JOLT Digest

District Court Permits Facebook’s Trademark Suit to Proceed Against Teachbook.com
By Albert Wang – Edited by Abby Lauer

Facebook, Inc. v. Teachbook.com LLC, No. 11-cv-3052 (N.D. Ill. September 26, 2011)
Slip Opinion

The District Court for the Northern District of Illinois denied defendant Teachbook’s motion to dismiss a trademark infringement suit brought by social networking site Facebook.

Judge Aspen, writing for the court, held that Facebook had pled sufficient facts to survive Teachbook’s Rule 12(b)(6) motion. The court declined to consider Teachbook’s extrinsic evidence and based its holding solely on the content of Facebook’s complaint and exhibits. The court also rejected Teachbook’s assertion that the word “book” was too generic to sustain a trademark claim, noting that Facebook’s trademark registration covers the compound word “Facebook” and that the specific use of “book” as a suffix was potentially protectable. In so holding, the court noted that consumer confusion could arise because Teachbook framed its service as an alternative for teachers barred by work policy from using Facebook.

The Trademark and Copyright Law Blog provides an overview of the case. John Del Vecchio contemplates the consequences of this holding for other sites with the word “book” in their name, while Eric Goldman criticizes the court’s findings on generic terms and on the likelihood of consumer confusion.

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District Court Requires Warrant for Cell Phone Location Data

By Michael Hoven – Edited by Jonathan Allred

In the Matter of an Application of the United States of America for an Order Authorizing the Release of Historical Cell-Site Information, 10-MC-897 (E.D.N.Y. Aug. 22, 2011)

Slip opinion

The United States District Court of the Eastern District of New York denied the government’s request to order Verizon Wireless to turn over 113 days of customer location data which, according to the government, was relevant to a criminal investigation.

The court held that the Fourth Amendment covered cell phone location data and that law enforcement would need to show probable cause and receive a warrant to access such information. The court decided that cell phone users have a reasonable expectation of privacy that deserves protection from government intrusion. In so holding, the court applied an exception to the third-party-disclosure doctrine that would otherwise give law enforcement access to non-content information (such as location data) that users have already divulged to a third party (such as a service provider), concluding that disclosure of cumulative cell phone location data would be as intrusive as disclosure of the content of cell phone communications.

Ars Technica provides an overview of the case. Techdirt applauds the decision’s protection of cell phone users’ privacy. Wired notes that action by the Supreme Court or the Senate could favor government access over user privacy and limit the effect of the court’s ruling. (more…)

District Court Rules that DMCA Safe Harbors Apply to Cloud-Storage Music Locker Service Liable for Indirect Infringement

By Andrew Crocker – Edited by Jonathan Allred

Capitol Records, Inc. v. MP3tunes, LLC, 07 Civ. 9931 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 22, 2011)

Slip opinion

The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled on competing motions for summary judgment in a copyright infringement case brought by EMI, Inc. against cloud-storage locker service MP3tunes and its executive Michael Robertson. The court granted EMI’s motion for summary judgment of contributory infringement against MP3tunes for not removing specific infringing material from users’ accounts and direct infringement against Robertson for personally downloading infringing material, while granting in part MP3tunes’ motion for summary judgment on its entitlement to safe harbors under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (“DMCA”).

The court ruled that MP3tunes had satisfied the threshold requirement for safe harbors granted to service providers in the DMCA by establishing a policy for dealing with repeat infringers among other requirements, but it found that MP3tunes had not done enough to respond to takedown notices from EMI regarding MP3tunes users’ infringement. MP3tunes’ locker service allows users to upload music from their personal collections and play these songs back from any computer. MP3tunes also operates sideload.com, a website (and an accompanying web plugin) that allows users to search for new music and “sideload” it directly to their locker for storage and playback. Sideload.com also aggregates music sideloaded by users, serving as a resource for discovering new music. When MP3tunes received EMI’s takedown notice, it removed links to the infringing content from sideload.com, but it did not delete songs that had been sideloaded from these links to individual user accounts. Relying heavily on precedent from Viacom v. YouTube, 718 F. Supp. 2d. 514 (S.D.N.Y. 2010), which was previously covered by the Digest, the court held that although MP3tunes was obligated to remove only those copyrighted works that were described with sufficient precision in EMI’s takedown notice, it should have removed copies of these works from users’ accounts as well. As a result, the court ruled that EMI was entitled to summary judgment on the claim that MP3tunes was liable for contributory infringement for these specific works.

Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog provides an overview of the case. The Washington Post and the New York Times both agree that the court’s application of DMCA safe harbors to MP3tunes’ service will be welcome news to Apple, Amazon, and Google, all of whom have recently introduced cloud music storage locker services.

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Court Shuts Down DVD Streaming Service Zediva
By Daniel Robinson – Edited by Kassity Liu

Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., et al. v. WTV Systems, Inc., No. CV 11-2817-JFW (C.D. Cal. August 1, 2011)
Slip Opinion

On August 1st, the District Court for the Central District of California granted a preliminary injunction ordering Zediva, an online video service, to shut down.

The order, by Judge John Walker, held that the Plaintiffs Warner Bros. and other movie studios were likely to succeed on the merits of their copyright claim, and that the potential harm the service posed to the plaintiffs outweighed the burden of an injunction on the defendants. In so holding, the court held that the defendants’ service violated the plaintiffs’ public performance right by transmitting content from DVDs to its subscribers.

Reuters provides an overview of the case. Techdirt criticizes the decision, arguing that streaming a DVD to one customer is not a “public performance.” Ars Technica provides a detailed description of the holding. (more…)

District Court Says CAN-SPAM Act Does Not Violate First Amendment
By Samantha Kuhn – Edited by Chinh Vo

U.S. v. Smallwood, 09-CR-00249 (N.D. Tex. July 15, 2011)
Slip Opinion hosted by Scribd.co

The District Court for the Northern District of Texas rejected a First Amendment challenge to the CAN-SPAM criminal statute, which prohibits the computer transmission of “multiple commercial electronic mail messages, with the intent to deceive or mislead recipients . . . . as to the origin of such messages.”

The court first rejected defendant Alicia Smallwood’s motions challenging her indictment for, among other things, electronic mail fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1037(a)(2) and (b)(2)(c) (“CAN-SPAM Act”). The court determined that Smallwood was engaging in “clearly proscribed conduct” and was therefore not entitled to challenge the statute for vagueness. As a result of this finding, the main issue in the case became whether the statute was overly broad in its regulation of protected speech and thus a violation of the First Amendment. The arguments presented by Smallwood for over-breadth centered around the statute’s limitations on commercial speech, and the court rejected them.

Eric Goldman provides commentary on the outcome and implications of the opinion. For a background on the CAN-SPAM Act’s requirements, see Cybertelecom.

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