practicehacker

We're the ABA Damnit! We own you!

This was my 10th year at ABA Technology Show in Chicago. This year was particularly cool.  Here’s why:

Meeting The Heavies: To me, seeing people like Dennis Kennedy, Tom Mighelle, Bob Ambrogi, Jim Calloway, Kevin O’Keefe, Brett Burney, Andy Atkins, Jay Foonberg (!) and the rest of my pretend blog friends … I mean pretend LinkedIn friends … is like reconnecting with long lost relatives. Exciting and a little intimidating. But all of them were really great and down to earth. Except that Kennedy. Such a prima donna. I kid, I kid.

Meeting Canadians: Who can forget meeting the Great Librarian of Upper Canada! Beat that. Then there was Phil of the Future (my name for him), Steve Matthews (nice guy), Brett Burney (I think he’s Canadian), Dominic Jaar (vive la Quebec libre!), the boys from Clio (or as I called them, the Booth Babes), and a host of other talent from the Great White North. It was great to meet you all: now go back where the ice doesn’t melt until July.

Technology Becoming Accepted: This year for the first time in memory I noticed a preponderance of grey hairs and the careful gait of partners scoping out potential buys for their offices.  This was not the brash, flash-in-the-pan TechShow of the late-90′s in which the Internet was decried as a fad.

SaaS, Saas, and more Saas: Software as a service was all over the place, and by next year it will be pervasive. This year I was knocked out by the number and variety of kick-ass SaaS providers at the show including Clio, RocketMatter, and VLO Tech. Clio was my hands-down favorite for a number of reasons – I intend to use it in my own practice. Whatever your cup of tea, the idea of throwing away the IT department in favor of the Cloud is gaining traction fast.

Less is … Less: One lamentable fact about this  year’s show – there was less of it than I’ve seen in a long time. Another casualty of the economy I’d say, but we shouldn’t overlook the fact that many legal technology vendors have been slaves to profit instead of boosters for innovation and the slow economy is making it painfully apparent what a royal screw job they’ve been giving lawyers all these years. Many players couldn’t make it ? Good riddance to bad company.

Other than that however, it was a great experience as always and one that I heartily recommend to one and all. If you haven’t been to TechShow, go there. If you have, come back. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

For more coverage see my SmallLaw Column in TechnoLawyer.

Check out Twitter coverage of TechShow.

As always, I’d love your thoughts. E-mail me at mhedayat[at]mha-law.com or tweet me @practichacker.

ttyl

SEATTLE, WA–(Marketwire – December 18, 2007) – In this opinion the U.S. District Court in Seattle, WA dismissed the class action complaint filed in June 2007 against nascent attorney-portal and rating site Avvo with prejudice. This blog has been following Avvo, and the Brown lawsuit, since its inception. Ironically, the suit probably drew more attention to Avvo than the site would have otherwise attracted. Take that Counselor.

In its motion to dismiss Avvo argued that its publication of attorney disciplinary information and the opinions of clients and colleagues, as well as its own numerical rating, constituted protected speech. The Court agreed, stating that all of the foregoing “are absolutely protected by the First Amendment and cannot serve as the basis for liability under state law.” In short, lawyers now have to take it as well as they give it out.

Avvo CEO Mark Britton, a lawyer himself, says Attorneys in the jurisdictions in which Avvo operates (currently Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington) had “better not pout, better not cry, better not shout I’m telling you why – Avvo-Clause is coming to  town … to eat your lunch if you don’t come clean with clients.” Ed. Note. That quote may not have actually been from Mark Britton.

See other Avvo articles on the pm blog

Lawyers have taken to blogging with gusto. Who among us can resist the urge to share their wisdom with the whole world, a paragraph at a time? Certainly not your humble narrator. But you ask,’what about the cyber-liability?’ No problem. Keep these 12 simple rules in mind and you’ll go far. Oh, and you’re welcome.

Posting for Dollars

As blogs have displaced traditional media as a way of getting information into people’s hands fast, fast, fast, ads have morphed from the eyesores they once were into paid, market moving, posts from influential bloggers. Welcome to word of mouth marketing. Remember the payola scandals of the 50′s? Well it’s time to rock around the clock again! Only this time the FTC recommends advertisers disclose their relationship with the promoting blog — and maybe they will, but remember that getting paid to endorse things is as American as hot dogs, baseball, apple pie, and invading the middle east. Just look at PayPerPost and ReviewMe — websites doing business out in the open connecting would be shills with corporate sponsors.

And hard on the heels of the word of mouth campaign comes so-called buzz advertising; which is not really advertising so much as a system of peer recommendations by e-mail (e.g. normal human behavior) that has been cooped and sold by marketing folk. Since the FTC has yet to weigh in on buzz marketing we don’t really know what its position will be; but we can be confident that by the time it takes a stand the landscape will have shifted under the commission’s feet, ensuring that it stays on the cutting edge of cultural irrelevance.

Finally, it turns out that scholars at University of Chicago Law School are looking into the use of hyperlinks in blogs and websites as part of a growing, but loosely affiliated, body of rules known as e-commerce law.

Going Deep

One of the great features of blogging is that it allows authors to co-opt or refer to an entirely new line of discussion by using links to outside sources. In fact, linking is so easy and intuitive that it seems you could write an entire article consisting of references to other articles (“sampling” in modern musical terms). Therein lies the problem. When is linking equivalent to infringement of the (original) author’s copyright? The answer may lie in the depth of the link. Content found within a website (i.e. not on the main page) is presumably meant only for visitors to that site — not tourists from nearby sites or blogs. Now while no law bans the practice of deep linking to content you don’t own, it goes without saying that passing off someone else’s work as yours is a copyright no-no. What’s an enterprising blogger to do? Disclose, disclose, disclose, and see the discussion in Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc. One way to stay out of trouble would to limit your link references to pieces within the journalism and blogging communities themselves, where such practices are tolerated, and even appreciated.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Complaints

Words are more powerful accompanied by images. Where time or resources are tight, bloggers borrow from one another, from the Web, or from resources such as Flickr or istockphoto, to enhance their posts. How often does that happen? So often that bloggers have developed techniques to deal with the phenomenon such as inline linking (which leads the reader to a source page) and thumbnails (small representations of a picture or photo). With inline links, bloggers use a share and share alike copyright policy known as the creative commons, in which one can can cheaply purchase royalty-free images. As for thumbnails, as long as you use a genuine one rather than simply a reduced-size image, a US Circuit court has held that thumbnailing is “fair use.”

Steal This Content!

Copyright disputes stand squarely at the heart of the intersection between the Internet and time-tested legal conventions. Very simply, work is protected under copyright as soon as it is created – no record or registration is needed – but you can still choose to register your creation with the U.S. Copyright Office in order to create a public record that can be used in the event of copyright infringement. Copyright violations are torts, and strict liability torts at that. Most suits do result in monetary awards and injunctions against future infringement, but almost all start with a simple cease and desist letter.

Trademarks

Most bloggers don’t have a trademark to protect, but large corporations do. If your domain is similar enough to an existing trademark to cause confusion in the market (whatever that is) then you can expect to be challenged. The issue here is cybersquatting. In November 1999 the U.S. Congress passed the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act to address the issue, but the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) uses the flexible Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) for faster results. On this point, see Continental Airlines, Inc. v. continentalairlines.com.

Reader Data: Keep Private Things Private

When you solicit user data as part of the requirement for visitors to use your blog or website, you are doing 2 things: building a database of customers for future reference, and loading up on potential liability. What you know can hurt you, even if you don’t use it. Good examples include the forest of regulations in HIPAA, P3P, U.S. Code of Fair Information Practices, and California Online Privacy Protection Act. The simplest solution is probably to just post a privacy policy so users know what to expect and a clear process for opting out of or modifying personal information. This can be as simple as providing an email address for the person to opt-out.

Who Owns User-Developed Content?

Whether comments, reviews, a bulletin board, or some other way for people to sound off, you may have user-developed content on your site or blog and may not even know it. Now all you need to do is figure out who owns that that stuff and what can be done with it. While it may come as something of a surprise, it turns out user-developed content is owned by the users who developed it, and under tenets of basic copyright law must be cleared before further use. Maybe the easiest thing to do in these cases is to use a EULA (Internet-speak for an end-user license agreement a/k/a shrink wrap agreement). This would be the delightful jumble of words that you’be been skipping over ever since you ripped open your first coyp of DOS. Oh, joy!

Who Suffers from User-Developed Content?

Surprise! While you can’t use content from others you can sure be liable for it. Just ask the satisfied customers in Congress who authored Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act on blogger liability for user-generated content. Of course there is broad protection for freedom-of-speech types, but the law was not designed to protect ISP’s, bloggers, or message board webmasters from liability for user defamation, slander, “hurtful talk” (hurtful talk — you’ve got to be @$%! kdding me!), federal crimes or intellectual property violations. Got it? No fun of any kind. See Doe v. Cahill for a well-reasoned opinion.

Let’s Blog about Taxes!

This section of our discussion deals with making money … so it does not apply to the vast majority of bloggers out there. Nonetheless, for the elite minority who have managed to make a buck or two, remember: your Uncle Sam wants his cut. Luckily if you are just selling goods over the Internet you are still in the clear under the Supreme Court’s Quill v. North Dakota decision stating that you are largely exempt from collecting a sales tax. But remember – tax law can be a 2 edged sword. Remember to ask about tax deductions for business user of your home, supplied, and more. Check out these deductions on business use of your home for example.

Spam-A-Ram-A

You knew we would end up here. I swear I don’t need all that Viagra spammers keep trying to sell me, what with all the LOTTERY! YOU’VE WON announcements I’ve been getting lately. You get the idea — don’t make your blog’s newsletter a victim of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. But then why would you when that’s the poitn of RSS: everything you want in an electronic message and nothing you don’t.

See you online, folks.

Source: Aviva Directory

Los Angeles Times

By Maura Dolan, Times Staff Writer
November 21, 2006

 SAN FRANCISCO — Internet users and providers cannot be held liable for posting defamatory material written by someone else, the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday.

The prospect of blanket immunity for those who intentionally redistribute defamatory statements on the Internet has disturbing implications,” Justice Carol Corrigan wrote for the court.  But, she added, immunity “serves to protect online freedom of expression and to encourage self regulation [more]