I just posted the updated and revamped Trademark Use FAQ. Trademarks are becoming more and more important with the rise of lifestyle goods and the social network, as people claim their affinity for brands and product lines as a means of self identification and a way of quickly locating potential friends with common interests. The [...]

Need to get rid of yesterday’s cameras, camcorders, cellphones and other electronic gadgets? Check out SecondRotation. The company buys your not-so-new gear and re-sells it on eBay. Fill out a packing slip, put the item in the mail, and your PayPal account gets credited for the amount paid after your item checks out. Second Rotation [...]

In the last few weeks I’ve been updating and posting many of my articles on copyright, trademark, and domain name law from the old Arborlaw website.
The Joint Copyright FAQ is the most updated article of the group — as 21st century creators rip, mix, remix, mashup, and scramble bits and bytes of content into new [...]

iPhone envy may be chewing you up, but Google has lots of savvy options for the humble low-tech phone. Who needs web browsing? Using Google SMS (in beta) you can use your plain-vanilla cell phone to send a text message to GOOGLE (466453) and retrieve a broad variety of information: local bars and restaurants, [...]

This week, the Michigan Supreme Court upheld a 1996 never-enforced voter ID law, which requires Michigan voters to produce valid photo IDs in order to vote. The law has been the subject of controversy on both privacy and economic grounds — privacy advocates condemn any linking of basic constitutional rights and liberties with identification [...]

Here’s an Infoworld item on Ed Foster’s Gripelog about those annoying email disclaimers. Should anyone use email disclaimers? Should everyone use email disclaimers? Are they legally effective? Are they worth it? I commented on the blog entry for Ed’s readers, but the legal issues are worth exploring on here.
Email disclaimers [...]

I recently answered a commonly-asked question about the legalities of forwarding email. Forwarding email is very easy to do; the user just clicks on a button and types in an address and the entire email is sent off into cyberspace to another reader. As any user of the Internet knows — this is, [...]

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University gives a highly entertaining and masterful demonstration of the copyright principles of fair use and parody in action — by explaining the basics of US copyright law in a clever mashup using protected Disney characters and other intellectual property (Disney is one of the entertainment industry’s biggest advocates of [...]