In a decision issued today, New York’s Appellate Division for the First Department reversed a decision of the state supreme court that had ordered Google and GoDaddy to identify BehindMLM, the author of a blog about multilevel marketing schemes, and quashed subpoenas to Google (the host of the blog) and GoDaddy (the registrar of the […]
Author Archives: Paul Levy
Prepared Food Photos is coming to terms with the financial consequences of its relentless pursuit of massive damages for alleged infringement in its copyright in individual stock photographs. Two years ago, it sent its standard demand letter to a Clyde’s Chicken King, a family-owned fast food joint in Port Barre and Opelousas Louisiana, objecting to […]
It’s been years since I have had to litigate the issue of whether the inclusion of a trademark in the domain name for a web site about the trademark holder has Lanham Act ramifications. I rather thought that issue was settled by such cases as Lamparello and Bosley. The final nail in the coffin was […]
An Alabama lawyer recently sought my help responding to your February 9, 2024 demand letter to Foggy Bottom Farms, complaining about alleged infringement of Prepared Food Photos’ copyright in a photo of vegetable. Over the past several years, I have seen many demand letters from your client based on that photo (for example, your client’s […]
Last spring, I posted two articles about a new force among the corps of copyright trolls – a law firm calling itself CopyCat Legal, representing a copyright holder that we had challenged before, now calling itself Prepared Food Photos, Inc. (“PFP”). When I last wrote about these two, I called their monetary claims outlandish. But […]
In the twenty-three years since the New Jersey Appellate Division issued its seminal decision in Dendrite International v. Doe, appellate courts in most adjoining and nearby states — Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland — have adopted at least most of the major features of the Dendrite standard. But New York has been the outlier — no […]
by Paul Alan Levy Today we have filed our first brief in a case in the First Department of New York’s Appellate Division that may present an opportunity to secure an appellate ruling in that state on the Dendrite standard, the consensus approach to deciding whether an individual or company contending that speech about it […]
Over the past few years, since I started to pay attention to copyright infringement demand letters sent by the law firm of Mathew Higbee, and after we filed a few declaratory judgment actions on behalf of discussion forums whose users had posted images or inline links to images, I thought I had perceived an improvement […]
After years of being a happy haven for outrageous libel tourism, providing a steady source of income for certain lawyers and a source of intimidation for many speakers, Virginia has been slowly upgrading its anti-SLAPP law. The changes may even be applicable to diversity cases pending in federal court. A few years ago, Virginia created […]
When I first saw the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Elster v. Vidal, won by my friends and former colleagues Jon Taylor and Greg Beck, holding that the First Amendment forbade the United States Patent and Trademark Office from withholding registration of the proposed trademark “Trump Too […]