by Paul Alan Levy I blogged last week about a troubling trademark-law decision from the Ninth Circuit; this week Amazon filed a petition for rehearing en banc. Spurred by the concerns I articulated last week, we are preparing an amicus brief in support of the petition, and of course I have written to both sides […]
Author Archives: Paul Levy
by Paul Alan Levy In its decision issued last week about the application of trademark law to the operation of online search engines, Multi Time Machine v. Amazon the Ninth Circuit has taken a dangerous step backwards. The case might, however, prove to be the vehicle by which that court wipes out the bad precedent […]
by Paul Alan Levy Not much, it appears. Following up on the recent spate of stories about a grand jury subpoena that the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York had issued to Reason Magazine, demanding the identities of the authors over several commenters who called for the execution of […]
by Paul Alan Levy In a decision issued today, the Washington Court of Appeals has embraced the broad consensus among state and federal courts holding that plaintiffs who want courts to force service providers to provide identifying information about anonymous online speakers must both provide notice to the speakers and present evidence of wrongdoing, for […]
by Paul Alan Levy Now that a federal court gag order against it has been lifted, Reason Magazine has now published its own comments, and a number of other bloggers have been writing as well, about Reason’s experience with a grand jury subpoena seeking to identify anonymous online commenters. In response to an article about […]
by Paul Alan Levy In a decision issued yesterday in Hadley v. Subscriber Doe a/k/a Fuboy, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed lower court rulings that an anonymous commenter who responded to a local newspaper article by calling a local politician a “Sandusky waiting to be exposed,” making particular reference to the fact that he could […]
In an amicus brief filed this afternoon, Public Citizen and Twitter have urged the California Court of Appeal for the First District to join with the Court of Appeal for the Sixth District in ruling that plaintiffs seeking to identify anonymous online critics whose statements they claim are defamatory or otherwise wrongful must produce evidence […]
by Paul Alan Levy Judge Tena Campbell of the United States District Court has issued an interesting decision holding that a California woman sued in diversity by a Utah company may file a special motion to strike the plaintiff’s defamation claim. The case involves a suit by the “Diamond Ranch Academy” against Chelsea Filer, a […]
The Los Angeles Times carries an op-ed about a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the City of Inglewood, California, against a local resident who has taken portions of the city’s own recordings of public meetings to highlight conduct by the city’s elected mayor that he deemed inappropriate. The defendant has a web site that lambastes […]
by Paul Alan Levy In a ruling issued this morning in Davis v. Cox, the Washington Supreme Court unanimously struck down that state's anti-SLAPP statute because of a provision, not contained in most other state anti-SLAPP statutes, under which once a case is found to over a matter of free speech or petition within the law's […]