Category: Internet Law

Unhappy consumers take to the Internet and social media all the time. It’s commonplace today for a person irritated by a flight delay to post on Twitter, or someone that received poor service in a restaurant to leave a damning review on a consumer based website. But, what happens when the complaint lodged against the service provider isn’t true? The answer is that you get sued, and the First Amendment won’t protect you.

Fathers and Daughters Nevada has filed suit in the Eastern District of Michigan (Fathers and Daughters Nevada, LLC v Does 1-15, Case No. 2:16-cv-10372) against fifteen John Doe defendants (Does 1-15) who they believe have illegally copied and distributed its copyrighted work, the movie “Fathers and Daughters,” via bit torrent sites. The defendants, who haven’t […]

Anonymity is a blessing and a curse, allowing us to hide behind our computers and electronic devices, creating whatever image and identity we wish to portray. “Screen names” offer a form of protection to Internet users, so when an anonymous defamatory post is made, tracking down the user can feel like an almost impossible task.

Due to the major expansion of social media channels and online forums on the Internet in recent years, the issue of defamation has taken on a new face. Defamation is a problem that has existed for decades, but only in recent years has it started to und…

Ken Kratz is probably best known as the local prosecutor who put Stephen Avery in prison for murder in Manitowoc County, WI, as documented in the Netflix series “Making a Murderer.” For this and several other reasons, he’s got a pretty comprehensive presence on the Internet: a Google search for “ken kratz” comes up with about 190,000 hits, few of which paint a flattering or positive picture. From bad Yelp reviews to accusations of prosecutorial malpractice to coverage of a long-ago sexting scandal, it’s easy to see why Ken Kratz might want Google to remove links to those negative articles and posts.

China has a strong system in place for ensuring the protection of copyrighted material, often resulting in almost immediate action. The Chinese copyright takedown policies are designed to protect the right of “communication through an information network.” This focuses on a right to make sound and audiovisual recordings available to the public over the Internet.

The acronym SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” These are often called “SLAPP suits” and have become quite the problem for smaller advocate groups and outspoken individuals. SLAPP suits are technically lawsuits, but they are not filed to win. Rather, they are filed to censor plaintiffs’ critics by scaring defendants into lengthy and […]

The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (“UDRP”) was created by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) and was introduced in 1999 to create a dispute resolution system for domain name issues. Registrants of domain names enter into contractual agreements with the issuer of the domain name (the “registrar”). Often, part of […]

Over the last fifteen years, federal courts in Michigan have heard nearly 50 cases involving alleged violations of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). Although each has contributed to a better understanding of cybersquatt…

On December 16th, an opinion from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals boosted the number of appellate courts agreeing to an interpretation of a rule related to trademarks and domain names. The court held that re-registering a domain name,…