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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
The font foundry P22 is suing Universal Studios for using its Cezanne font on a bunch of Harry Potter-branded T-shirts and other merchandise. The complaint lists three causes of action: copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement and breach of contract. The complaint asks for three main things. First, there’s a request for an injunction preventing Universal from using the Cezanne font and from making or selling any new products that contain the font. Second, destruction of all [...]
Once again, Dropbox has updated their Terms of Service to address concerns that they were trying to claim ownership of its users files. They never were, but now they’re specifically saying so. I was especially pleased that they phrased the license approximately how I suggested, by dropping reference to the specific Section 106 rights. However, now they’ve opened up a new can of worms for themselves surrounding when they can disclose it. Here’s what their [...]
The latest IEEE Software has an article on Client-Shared Source, where a software publisher will grant its customers access to its source code, with the idea that the customers would contribute to the code itself. The idea of sharing source code with selected customers is not particularly new–it’s actually fairly common with Operating Systems (see, for example, Microsoft’s program). But, Client-Shared Source goes beyond simply allowing customers to see the code — it also allows [...]
Does this situation sound familiar? Clyde: Hey Karen, how’s the startup going? Karen: Hi Clyde. It’s going great — we almost have our alpha product ready and there’s a lot of excitement, but . . . Well, we’re running out of money and need to find some more investors. Clyde: Hey! I can help! I know some investors who might be interested in your business. How about if I introduce you for, say, 2% of [...]