Meier v. Midwest Recreational Clearninghouse, LLC, 2010 WL 2738921 (E.D. Cal. July 12, 2010) Plaintiffs live in California and bought an RV online from a vendor in Minnesota. The vendor’s website terms of service had a provision requiring that all disputes “arising out of or related to the use” of the website be brought in [...]
Archive for the ‘Contracts’ Category
New copyright lawsuit involves Creative Commons
July 2nd, 2010
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GateHouse Media, Inc. v. That’s Great News, LLC, No. 10-50164 (N.D. Ill. filed 6/30/2010) A lawsuit filed this past week in the Northern District of Illinois includes a claim that the defendant violated the terms of a Creative Commons license covering the plaintiff’s copyrighted works. GateHouse Media publishes a slew of local newspapers, including the [...]
Portability policies are an intriguing innovation
June 25th, 2010
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One of the fundamental and inherent technical shifts that are happening as computing moves to the cloud — for enterprise functioning and for more personal things like enjoyment of social media — pertains to the location of the user data being acted upon. Just think about how many different sites and providers across the web [...]
Wait just a second . . . isn’t online gambling illegal?
January 26th, 2010
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Wong v. Partygaming Ltd., — F.3d —, 2009 WL 4893955 (6th Cir. December 21, 2009) The Sixth Circuit’s recent opinion in the case of Wong v. Partygaming is interesting if you’re a civil procedure wonk and care about things like which law applies to determine the enforceability of forum selection clauses in website terms and [...]
Browsewrap website terms and conditions enforceable
January 5th, 2010
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Major v. McAllister, — S.W.3d —, 2009 WL 4959941 (Mo. App. December 23, 2009) The Missouri Court of Appeals has issued an opinion that reflects a realistic grasp of how people use the web, and also serves as a definitive nod to self-responsibility. The court refused to accept a website end user’s argument that she [...]
Court upholds eBay forum selection clause
October 26th, 2009
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Tricome v. Ebay, Inc., 2009 WL 3365873 (E.D. Pa. October 19, 2009) Everyone who signs up to use eBay has to assent to the terms of eBay’s User Agreement. Among other things, the User Agreement contains a forum selection clause that states all disputes between the user and eBay must be brought to court in [...]
Web host did not breach contract by terminating rude customer
October 11th, 2009
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Mehmet v. Add2net, Inc., — N.Y.S.2d —-, 2009 WL 3199876 (N.Y.A.D. 1 Dept. October 8, 2009) Plaintiff website operator didn’t pay his monthly hosting fees on time. He called the hosting company and said he’d be sending a check, but in the meantime the web host exercised its right under the hosting agreement to suspend [...]
Do Twitter’s new terms of service forsake third party developers?
September 11th, 2009
4 Comments
Twitter announced its new Terms of Service yesterday. One big issue deals with copyright ownership. This is one of the perennial questions in the law of social media: “who owns the user-created content?” Twitter nods to this issue when it states that “Twitter is allowed to ‘use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display [...]
Website terms of service provide basis for exercise of personal jurisdiction
April 9th, 2009
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CoStar Realty Information, Inc. v. Field, — F.Supp.2d —-, 2009 WL 841132 (D.Md. March 31, 2009) Personal jurisdiction cases — even ones that involve the internet — are generally not all that interesting. But the case of CoStar Realty Information, Inc. v. Field is worth noting because of the way the personal jurisdiction analysis was [...]
Clickwrap binding despite claim of no opportunity to read terms
February 23rd, 2009
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Via Viente Taiwan, L.P. v. United Parcel Service, Inc., 2009 WL 398729 (E.D. Tex. February 17, 2009) A federal court in Texas held the clickwrap agreement between United Parcel Service and one of its customers was binding. After plaintiff Via Viente sued UPS in Texas, UPS moved to transfer venue to the Northern District of [...]
