by Paul Alan Levy The last time I blogged about Med Express, the eBay seller that brought a defamation suit against two eBay customers for leaving truthful and mildly critical feedback, then apologized and blamed its lawyer for filing a different lawsuit from the one it wanted to file, we had just gone to trial […]
Author Archives: Paul Levy
by Paul Alan Levy In mid-2009, Jennifer Choi posted a scathing Yelp review of a Phoenix repair shop called ToyoMotors, contending that her car was diagnosed as needing repairs that other shops assured her were unnecessary, and that its fees were excessive by comparison with its competitors. Four years later, ToyoMotors went on the offensive. […]
by Paul Alan Levy In a decision issued today, the California Second District Court of Appeal has created an additional way for anonymous speakers, and for web operators who host anonymous comments, to protect the right to speak anonymously. Instead of invoking the First Amendment as courts in other states, and indeed other appellate courts […]
by Paul Alan Levy Popehat carried a story yesterday about a demand letter from a "senior attorney" for the US Department of Health and Human Services named Dale Berkeley (who pompously signed himself as "Ph.D. / J.D."), complaining about two lame parodies on a web site that opposes Alcoholic Anonymous and asserts that there is […]
by Paul Alan Levy Yelp appears to be worried enough about the insistent campaign of businesses like Hadeed Carpet Cleaning that have received negative Yelp reviews to tell the press that they get punished for refusing to advertise that it is now including on every page of business reviews this line: "Your trust is our […]
by Paul Alan Levy Law professor Josh Blackman reports that Aspen Publishers is promoting the next edition of the property law casebook he assigns pursuant to a license scheme apparently intended to undermine the application of the first-sale doctrine to books: students must agree to return the casebook at the end of the class, […]
by Paul Alan Levy Last week the Sixth Circuit held oral argument in Jones v. TheDirty.com, a case where a high school teacher and pro-football cheerleader sued an online web site for hosting comments asserting that she had sex with several football players and speculating about whether she had contracted sexually transmitted diseases. The trial […]
by Paul Alan Levy In a decision issued this morning in Octane Fitness v. Icon Health and Fitness, the Supreme Court held that attorney fee awards in patent cases depend on an assessment of the totality of the circumstances, and that either the substantive weakness of the losing party's litigating position (including both facts and […]
by Paul Alan Levy Over at Techdirt, Tim Cushing points us to a bizzare situation in the Ninth Circuit rule in which the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press was required to file its amicus brief supporting EFF’s position in litigation over National Security Letters under seal. The Reporters Committee’s announcement of its brief […]
by Paul Alan Levy When I was pulling together my recent analysis of Hadeed Carpet Cleaning’s assertion that its negative reviews had appeared on Yelp only after it pulled its advertising from Yelp, I figured that it might be helpful if I ran a cross-check against how Hadeed is portrayed on other web sites that […]