President Obama and various members of Congress have recently intimated that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would not pass until one of its more controversial provisions is removed. That’s all well and good, but SOPA is still an awful bill. SOPA is intended to fight piracy of both copyrighted works (like music and movies) and physical goods (like face Gucci purses) by going after the websites and other internet services that make these goods [...]
Jan 182012
Jan 162012
Received an absolutely ginormous Delaware franchise tax bill in the past few weeks? Corporate lawyers all across the country are getting phone calls from anxious clients wondering why their startup company now owes Delaware tens of thousands of dollars — sometimes more than their entire company has in the bank. Take a deep breath — chances are that you don’t owe anywhere close to that much. There are two ways to compute franchise taxes, and [...]
Oct 202011
Why are Internet Terms of Service usually so hard to read? Some lawyers will tell you that they need to be written in precise, lawyerly, language to protect the provider against legal claims from its users. And, it’s probably true that terms written in that very precise language may protect the provider in some cases where terms written in plain English won’t. However, that precision comes at a cost: most people find that very precise [...]
Oct 032011
I blogged recently about a few hoops that service providers have to jump through to be entitled to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbor from being sued for copyright material their users post. One of those requirements was that the service provider had to name an agent to receive DMCA takedown requests and tell the Copyright Office who that was. That was 1998, and the Copyright Office then put out some interim regulations about [...]
Sep 292011
There’s been a lot of discussion in the past few months about services that use their terms of service to avoid class action lawsuits. It all started when, in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the US Supreme Court ruled a service’s Terms of Service could require disputes to be resolved in arbitration without the ability to arbitrate as a class. This overturned a rule that had existed in California, which found such provisions unconscionable, and thus [...]
Sep 212011
This past Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission issued proposed changes to its rules implementing COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). COPPA prevents service providers from collecting, using or disclosing personal information of children under 13 years old without their parents’ consent. While many of the changes only clarify the existing rules, there are five main places which might impact smaller service providers: 1. Broadening the amount of information protected The proposed rules would classify [...]
Sep 122011
The LexisNexis Legal Business Community Blog has a post about important things to put in a website’s terms of use. The author breaks down provisions into a few specific categories: (1) clarifying ownership of intellectual property, (2) the operator’s liability for what others post, and (3) limiting the operator’s liability. I recommend the post, but he misses a few important provisions: DMCA Notices. The Digitial Millennium Copyright Act grants website owners some immunity from suits [...]
Sep 062011
Most technical folks in the US have some passing familiarity with the notice-and-takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The basic idea is that if you have an website and somebody, without your knowledge, posts something to the site that infringes some third party’s copyright, then you won’t be liable for having the content on your website, so long as you remove the material when its owner asks you to. There are, however, [...]
Jul 262011
In 2009, the EU passed a new directive, effective May 25, 2011, with the purpose of preventing web service providers from inserting cookies into their users’ browsers without first providing “clear and comprehensive information” about how the cookies would be used and then obtaining the user’s consent. But, what does it mean to consent? What, exactly, does a service provider have to do? Luckily (or not), the EU has a Working Party that, in a [...]
The Y Combinator, an incubator in Silicon Valley, publishes a set of documents for use in the first financing round of early-stage companies. The documents provide a fairly simple and well-understood set of terms for a financing, centering on a “non-participating” liquidation preference — if the company is sold or liquidated, the investors have to choose between getting their money back (or at least as much of it back as is left) or sharing with [...]
