Balough
December 14, 2013
The Virginia Supreme Court has reversed itself as well as the conviction of a spammer, finding the state’s anti-spam law overly-broad and therefore unconstitutional. In February, 2008, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Jeremy Jaynes for violating provisions of Virginia’s anti-spam statute that prohibited falsifying or forging electronic mail transmission information or other […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A news organization can fire an employee even if the termination is based upon the employee reporting journalistic ethics violations, the Seventh Circuit has found. The appellate court affirmed a trial court decision that an employee can be terminated for reporting to her superiors and declining to produce a program that she said failed to […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Hiding a competitor’s trademark in metatags and printing them with white ink on the website constitutes “willful” trademark infringement under the Lanham Act. McGills Glass Warehouse is an internet-based retailer of stained-glass supplies. It embedded the registered trademarks “Venture Tape” and “Venture Foil” in its website metatags and on the pages by “printing” them in […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Author J. K. Rowling has stopped the publication by RDR Books (and attributed author Steven Vander Ark) of a proposed lexicon of the fictional character Harry Potter, his spells, and his world. A New York District Court found that the content of the lexicon used too much of the actual language in Ms. Rowling’s books […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
The owner of free open source software can bring an action for copyright infringement when a party using the software does not abide by the conditions of the license, the Federal Circuit found. Robert Jacobsen developed software and licensed it through an open source license. The license required that any future copying and modification of […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A California resident who sent over 100 emails to Idaho to recruit executives from a competing marketing firm can be sued in Idaho for violating the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (Can-Spam Act). Daryl Hansen filed a motion to dismiss the case. He argued that he could not be […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A woman who gained instant fame after being selected for the Guinness Book of World Records can recover a domain name using her name that was registered days after she became famous. Rachel Aldana won a contest run by the British tabloid “The People” for having the “biggest breasts in Britain.” After publication of the […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A law requiring persons selling sexually explicit materials to register with the Indiana Secretary of State and pay a $250 registration fee was struck down the day before it was scheduled to go into effect. U.S. District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker found that the statute was not narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Police do not need to obtain a warrant to place a GPS tracking device on the undercarriage of a van and to subsequently use the information acquired to obtain a conviction for burglary. In a 2-1 decision, a New York appellate court upheld the trial court’s decision to allow information from the GPS device to […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A city violated a police officer’s privacy rights when it retrieved and reviewed text messages on a city-issued pager in spite of a written policy that the messages were public. The police officer, as well as the recipients and senders of other text messages on the officer’s account, sued the City of Ontario, Calif., after […]
