Woman Sues Yahoo Because Search On Her Name Links To Porn And Malware

from the and-now-it'll-link-to-bogus-lawsuits dept

Eric Goldman alerts us to the latest questionable lawsuit against a search engine -- this time involving a woman suing Yahoo due to her unhappiness concerning search results on her own name. You have to read Goldman's full description of the case -- I can't do it justice -- but the woman appears to claim that she's an important figure and the only one in the world with her name (Beverly Stayart or Bev Stayart), and was greatly upset to find that when she searched on her name, there were links to questionable sites -- some of which showed adult videos or had her antivirus software warn her of malicious attacks. It's unclear why the woman thinks she owns the rights to all search results on her name, but it seems quite likely that Section 230 safe harbors should protect Yahoo from any sort of liability. Of course, with articles like this one and Goldman's, it seems likely that search results will show plenty of other links now as well.

Filed Under: bev stayart, beverly stayart, lawsuits, liability, searches
Companies: yahoo

Can You Re-Copyright Photos In The Public Domain?

from the not-good dept

Davis Freeberg wrote in to tell us about how a small publishing company, Summertown Sun, had issued takedown notices for public domain photographs that were put on Flickr. What appears to have happened is that a user, by the name of "Dazzlecat," posted some photos to Flickr that she believed were public domain photographs (vintage photographs from over a century ago). However, Summertown Sun sent a takedown claiming copyright ownership of those photos. That seems odd, since public domain is... public domain. Either way, Yahoo/Flickr obeyed the takedown notice and then also took down a followup altered image and blog post that trashed Summertown for the takedown, saying that it violated Flickr's terms of service. Yahoo is, of course, free to do what it wants -- and has the right to takedown whatever it feels violates its terms of service, but what's more interesting is the question of whether or not the images are in the public domain, and whether or not Summertown's takedown was actually legal.

In a response to the original complaint about the takedowns, Summertown tried to defend itself by claiming:

We claim copyright on images we have creatively altered, which includes hundreds in our collections; such alterations remove them from the public domain. In addition we offer all of our images under the terms of a license agreement, regardless of copyright status, which is common practice in the image industry in recognition of considerable expenditure of production work, money, and other resources in making our products available.

That seems troubling -- and not quite right to me. You can't "remove" something from the public domain (Congress can apparently, but that's another issue). You can alter a work and then copyright the alterations if they are significant changes. Minor tweaks and alterations are not copyrightable and certainly the underlying original image is still very much in the public domain. Now, looking over the Victorian photographs that Summertown offers, many of them do not seem to have major alterations at all. Some appear to be colorized, so perhaps (maybe?) they could claim that the colored part of the images are copyrighted, but even that might be a stretch.

Furthermore, the fact that Summertown engages in the "common practice" of putting forth a license, regardless of copyright status, is rather meaningless. If it's in the public domain, it's in the public domain. You can't pretend the public domain doesn't exist just because you add a license to something. If that were the case, there would be no public domain at all.

I've run this by a few copyright lawyers I know, and most agreed that Summertown's position seems tenuous, though it really does depend on what photos, specifically, were uploaded to Flickr. So, without knowing exactly which images were placed in the Flickr stream, it's not 100% clear that Summertown violated the DMCA with a false takedown (it's against the law to send a takedown if you don't actually own the copyright), but if the photo in question really did not have significant alterations, then it seems likely.

Filed Under: alterations, copyright, flickr, photographs, public domain
Companies: summertown sun, yahoo

If You Get Sick While Traveling, You Don't Get To Sue Yahoo, US Air Or Sabre

from the just-saying... dept

Yes, we live in quite the litigation-happy world, but sometimes you see the type of lawsuits that just blow you away. Unfortunately, I have no link on this one, but Eric Goldman sent over the details on a recently decided case that's too fantastic not to share. Apparently, a guy named Sol Jaffe (who appears to have a history of being on the losing end of pro se lawsuits) booked a round trip from Phoenix to London via Yahoo and Travelocity. While in London, Jaffe apparently caught a cold. He also received an email from Yahoo that suggested his return flight had been canceled. After calling Yahoo and US Air, he found out that was not the case. He flew from London to Philly, where he then found out that his reservation on the connecting flight back to Phoenix was, in fact, canceled -- but US Air let him board anyway, fixing the problem.

The next day, Jaffe went to a doctor, who diagnosed him with a respiratory infection, a sinus infection and hypertension. Jaffee chose to blame and sue Yahoo, US Air and Sabre for the ailments -- saying they caused him so much stress that it turned the cold into those infections and hypertension (there's some confusion -- by pretty much everyone other than Jaffe -- why Sabre is included). Apparently, around the same time, he also (separately) sued Best Buy -- claiming that its failure to return a computer to him in a timely manner caused hypertension and cardiac problems... but that's a different case for a different time. A lower court quickly dismissed this case. Jaffe filed an amended lawsuit and eventually the court granted summary judgment to US Air and dismissed the complaints to Yahoo and Sabre -- and dismissed the whole lawsuit, with prejudice, and (eventually) told Jaffe to pay the attorneys' fees of the three companies.

Jaffe, apparently not seeing the legal writing on the wall, appealed (though, he screwed up the appeal quite a bit, as well). Defending himself, he tried to ask the court to take a more lenient view on him, since he wasn't a lawyer or a big corporation, though the court pretty quickly slapped that concept down, pointing out that you get equal treatment under the law, pro se or as a big corporate lawyer. The court then pointed out that Jaffe failed in the most basic part of his case: showing that the defendants' actions somehow caused his ailments. He did include letters from friends and doctors that he was sick, but never showed why that sickness came as a result of these actions. Furthermore, the court found it rather silly to think that the actions were in any way negligent:

He did not allege any facts that show there was an unreasonable risk of bodily harm. Moreover, without a factual predicate, it is unreasonable to claim that changing a flight reservation or requiring passengers to go to several different airline counters creates a risk of bodily harm, much less a high probability that substantial bodily harm will result.

The court then goes on to walk through all of the other claims that Jaffe made, pointing out how he failed to substantiate any of them -- including, by the way, quoting Jaffe's claim that an offer made by US Air earlier in the case had "all the merit of a rotten fritter." Believe it or not, the court did not find that argument compelling. In the end, the appeals court concurred with the lower court, trashing every argument Jaffe made, and upholding the ruling that he owes the legal fees to the three companies he sued.

So... the next time you get sick on a flight, and part of the travel experience is just slightly less satisfactory than expected, you probably shouldn't try suing everyone. You may just end up having to pay those companies' attorneys' fees, which is probably quite a bit more unpleasant than a rotten fritter.

Filed Under: frivolous, lawsuits, sol jaffe
Companies: sabre, travelocity, us air, yahoo

Ocean Tomo Patents Being Used To Shake Down Companies That Have Online Recommendations

from the ebay-for-patent-trolls dept

Ocean Tomo is a company that's been around for a few years, trying to establish itself as the auction house for patents. I've already made clear how troubling I believe its business model to be, but the company always tries to put a friendly face on it, claiming that it's not about aiding so-called "patent trolls" but actually reducing the problem of patent trolling. However, that (of course) isn't what's actually happening. A patent on personal recommendation systems ("if you bought x, you'll like y") was bought via Ocean Tomo by what seems likely to be a bunch of lawyers under the company name Quito (though, it's not entirely clear who's involved) and is now being used in a lawsuit against thirteen big internet companies that employ any type of rating system. The companies being sued are: Netflix, Amazon, Yahoo, RealNetworks, last.fm, Pandora Media, Slacker Inc., Veoh, Hulu, NBC Universal, CBS, News Corp., and Strands.

As you look through that list, you'll recognize that some have done significantly innovative work in taking the concept of an online recommendation system and actually making it useful. The simple idea of doing recommendations is pretty straightforward. Making it work well? Not so much. Hell, that's why Netflix is offering $1 million to anyone who can improve their recommendation engine by just 10%. The basic ideas expressed in the patent are not where the value in these recommendation systems lies. It's in the actual effort of figuring out how to make them work better. This patent has nothing to do with the actual success of a recommendation system, but the holders of it may now get a pay day just for holding the patent, thanks to Ocean Tomo's auctions. And, of course, this means that all of those companies that were actually innovating will, at the very least, now need to spend legal dollars defending against this massive innovation blocker.

Filed Under: patents, recommendations
Companies: amazon, cbs, hulu, last.fm, nbc universal, netflix, news corp., ocean tomo, pandora, quito, realnetworks, slacker, veoh, yahoo

Have The Big Internet Companies Turned Their Back On Net Neutrality?

from the that's-what-you-get dept

In general, I side pretty strongly with Tim Lee's recent net neutrality paper suggesting that we shouldn't rush into net neutrality legislation that is likely to have unintended consequences -- but at the same time, we shouldn't downplay the importance of a neutral end-to-end internet. One of the key points of his paper was that the net neutrality battle, as portrayed in the press, was quite misleading. It has never really been about "internet companies" vs. "telcos." And, this point becomes especially important for consumers who value neutrality, who mostly lined up behind the big internet companies on the assumption they would fight hard to protect net neutrality.

However, as the Wall Street Journal is noting, it seems like many of those big internet companies that were strong supporters of net neutrality are now moving away from that position, and some may be going in completely the opposite direction. In fact, the article highlights (without any named sources... so...) that Google has been busy negotiating preferential traffic deals with various internet providers, such that it would get to place its own servers on their premises to give users a faster route to Google's servers. Google's only comment was to deny that this would violate net neutrality concepts, though some might disagree. On the whole, I'd have to agree that this doesn't appear to violate network neutrality rules, as it's more like Google setting up its own private Akamai-like CDN, and, as we've explained before, a CDN does not violate neutrality.

So, to be clear, it looks like the WSJ is blowing this totally out of proportion when it comes to the Google/net neutrality angle. But that doesn't mean it doesn't raise other important questions for those who line up behind the big internet companies in the expectation that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will fight various fights for them. The article details how each one of those companies has stepped back from the fight in recent days, and even have been doing deals with telcos that are perhaps on that fuzzy border of a non-neutral internet.

In some ways, this is similar to the point we've been making in some other areas, where people and companies, who used to rely on Google's legal team to fight their battles, now need to realize that Google is no longer the defender of Silicon Valley. While the company used to take the stance that what was good for the internet user overall would be good for Google in the long term, in the last year or so, the company has increasingly made decisions that go against that principle. Instead, it's done a number of deals that allow it to leverage its cash reserves to make life more difficult for others, but allow Google to protect itself.

So, even if Google isn't really backing away from net neutrality right now, given its other actions recently, people need to increasingly realize that Google no longer always views "what's good for internet users is good for Google," and should plan accordingly.

Filed Under: internet, internet companies, net neutrality
Companies: amazon, google, microsoft, yahoo

Silicon Valley Patent Attorneys Register Their Own Patents; Sue Google, Microsoft, Yahoo And Others

from the more-lucrative dept

A few months ago, we pointed to Joe Mullin's excellent article detailing how various patent attorneys were finding a lucrative side business in registering or buying their own patents and suing companies themselves. It's just that much more lucrative. Mullin is back, describing two Silicon Valley patent attorneys, Dominic Kotab and Kevin Zilka, who have been registering or buying a bunch of patents, and have been quite active in both setting up multiple shell companies, and suing many different defendants. And, despite the fact that they're both based in San Jose, right down the street from many of the firms they've sued, all of the lawsuits are being filed in Texas, of course. This includes a lawsuit against Adobe, whose headquarters are a mere four blocks from the offices of Kotab and Zilka. Adobe asked for the case to be transferred to California... and the request was rejected.

They've sued pretty much all of the big name tech companies, including Microsoft (five different times, on five different patents), Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, AT&T, AOL and many, many others. The most recent is a lawsuit against Google for apparently violating this patent, which the lawyers claim Google is violating with its new Chrome browser.

Filed Under: dominic kotab, kevin zilka, patent attorneys, patents
Companies: google, microsoft, yahoo

DOJ Was Three Hours From Suing Google For Antitrust Violations

from the pick-your-fights dept

It was pretty clear back in September, when the Justice Department hired well-known antitrust litigator Sandy Litvack, that it had decided that it was going to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google, even if there were serious questions about what harm its ad deal with Yahoo would actually cause. Despite plenty of negotiation and totally rewriting the deal, the Justice Department was set on opposing it, leading Google to give up.

Now, that litigator, Sandy Litvack has admitted that the Justice Department was three hours away from filing its antitrust suit, which he was "looking forward to" and he's apparently disappointed he didn't get to go to court over it. That seems troublesome. If the purpose of antitrust activity is to protect consumers, then its litigators should be pretty happy that it avoided a (taxpayer-funded) legal battle.

Filed Under: antitrust, justice department
Companies: google, justice department, yahoo

Court Says Yahoo And Google Aren't Liable For Gambling Ads

from the thank-you-section-230 dept

It's been really weird to see various politicians in the US go after online gambling in a variety of questionable ways, from Kentucky's attempt to seize domain names to the federal government forcing banks to block financial transactions for any gambling site. But one of the oddest moves has been to go after any publication that allowed online gambling ads to show up on their website. More than four years ago a bunch of websites, including Yahoo and Google were sued for allowing gambling ads to show up on searches. The two big search engines eventually settled with the federal government to try to block out gambling ads, but this particular lawsuit, based on California state law, continued.

It took a while, but a court has finally ruled that the search engines are protected by section 230 of the CDA, and they aren't responsible for ads posted by users -- even if they happen to get through the filters that Google and Yahoo set up to try to prevent gambling ads. There are a few important points to note here: (1) Just because the site is getting paid for the content, does not mean that section 230 safe harbors don't apply. We often hear people say that if a company is making money they must lose the safe harbors. That's simply not true, (2) Just because the search engines proactively try to filter out the content, they don't lose the safe harbors either. In fact, in this case the judge seems even more sympathetic because of that. There's a misconception out there among many that if you do meddle in the content at all, you give up your safe harbors. Again, that's not true.

Filed Under: ads, gambling ads, liability, section 230
Companies: google, yahoo

Argentinian Celebrities Succeed In Forcing Search Engines To Block Search Results On Their Name

from the internet-stupidity dept

Proving, once again, that common sense isn't so common, News.com is reporting on a series of orders handed down by judges in Argentina that have forced Google and Yahoo to completely block searches on certain Argentinian celebrities. Apparently, some Argentinian models who were upset that their pictures were showing up on some porn sites, sued both Yahoo and Google. For anyone who understands just about anything about how the internet works, it would be easy to recognize that this lawsuit was grossly mistargeted. Yahoo and Google have nothing to do with the content on the various websites they point to, but apparently Argentinian models and judges do not seem to recognize this.

So, the judges issued an injunction, demanding that Google and Yahoo block references to the models. This "win" caused other Argentinian celebrities who were upset with content online about them to seek out the same lawyer, who filed similar lawsuits over and over again. Each time, the court has issued an injunction, forcing Google and Yahoo to block results on those individuals. In some cases, they've tried to block specific results, but in at least one case, Yahoo has blocked all results on a search for Argentinian soccer star Diego Maradona. The blocks only impact the Argentinian sites, but it still seems fairly ridiculous.

Google is appealing the injunctions, saying that this really seems like something of a shakedown. The company is also trying to explain to the Argentinian government why it should put in place safe harbor laws that protect service providers from being liable for the content created by others. Of course, even without such laws in place, common sense should prevail. Apparently, though, common sense remains less common than commonly believed.

Filed Under: argentina, celebrities, liability, safe harbors, search engines
Companies: google, yahoo

Justice Department May Have Just Killed Yahoo; Google Drops Partnership

from the you-wanted-less-competition,-you-got-it dept

Well, apparently even the greatly scaled back version of their ad partnership wasn't enough to appease a Justice Department intent on suing Google for antitrust no matter what the real issues are. Google had previously threatened to kill the deal if the Justice Department didn't ease up on its position, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Google has now dropped out of the deal entirely.

The government is still insisting that it would have represented a monopoly, as around 90% of the "relevant market" would have been managed by one company. First of all, they were only looking at the search ad market, which is hardly the relevant market. Advertising budgets pay for much more than search ads, and if search ads really became more expensive, it would only open up opportunities for alternative means of advertising. Besides, there was still little to no indication that any such deal would increase advertising fees. Given Google's auction based system, and the fact that this would increase inventory, there's plenty of reason to believe it would actually decrease advertising costs.

In the end, killing off this deal may represent a pretty big blow to Yahoo's chances of moving forward as an independent concern. The company was very much relying on the Google deal to stabilize its financial condition. Without that, Yahoo is in trouble -- meaning there's probably a good chance that Microsoft takes another look at acquiring the company for much, much less than before. That means, Yahoo as we know it, disappears. Considering the Justice Department wanted more competition rather than less, it's unfortunate that it's misguided decision is effectively killing off one of the competitors.

Filed Under: antitrust, justice department
Companies: google, yahoo