itself from the taint of cybersquatting, brand abuse, and criminal activity involving domains... To underscore the scope of the issue, consider this research on just 30 top Interbrand-ranked global brands. The most recent MarkMonitor Brandjacking Index found cybersquatting incidents increased over 40% in the last year for the brands that were studied; these leading brands suffered as many as 15,000 incidents per brand... more
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been taking a lot of people to court -- basically, harassing folks in an attempt to curb file-sharing. The $220,000 verdict against Jammy Thomas got a lot of news (and probably worried a lot of folks). However, on appeal (i.e., after a new court not cherry-picked by the RIAA to try the case looked things over), the RIAA lost... again. ...At its heart, the verdict reaffirms that simply making a copyrighted work available is not the same as actually distributing the work. more
I first outline a brief history of free file-sharing technology, then draw some general and domain name lessons, then outline the what, how, and why that make your activism effective and necessary... The domain name industry is decentralized and atomic in that anyone from anywhere in the world can register a domain name, keep the ownershp name and address private, and host it from a country where the U.S. and European legal systems don't apply. Thus, legal action will only drive domain owners further underground. more
Earlier this year, I wrote glowingly about the new CIRA whois policy, which took effect today and which I described as striking the right balance between access and privacy. The policy was to have provided new privacy protection to individual registrants - hundreds of thousands of Canadians - by removing the public disclosure of their personal contact information... Apparently I spoke too soon. more
Lots of coverage in the last two days about a Memorial Day weekend attack that took down the servers of Revision3, an Internet video network. This story has a lot of ingredients -- P2P maneuvering, DDoS attack, copyright vs. piracy, talk of laws broken and the FBI investigating. more
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