Another CDA Case--Roommates.com

It's been an interesting few weeks for CDA cases. Earlier, the 7th Circuit found that the CDA insulated Craigslist from liability under the Fair Housing Act. See my March 17 post, below. Then, a New Hampshire court said that the CDA did NOT insulate from claims arising under the right of publicity. And now we have the latest 9th Circuit decision on CDA, holding that the Act does not insulate Roommates.com from Fair Housing Act liability. The differences between the 7th Circuit holding in the Craigslist case and the 9th Circuit's in Roommates.com appears to be the level of interaction the site has with posters--Roommates.com actively solicited information that could be used for discriminatory purposes. To read the Roommates.com case, click here:http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/view.php?id=493781&da=y

A Chink in the CDA Armor?

A New Hampshire federal court has ruled that a state-law right of publicity claim against a Web service, arising from material posted by a third-party user, is not subject to dismissal under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The court rejected the Ninth Circuit's reasoning in Perfect 10 Inc. v. CC Bill to hold that the plaintiff's right of publicity under state law is an intellectual property right excluded from CDA immunity. Case name is Doe v. Friendfinder Network Inc. You can view the opinion here: http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/view.php?id=492151&da=y

Muxtape, Mixwit and the RIAA

OK, how is this NOT copyright infringement? Checkout http://muxtape.com/ and http://www.mixwit.com/. Cool idea, right? Share your mix tapes? You can try to rely on the DMCA, but if they're betting the farm on that they better read Grokster again. See http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/view.php?id=488991&da=y
I will bet that RIAA will commence legal action against one or both within three months. Watch this space for updates.

CDA Insulates Craigslist

The 7th Circuit has applied the Communications Decency Act to insulate Craigslist from liability under the Fair Housing Act. Another example of the breadth of the CDA (47 U.S.C. Section 230). The opinion is here: http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/view.php?id=462882&da=y

How Much is Your Domain Name Worth?

You've read that domain names are the new real estate, and that valuations for prime domain names are increasing again after the dot-com crash. Appraising a domain name is a tricky business, however, because unlike real real estate, i.e., dirt, we've only been placing values on domain names for a few years. As a general rule, the value of a domain name is the price the market will bear--the price a willing buyer will pay a willing seller. But where to start the negotiation? Registrar Moniker.com offers an appraisal service, as do several other companies. But I found an interesting tool the other day that might give you an idea of your domain name's value. Go to http://estibot.com/ and check it out. I personally think the valuations it offers are too high, but it it is interesting to see the methodology it employs.

NCAA Sets Live Blogging Limits for Games!

lThe NCAA issued new rules this week that will allow credentialed press to blog live NCAA championship sporting events. The rules, however, limit the number of times reporters can post live blogs depending on the sport they cover.

Apparently, this only effects credentialed press. What would happen if I went to a game and blogged live just as a spectator? Would the blog police come and confiscate my hardware?

This raises the larger, and in my opinion copyright, issue as to who owns the data contained within an NCAA game? Those are mere facts and typically are not covered by copyright protection. The NCAA must be making this purely a matter of contract, then . . .

Coverage at http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E18002573B7006F8836.html

ICANN to Fast Track Internationalized Domains

From an ICANN press release:

"Domain Names, which are currently mainly limited to characters from the Latin or Roman scripts, are seen as an important element in enabling the multilingualization of the Internet, reflecting the diverse and growing language needs of all users. . . .

Thanks to ICANN’s evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names, Internet users around the globe can now access wiki pages with the domain name "example.test" in the 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own sub pages with their own names in their own language; one suggestion is: example.test/yourname." See

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-13nov07.htm

Same thing holds true for ccTLD's; see http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-13nov07.htm.

This means that at some point an Internet user in China could type in a domain name using Chinese characters for both the top- and second-level domain names. Cool!