Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, There has been a lot of buzz surrounding New York's new law requiring online retailers to collect sales tax from their New York Customers if they engage affiliate marketers in that state. The New York Times ) original coverage and the Overstock fallout (, the New York Post , Vastplanet , Cost Per News, and The Wired Blog represent a handful of the coverage out there.

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Today we're going to contrast two recent judicial opinions on the use of a competitor's trademark in meta-tags. Same issues; Different outcomes. Let's take a very brief look at each case. North American Medical Corp. v Axiom 2008 WL 918411 )11th Cir. April 7, 2008( The two companies involved in this suit make spinal decompression devices. Allegedly,

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Last week, there was minor uproar over a Florida District Court's Order involving negative keywords. Understandably, many SEO/Ms were anxious that the Court screwed something up that would prevent companies from bidding on their competitors' trademarks for keyword advertising. Ars Technica ran the headline "'Negative Keyword' Ruling May Have Big Impact On search Ads.

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please The Mozzers, Pssst. I've got a secret. It involves the hokey pop culture phenomenon, The Secret, and the controversial SEM, Dan Hollings. Okay. I lied. It's not a secret. In fact, the whole nasty mess is public record because the owners of The Secret are suing their former internet marketer for trademark infringement and violating his duty of loyalty to them. The case, TS Merchandising v. Hollings ,

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Last Friday, I had the pleasure of attending the Law and Business of Online Advertising, a conference co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and University of Santa Claras High Tech Law Institute . It was a Who's Who of online marketing super stars, including Eric Goldman )my hero(, Kim Howell )poor thing had to explain online marketing to liberal, non-technology academics(,

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, According to Google, its Adsense program for domains "allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory." After a ruling by the Northern District of Illinois a few weeks ago, Adsense may also allow plaintiffs' attorneys to unlock Google's value. Or, if that is ungenerous,

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, I was working on trademarking some SEOmoz marks the other day, when I noticed that someone is trying to register "SEO" as a service mark. I was shocked. Apparently, the guy who's doing this has managaged to get all the way to the publication stage of the registration process. That means he has passed the preliminary review by the Trademark Office's )"TMO"( reviewing attorney. Currently,

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Welcome to Legal Monday! )It's still Monday, right?( My goal is to present a checklist of legal issues and trends surrounding affiliate marketing. I hope this will be interesting to both merchants and marketers. Affiliate marketing has unfortunately gained a bad reputation for being particularly high risk. While the industry is unlikely to ever be risk-free,

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Legal Monday is here again. This week's post is part practical guide and part cybernag. Remember the post I wrote encouraging you to register your copyright back in December 2007? I bet you haven't done it yet. Am I right? I thought so. Today, I'm breaking down the registration process even further by providing some sample registration forms and discussing strategies for how to register your content.

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, We're keeping Legal Monday short and sweet to bring you this breaking news. As many of you know, Valueclick and its subsidiaries, Hi-Speed Media and E-Babylon, have been under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission )"FTC"( for alleged violations of the Can-Spam Act and failure to protect consumer's sensitive information.

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Happy Legal Monday! Fuel up on that caffeine because today I want to discuss how trademark law plays out in the course of a domain name dispute. We're going to compare and contract the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act with I-CANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. As I see it, there are generally three kinds of domain name disputes.

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers, Welcome to another edition of Legal Mondays! Im very pleased to be back in town with all systems go. Before I left for vacation in February, we were looking at trademark law basics . Today, were building on the basics and moving into problem sets. Today's topic is How screwed am I? Another business has the same name as mine.

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May it Please the Mozzers, I had the pleasure of attending Law Seminars Internationals 16th Annual Seattle Conference on New Development in Technology Law last week. The place was chock full of brilliant legal minds and even a handful of techies. I want to spotlight one presentation in particular today. David Bateman , of K&L Gates spoke on policing bad behavior on the internet. )He had such a peppy,