A tiny dose of copyright on Viral

April 13, 2007 | by Evan Brown (@internetcases) | Comments Off 

Veoh Networks’ Viral (for which I am the Legal Correspondent) has released Episode 18. I do a brief piece on the basics of copyright. My part comes in at about the 2:50 mark. But watch the whole episode — it’s entertaining!

Thanks to my friend Mike Pugh who helped me film this segment.


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Student’s First Amendment rights violated in conviction over MySpace postings

April 11, 2007 | by Evan Brown (@internetcases) | Comments Off 

State v. A.B., No. 67A01-0609-JV-372 (Ind. App. April 9, 2007) [Download the opinion.]

A middle school girl in Greencastle, Indiana created a bogus MySpace profile impersonating her school’s principal. She invited one of her classmates, A.B., to be a “friend,” and A.B. posted an obscenity-laced (yet surprisingly grammatically accurate) comment that was critical of the school’s policy against certain types of body piercings. A.B. also created a group on MySpace that was likewise critical of the principal, and posted content there.

The State filed a delinquency petition against A.B., alleging several violations of the state’s harassment statute, Ind. Code § 35-45-2-2(a)(4). The trial court issued an order adjudicating A.B. to be a delinquent child, and gave her nine months of probation.

A.B. sought review, arguing, among other things, that the web content she created was political speech protected by the First Amendment. On appeal, the court agreed and reversed the adjudication of delinquency.

The court applied a two-part test to review the constitutionality of the application of the harassment statute. It determined (1) whether state action had restricted A.B.’s expressive activity, and (2) whether the restriction constituted an abuse of the right to speak. The court answered both of these questions in the affirmative.

In determining that the restriction was an abuse of A.B.’s right to speak, the court did “not engage in speculation as to what the speaker might have meant,” but employed an objective standard to determine that the speech was to be understood as political speech.

This form of speech is to be protected, absent some “particularized harm analogous to tortious injury or readily identifiable private interests.” The court found that the state presented no evidence of this sort of particularized harm, thus the constitutional right to speak had been contravened.

eBay auction not enough to confer personal jurisdiction

April 10, 2007 | by Evan Brown (@internetcases) | Comments Off 

Great Notions, Inc. v. Danyeur, No. 06-656, 2007 WL 944407 (N.D. Tex. March 28, 2007)

Courts faced with the question of personal jurisdiction involving eBay transactions have consistently held that the typical online auction process, in and of itself, is insufficient to confer specific personal jurisdiction over an out-of-state defendant. The recent case of Great Notions, Inc. v. Danyeur, No. 06-656, 2007 WL 944407 (N.D. Tex. March 28, 2007) does not deviate from that trend.

Plaintiff sued an Arkansas defendant for copyright infringement and unfair competition. The defendant was accused of counterfeiting and selling plaintiff’s designs through his online account with eBay. There were no allegations that the eBay auction process was altered or circumvented in any way.

Defendant moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. The court granted the motion, dismissing the case without prejudice.

Because the Texas long-arm statute confers jurisdiction to the limits of the federal constitution, the court concerned itself only with the federal due process inquiry. That question involved an analysis of (1) whether the defendant had minimum contacts with Texas resulting from an affirmative act on his part such that he could reasonably anticipate being haled into a Texas court, and (2) whether the exercise of jurisdiction would comport with traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice.

The court needed only to consider the first element, namely, whether there were minimum contacts with Texas. It held that conducting a straightforward eBay auction was insufficient to confer specific jurisdiction. The facts of this case could be distinguished from another Northern District of Texas case by the name of McGuire v. Lavoie, No. 03-161, 2003 WL 23174356 (N.D. Tx. Aug 19, 2003), in which personal jurisdiction was found where the eBay seller ended the auction prematurely and entered into a traditional sales relationship through a series of transactions with a known buyer.

For a recent eBay personal jurisdiction case with a different result, read about last year’s decision by the Eastern District of Michigan in the case of Dedvukaj v. Maloney.

Guest on Capture the Conversation podcast

April 5, 2007 | by Evan Brown (@internetcases) | Comments Off 

Room 214, a Boulder, Colorado based “search marketing and social media agency” produces the weekly Capture the Conversation podcast. My buddy Kris Smith hosts the show, and last week he invited a hipster friend of ours, Mike Marusin and me on to talk about new media, RSS, blogging and other exciting stuff. Check out the show here.

Josh Wolf freed from jail

April 4, 2007 | by Evan Brown (@internetcases) | Comments Off 

For the past several months the controversy around video blogger Josh Wolf has swirled, as he served time in a federal corrections center for contempt of court. Wolf chose to be incarcerated last year rather than turn over to the feds footage of a San Francisco political demonstration. The story has placed the idea of citizen journalism at front and center. (I mentioned Wolf’s situation in a piece I did for Viral on Veoh which you can view here.)

Yesterday, Wolf and the federal prosecutors worked out a deal where Wolf turned over the footage and was released from custody. Read more about Wolf’s story and release here.

Appellate court lifts injunction against website owner in defamation case

April 1, 2007 | by Evan Brown (@internetcases) | Comments Off 

Pennsylvania appellate court reverses trial court’s determination that former patient agreed to never again mention doctors on gripe site.

Nevyas v. Morgan, — A.2d —-, 2007 WL 704998 (Pa.Super. March 9, 2007)[Download opinion.]

A former patient unhappy with the LASIK surgery he received started a website to warn others of the procedure’s possible dangers. The website contained allegedly defamatory statements about the LASIK doctors who performed his procedure.

lasik.jpg

An attorney for the doctors sent a cease and desist letter to the patient, threatening to file a lawsuit against him if he failed to remove the content about the doctors. The patient responded with his own letter, agreeing to “conform to [the] request insofar as to remove any stated libelous reference to the [doctors] and their practice only.” The patient went on to state that he would not remove the site in its entirety, and would continue to publish “within the legal guidelines as allowed by . . . the First Amendment.”

The patient quickly lived up to his promise. He replaced the site with an earlier version that made no reference to the doctors at all. Nonetheless, a few days after that, the hosting provider removed the site at the doctors’ request.

Understandably perturbed by the deletion of his website, the patient got a new web host and reposted the version of the site containing the references to the doctors. A few months later, the doctors filed suit. As one would expect, the doctors sued for defamation, but they also sued for breach of contract and sought specific performance. They argued that by posting the earlier version of the site (which made no mention of the doctors) in response to the cease and desist letter, the patient entered an agreement to never again mention the doctors in any manner, whether defamatory or not.

The case went to trial on the claim for specific performance, and the court ruled in the doctors’ favor. It found that the parties had entered into an agreement whereby in exchange for the doctors not filing a lawsuit against the patient, the patient would remove all defamatory statements about the doctors from the site and refrain from defaming them in the future. But the trial court’s order went a bit further — it forbade the patient from mentioning the doctors at all.

On appeal, the court vacated the lower court’s order and remanded for further proceedings. The appellate court held that the trial court was correct that the actions of the patient in response to the cease and desist letter constituted an agreement to remove the defamatory content already on the site . But the appellate court also held that the patient’s action of uploading the original website, which contained no reference to the doctors, did not constitute an agreement on his part to never again mention them. Rather, the court held, the letter the patient sent in response to the cease and desist letter reserved the right to continue to update the site to mention the doctors.

Because the trial court did not consider whether the statements on the later version of the website were the same as what the patient had agreed to remove (or were otherwise defamatory), the case was remanded for further proceedings to consider that question.