May It Please the Mozzers, A Jury awarded 4.8 million USD to NetQuote after finding that its competitor, MostChoice, submitted more than 3,500 false applications for insurance quotes to the NetQuote website. The jury was so pissed that it actually awarded double the punitive damages than...
If you have a site that includes user-generated content, you may one day receive a subpoena asking you for personally identifying information about your users. Receiving a subpoena can be intimidating and you often don't have a lot of time to respond. This post is designed to give you some high-level steps to follow.
May It Please the Mozzers, Many of you may remember the case Parker v. Google, Inc., in which the Court ruled that Google was not liable for direct copyright infringement by archiving and displaying usenet postings that contained copyrighted material, and also by displaying excerpts of websites in a list of search results. The case was one of many major search engine "win...
May It Please the Mozzers, Those of you who get paid to build links aren't going to believe this one. One of the world's largest law firms, Jones Day, actually filed suit against a small e-commerce company, BlockShopper, for linking to it with the anchor text "Jones Day." Yes. ...
May It Please the Mozzers, Attention everyone who co-blogs! If you create a blog collaboratively with another person, you may be wondering whether your blogger buddy creates potential liability for you each time she posts. We know that website operators can't be held liable for their users content thanks to Section 230 of the CDA. That's old news....
May It Please the Mozzers, Today I'm discussing a case involving alleged trademark infringement and meta tags. It's very dangerous to outrank your competitor, especially if that competitor has limitless pockets and very generic registered trademarks.
May It Please the Mozzers, I am often asked, "Can I talk about my competitor on my website?" To answer this question, I thought I would do a quick post about comparative advertising. The Federal Trade Commission promotes lawful comparative advertising as a great way to inform consumers and increase competition. Describing how your pro...
May It Please the Mozzers, In November 2007 I blogged about a wacky lawsuit involving the movie/book/TV phenomena called "The Secret" and an SEO, Dan Hollings. Several months have gone by and both parties have been busy. ...
May It Please the Mozzers, I have an update on the Jason Gambert Saga. For those of you wanting a refresher, please see my first post on the internet marketer trying to trademark "SEO" and ...
May It Please the Mozzers,...
May It Please the Mozzers, Continuing my mini-series on SEO contract clauses, today's Legal Monday focuses on indemnification clauses. These kinds of provisions are standard in many consulting contracts. They can be extremely valuable or extremely dangerous in your contract. Therefore it is very important to understand and use them intelligently. Inde...
May It Please the Mozzers, Last week, many of you requested more posts on common contract clauses. Your wish is my command: Today, I'm very briefly going to review "opportunity to cure" provisions. This provision is valuable for any one providing a good or service. ...
May It Please the Mozzers, Today's Legal Monday is brief (for a change!), but very important for anyone doing SEO consulting. When selling their products, consultants tend to use overstate their abilities and over promise on deliverables. It is important to resist this temptation and communicate as effectively and honestly with clients as possibl...
Reputation management problems are delicate enough when a company or an individual discovers negative press in search results for its name or common keywords. The situation becomes even worse when undesirable results are not the work of a disgruntled person writing about another, but of someone pretending to be someone else. With the growth of social media and, specifically, social networking, thi...