Law X.0

Trademark Metadata Can Violate Lanham Act When Used By Competitors

Mark Giangrande (DePaul), editor of Tech Law Prof Blog reports:

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a company who uses meta-tags of their competitor's trademarks in their web site violates the Lanham Act.  The case is North American Medical Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc., ___F.3d___, 2008 WL 918411 (CA 11, April 7, 2008).  The case involves multiple issues, including false claims Axiom allegedly made about North American Medical products.  The use of trademarks, however, is the more interesting issue.  The District Court found that Axiom's use of North American Medical trademarks as meta-tags violated 15 USC §1114(1)(a) by using them "in commerce" and causing a likelihood of confusion.

Read more about it on Tech Law Prof Blog. Here's the text of the opinion (pdf). My initial reaction: people are still using metadata! [JH}

What Can You (Legally) Take From the Web?

Interesting post from IEEE Spectrum describing how copyright applies to bloggers and webmasters. Check it out! [RJ]

Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age

In Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age (SSRN) Mary-Rose Papandrea (Boston College Law School) takes a close look at all of the various justifications for limiting juvenile speech rights and concludes that none of them supports granting schools broad authority to limiting student speech in the digital media, even with respect to violent or harassing expression. She argues the tests that most courts and commentators have applied to determine whether student speech falls within a school's authority to act grant schools far too much authority to restrict juvenile speech rights in general. Papandrea's article concludes the primary approach that schools should take to most digital speech is not to punish or restrict such expression, but instead to educate their students about how to use digital media responsibly. [JH]

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 Starts Today

The four-day Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 starts today [website]. Check out the Annotated Schedule of Programs and the offical Web 2.0 Expo Blog. Information Week will be providing on-going coverage of the event here. Follow news and blog coverage: Google News Search | Google Blog Search [JH]

Feedback Sought on Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers

W3C's Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group has released a stable version of its Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers, and has sent an invitation to the community to share reports of browser support and other feedback on the test itself.

Check out Web Worker Daily for a survey of mobile web browsers featured on various smartphones. [JH]