Socially Aware

January 27, 2014 - Trademark, Litigation, Supreme Court
You May Not Necessarily Be the Master of Your Domain
The ability to associate goods and services with a specific domain name can make or break a business, so much so that companies are still willing to fork over millions to purchase domain names. And although you may consider yourself lucky to have registered
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January 22, 2014 - Employment Law, Litigation
Uncovering a Line in the Sand: Employee Social Media Use and the NLRA
By: Mary Race
If an employee calls his supervisor a “nasty motherf[**]ker” on Facebook, would the employee lose the protection that he would otherwise enjoy under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)? Probably not, according to National Labor Relations Board (NRLB) decisions like Pier Sixty LLC. In
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January 13, 2014 - First Amendment, Employment Law, Litigation, Supreme Court
Refining the First Amendment Status of Social Media Activity by Government Employees
By: Aaron P. Rubin
The Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Pickering v. Board of Education allows governmental employers, including law enforcement agencies, to fire or discipline employees for disrupting operations with excessive complaining, but it prohibits governmental employers from firing or disciplining an employee for speaking out on
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December 30, 2013 - FTC, Online Promotions, Privacy, Litigation, Wearable Computers
Hot Off the Press – New Issue of the Socially Aware Newsletter
The latest issue of our Socially Aware newsletter is now available. In this issue, we explore legal concerns raised by Google Glass; we provide an overview of the growing body of case law addressing ownership of business-related social media accounts; we take a look at
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December 04, 2013 - Privacy, Employment Law, Litigation, Supreme Court
Two Circuits Address the First Amendment Status of Facebook Activity
Two recent U.S. appellate court decisions have clarified the extent to which the First Amendment protects the social media activities of government employees. In Gresham v. City of Atlanta , the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit found that an individual’s First Amendment
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December 03, 2013 - Terms of Use, Litigation
Potential Limitations Placed on Unilateral Right to Modify Terms of Use
By: Jessica Kaufman
Contractual provisions giving a website operator the unilateral right to change its end user terms of service are ubiquitous and appear in the online terms of many major social media sites and other websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google. Although amendments to terms
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November 06, 2013 - Terms of Use, Employment Law, UK High Court, Litigation
Recent UK Court Rulings on Employees’ Use of LinkedIn
Following our post on U.S. lawsuits concerning the ownership of LinkedIn and Twitter accounts , we report on a recent United Kingdom High Court ruling that considered who was entitled to operate four LinkedIn Groups , and other UK cases that have addressed related
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July 30, 2013 - Litigation
Court Finds Uniform Commercial Code Applies to Commoditized Software
We’ve all seen the ads on the Internet—computer-optimization software designed to make your old PC operate like it’s brand new. Many consumers see these advertisements and, frustrated with the performance of their computers, purchase such software with the aim of speeding up their sluggish
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July 29, 2013 - Trademark, IP, Litigation
Whose @SunValley Is It?
Readers of our blog may remember Leonard Barshack as the co-founder of Bigfoot , a popular Internet mail forwarding service that launched in 1995. Barshack, a resident of Sun Valley, Idaho, recently became well-known once again for his role as plaintiff in Barshack v.
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July 23, 2013 - Section 230 Safe Harbor, Litigation
TheDirty.com Goes to Trial
In 2012, we reported on a pair of district court decisions that, based on similar facts, split on whether defendant TheDirty.com, a gossip website, qualified for immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the 1996 law that states “[n]o provider or
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