Looks like all this Adwords litigation against Google isn’t going away anytime soon.  And why should it: everyone wants a slice of the online advertising pie.  Yesterday, a group of Texas plaintiffs filed a massive trademark infringement suit against Google, alleging that its practice of selling trademarked adwords to competitors of the trademark owner is illegal.

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Good news for those political techies who want to download, access, mash, and otherwise play around with Senate voting records.  The Senate is migrating their voting roll calls to XML format.

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The NY Times yesterday posted a tidbit about a little-talked about facet of antitrust law: the Clayton Antitrust Act does not permit a person to sit on the board of two rival companies when the result is a reduction in competition between them. Why is this interesting? Because it involves the FTC opening an investigation on two of the giants in tech, Apple and Google. The section is rarely enforced, but it could lead to Eric Schmidt leaving Apple’s board if push comes to shove.

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Much ink has been shed over clickwrap contracts, and more will continue to be shed as courts attempt to apply age-old principles of contract law in a new technological age.  Contracts with minors are typically voidable, but the court makes an exception to this general rule in this case.
In this case, several students were required to submit their class papers to turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection website.  The students’ schools had agreements with iParadigms, the company that owned the website, which allowed them to archive the papers.  The main issue in …

Now that Obama has shown his cards on a lot of nominations to techie federal agencies, as well as started fleshing out his own staff, now seems like a good time to take a snapshot of the folks advising the President on tech policy, and those regulating the tech industry.  This will be a series of posts taking a closer look at the makeup of the politicians and political staff that will be regulating the industry.  We’ll start out at my home, the FCC.

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Some subconsciously assume that Facebook is a sort of walled garden where you can control who has access to your personal information.  At least in one case, a court has ruled that this is incorrect.   Evan Brown at Internet Cases has found an interesting case, Ledbetter v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2009 WL 1067018 (D. Colo. April 21, 2009), a personal injury suit where the Wal-Mart sought information about Ledbetter from MySpace, Facebook, and Meetup in order to defend the case.  The court granted their request, but did it get …

Already, the kickoff of this national broadband plan proceeding is receiving so much coverage.  Where did this strange bird come from, and where is it going?  Well, in the Recovery Act, the FCC was directed to come up with a national broadband plan that addresses a number of public policy goals including deployment, utilization and availability.  Today’s notice of inquiry opens all these major issues for comment from the public.  More about the structure and substance of the notice of inquiry, including comment dates and deadlines after the jump.

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The FCC met this morning and formally adopted a Notice of Inquiry seeking comment on its development of a national broadband plan.   Chairman Copps wants the process to be “open and inclusive”, so if you think you have a good idea for where our nation should go with its broadband infrastructure and services, read the item and comment away.  I’ll post again with a summary when the item is released.

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Great news for open government advocates.  Under the guidance of Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s CIO, the federal government will begin the process of making massive amounts of non-classified government data available on Data.gov.

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Outside the US Botanic Garden, Washington, DC

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Glenn Stansberry over at Nettuts+ has come up with a great list of HTML tags, many of which that I didn’t know previously, and some which could conceivably help with SEO.  For example, the <acronym> and <abbr> tags allow you to use abbreviations for terms and spell out the full term in the code, increasing your search engine exposure to variations of potential search terms.

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Even though webmail is insecure, the legal system usually treats communications via email as confidential for the purposes of attorney-client privilege.  What happens when good old Gmail caches emails between you and your attorney on your work computer, and your employer subsequently uses it against you in court?  No privilege for you!

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Then the current status of U.S. copyright law is not to your liking.  The U.S. code currently allows copyright holders to get $150k in damages where they prove that the object of their wrath willfully infringed their copyright, regardless of actual damages.  If you hoped that the Obama administration would undermine the statute, then the Obama Department of Justice has just disappointed you.

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In the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, there was a little tidbit that requires the FCC to submit a report to Congress in February 2010 containing a “national broadband plan.”  This is a pretty huge deal.  The key language in the statute requires the plan to
seek to ensure that all people of the United States have access to broadband capability and establish benchmarks for meeting that goal.
So, off to the races.

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The NTIA is holding hearings today on what “non-discrimination and interconnection” obligations it should attach to the billions of dollars of broadband grants it is going to distribute in the near future.   Round table discussion begins at 10:00 am ET and the public comments session begins at 11:30 am.  They usually have streaming video of these things, so check the website here.
UPDATE: Link to video is live.

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