Category: Policy

As you will recall, Overture sued Google back in 2002 for allegedly infringing its patented ad matching technology. This suit has been pretty quiet for a while, but internetnews.com’s Susan Kuchinskas has a good piece on where the suit stands and the key issues apparently informing it. Particularly interesting is this passage:

As Google’s IPO approaches, the rivals are waiting for a critical ruling by Judge Jeffrey White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. His so-called Markman order will define key words in the patent, drawing lines of battle.

“[A] Markman ruling defines the terms in the claim, which in turn define the scope of the invention, how broad or how narrow it is,” said Lee Bromberg, an intellectual property attorney with Bromberg & Sunstein. “It’s customary for each side to try to pick out certain important terms and to argue for their view of how they ought to be defined,” he continued. “It’s the judge’s job to decide what those terms mean. Sometimes the judge can define a term in a way that either establishes infringement or makes it impossible for infringement.”

Read More

Google has been hit with another lawsuit….this one by an ex employee who claims age discrimination.

And in other legal news, Google’s challenge to “Froogles.com” suffered a setback this past week, calling into question whether Froogle.com can continue as a trademark.

(hat tip to Gary, who has recently taken a job as SEW’s news editor, congrats!)

Cnet today runs a piece on click fraud, the practice of driving revenue through fake clicks on paid search links. This has been something of a whistling-past-the-graveyard issue for the entire paid search field (see here and here). Stefanie Olsen reports. Worth a read.

….some marketing executives estimate that up to 20 percent of fees in certain advertising categories continue to be based on nonexistent consumers in today’s search industry.

In one recent example of the problem, law enforcement officials say a California man created a software program that he claimed could let spammers bilk Google out of millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks. Authorities said he was arrested while trying to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program. He was indicted by a California jury in June.

Google has a page up reacting to the Gmail privacy brouhaha. Thank the California Legislature for this: a modified version of the Gmail privacy bill just passed the CA Senate.

Since the first privacy concerns were raised nearly two months ago, one of the smartest things Google has done in response is to give accounts to a bunch of journalists (I was on the list, but have not really used the account – I’m too swamped to conjur up a reason to fill a secondary account, and in any case I’m writing a book in which Google plays a critical role, so the idea of running my email through their servers feels a bit…odd, to say the least. I can just see my sources at Yahoo or Microsoft wondering whether I’m capable of fairness as they send mail to jbattelle@gmail.com…).

Anyway, those journalists who did use the service almost universally praised it. As a breed journalists are prone to piling on when they identify what they believe to be a clever or counter-intuitive meme. Gmail offered them a pretty prime opportunity to do just that. Most caught the counter-spin on Gmail’s scanning of email – to wit, everyone else does it (Hotmail, Yahoo etc) so why jump on Google? They are right, and it was a brilliant move on Google’s part to point that out. Now the press is full of articles beating up the privacy advocates, and as I mentioned earlier the California legislator who introduced the grandstanding Gmail privacy bill has modified it to allow scanning.

Read More

From time to time you might note, if you are really paying attention, that results on Google have been removed due to the DMCA, in particular a clause known as “Safe Harbor” – it has to do with supposed copyright infringement. If and when you run across such results, Google posts a notice at the bottom of the page informing you, and linking to the DMCA request that led to the result being pulled from Google’s index. This is a very fine example of Google being a good corporate citizen, but Joe Hall has a good suggestion for refinement: show this disclaimer at the top of the page, not at the bottom, where many won’t see it.

Also on this issue, the Virginia Journal of Law and Techweighs in with a paper entitled “Application of the DMCA Safe Harbor Provisions to Search Engines.” Why do you care? Well, this paper concludes that “the burden of complying with the safe harbor procedures should not be placed on search engines. Given these concerns, a better alternative would be for Congress to grant search engines complete immunity from contributory liability for copyright infringing activities by third parties.”

To reach its conclusion, the paper argues that “Internet service providers who receive notifications from copyright owners about allegedly infringing content must remove or disable access to that content in order to remain immune from claims for contributory liability. In response to such notifications, search engines have begun to remove links to allegedly infringing content from their search results. Unfortunately, application of the DMCA safe harbor provisions to search engines is problematic. Key portions of the statute refer to “subscribers” and “account holders,” making their application to search engines unclear because search engines typically do not have subscribers or account holders. Also, the lack of a subscription relationship between search engines and alleged infringers seems to make search engines more likely than other types of service providers to remove content overzealously in response to notifications.”

Read More