The Federal Trade Commission has finalized a new rule aimed at curtailing false, misleading, and otherwise fraudulent reviews on online retail sites. Fake reviews are a significant problem for the big e-commerce platforms, given that a robust customer review system is crucial to modern e-commerce business models. In fact, studies have shown that a one-star rating increase in a product review can result in as much as a 26% increase in sales. Unsurprisingly, this has caused a proliferation of fake reviews and “review brokers.” The new FTC rule is pretty comprehensive and worth a full read.
New York trademark attorney Jeremy Green Eche hit the jackpot—and may have run afoul of federal anti-cybersquatting law—when he recently sold the HarrisWalz.com domain for $15,000. Eche purchased the domain in 2020 for $8.50. Though cybersquatting law is focused predominantly on trademark protection, it includes a provision barring any registration that “consists of the name of another living person” without their consent and “with the specific intent to profit” from its sale. This isn’t the first time Eche got lucky purchasing domains. In 2016, he sold ClintonKaine.com to the Trump campaign, also for $15,000. Eche denied being profit-driven, noting the relatively low price he put on both the Harris and Clinton domains. That the “relatively low” price happens to be slightly less than the cost of pursuing a cybersquatting case against him is probably just a coincidence, right?
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that employers may be subject to lawsuits based on their employees’ off-work social media posts. In Okonowsky v. Garland, the court unanimously ruled that an employee of a federal prison was sexually harassed on Instagram by a coworker in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Following the ruling, plaintiff’s attorney Drew Pletcher said, “It appears to be the first holding in the Ninth Circuit to find that social media posts on an Instagram page could be considered workplace harassment under Title VII.” In the wake of this ruling, companies will need to consider whether their employee social media policies adequately address abusive or harassing behavior both inside and outside the workplace, including on personal social media.
Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has been hit with a $1.5 million copyright infringement lawsuit by celebrity photography sites BackGrid USA and BackGrid UK. The paparazzi companies allege Ye posted 10 BackGrid-owned photos to his Instagram account without permission or compensation. While it may seem counterintuitive that celebrities cannot post photos of themselves on their own social media, this is actually a fairly common fact pattern, and one that we have covered previously. For Ye, in any event, this will not be the first time he has tangled with paparazzi.
Embattled Georgia attorney Lin Wood has been ordered to pay his former law partners $4.5 million after an Atlanta jury found him liable for defaming them on social media. The feud began, like so many do, as an argument over money. The federal court’s initial ruling contained some not-so-subtle jabs at Wood. Judge Michael L. Brown wrote, “During a five-week period the following year, Defendant repeatedly accused Plaintiffs of criminal extortion in a series of messages he posted on a social media platform called Telegram. Hundreds of thousands of people viewed Defendant’s messages.” Brown continued, adding: “Tellingly, Defendant does not even try to show his accusations were true. Indeed, he admits Plaintiffs did not commit ‘the crime of extortion.’ But he insists his extortion accusations were still non-false because they contained ‘loose, figurative, or hyperbolic language’ that no reasonable person could construe as a genuine accusation of criminal conduct. The Court disagrees.” Lin Wood’s Telegram page can be viewed here.
A paywall for Reddit? CEO Steve Huffman hinted at subscription-only features for the wildly popular news aggregation and social forum site during an earnings call with investors. Unsurprisingly, Redditors had a snarky, and often hilarious, meltdown on the site. Despite its popularity, Reddit has struggled to become profitable. It’s a top site for AI web scrapers, which prompted the company to block Microsoft’s Bing search engine and enter into an agreement with Google for site access for AI training. Of the data sharing and web scraping situation, Huffman said, “[Our] preference is to have relationships with everybody, but we need to be very considered of where Reddit data goes and what it’s used for.”