Catawba County Schools in North
Carolina filed an injunction against Google, saying the search engine improperly
indexed private information about schoolchildren, including names, social
security numbers and test scores of 619 current and former students. The
information was stored in the school system's DocuShare server, which required a
user name and password to access. According to Google their crawlers
cannot index information secured by password. So where is the security leak?
The temporary injunction calls for Google to remove
any information pertaining to the Catawba County Schools Board of Education from
its server and index and accuses the corporation of trespass.
June 26, 2006: Farrell,
Nick, Google
"hacked our website", The Inquirer:
"A Schoolboard has won a temporary injunction against the
search engine outfit Google."
2. Toback drops porn lawsuit
against Google (for more information on the case see
Update
40)
Jeffrey Toback has dropped a
federal lawsuit that had claimed the search engine company Google Inc. profits
from child pornography. He said he did this because "Google has offered to sit
down and discuss the issues. They didn't want to do that while litigation was
pending, so we're taking them up on their offer."
June 23, 2006:
N.Y. Lawmaker Drops Google Porn Lawsuit, The Age:
"A Long Island politician has dropped a federal lawsuit that had claimed the
search engine company Google Inc. profits from child pornography."
June 23, 2006: Broache,
Anne,
Politician drops child porn suit against Google, CNet:
"A New York politician who accused Google of profiting from child
pornography and violating federal law has dropped his lawsuit, the search
giant said."
3. Louis Vuitton wins Google Adwords ruling
Louis Vuitton alleges that Google allowed AdWords
advertisers to purchase Louis Vuitton trademarks in order to serve ads against
them. Users searching for Louis Vuitton products on Google’s French site would
find ads from both Louis Vuitton competitors and from those offering Vuitton
knockoffs. In June 2006 The Paris Court of Appeals agreed with the February 2005
decision by a Paris district court that found Google guilty of trademark
counterfeiting and unfair competition and advertising. The Paris court increased
the Vuitton damages to allocate for the case (€300,000) and other legal expenses
(€75,000).
Google France said that since the case began in 2003, it
has implemented a policy barring Internet advertisers from buying search
listings under trademarks held by others, as well as a ban on advertising for
counterfeit products.
4. Google's first legal victory in the battles over its Google Books
Library Project
WBG, a German publisher, droped its petition for a
preliminary injunction against the Google Books Library Project after being told
by the Copyright Chamber of the Regional Court of Hamburg that its petition was
unlikely to succeed. The court indicated that the display of short snippets from
in-copyright books and the scanning of the books in the U.S. does not infringe
German copyright law.
For more information on the project and several
other pending lawsuits in the U.S. and in France
see this overview!
5. Kinderstart v. Google Lawsuit Dismissed (for
more information on the case see
Update
38 and
41)
U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel for the Northern
District in San Jose dismissed a lawsuit brought by
Kinderstart.com that accused Google in March 2006 of "pervasive
monopolistic practices" that led to the denial of the
site's free speech rights, prevention and destruction of
competition, and predatory pricing. Kinderstart, a parenting search engine site, filed its suit after
suffering an approximate 70 percent drop in monthly
traffic after Google buried its visibility in search
results.
Google argued in court that its rankings were
opinions and therefore protected by the US
constitution's first amendment, which protects freedom
of speech. The Judge wrote in his decision that,
"Kinderstart has failed to allege any conduct on the
part of Google that significantly threatens or harms
competition." Kinderstart will have the opportunity to
amend all nine counts of its lawsuit.
July 13, 2006: Mills, Elinor,
Judge dismisses suit over Google ranking, ZDNet:
"A California judge on Thursday dismissed a Web site's lawsuit against
Google over its fall in the Google search index, but left the door open for
the lawsuit to be amended and refiled. "
July 3, 2006:
Rank outsider sues Google over zero score, The Register:
"Google has defended its right to rank web pages in any manner it likes in a
groundbreaking court case over its search engine results."
June 30, 2006: Kawamoto,
Dawn,
Suit over poor Google ranking may go forward, CNet:
"A federal judge in California hinted that a parenting Web site that's suing
Google over a poor ranking in the search giant's massive index would be able
to proceed with its lawsuit."
About mid 2005 Avi Datner
learned that Yahoo's search results did not include his website partypop.com. In
November, he contacted Yahoo and told them that as the result of Yahoo's
excluding of partypop.com from its search results, he was loosing advertising
revenue. At about that time Yahoo confirmed that its search results were not
including partypop.com because someone at Yahoo had placed the website on a list
of web sites which were excluded from the search results. Yahoo did not explain
why the website was excluded.
In July Datner sued Yahoo,
claiming that Yahoo unfairly and illegally directs business away from him to his
competitors.
Datner v. Yahoo! Inc, Case No.
BC355217 (Cal. Superior Court
complaint
filed July 11, 2006)
7.
Google Settles Click Fraud Case (for more information on
the case see
Update 32 and
38)
An Arkansas judge approved a $90
million settlement between Google Inc. and advertisers who claimed the Internet
search engine company improperly billed them for clicks that didn't lead to
genuine customers seeking their products (Google charges advertisers a fee each
time a user clicks on an ad that is displayed on the search firm's website).
Google was accused of not doing enough to protect advertisers from "click fraud"
abuse.
In a
court-ordered
report,
Alexander
Tuzhilin, a
professor of information
systems at New York
University,
assessed Google's click
fraud control mechanisms.
He came to the following
conclusion: "Google
put much effort in
developing
infrastructure, methods
and processes for
detecting invalid clicks
since the Click Quality
team was established in
2003. These efforts were
not perfect since Google
missed certain amounts
of invalid clicks over
these years and it
adhered to the
doubleclicking policy
for too long in my
opinion. However, click
fraud is a very
difficult problem to
solve, Google put a
significant effort to
solve it, and I find
their efforts to filter
out invalid clicks as
being reasonable,
especially after the
doubleclick policy was
reversed in March 2005."
July 31, 2006:
Google settles click
fraud case for $90m,
The Register:
"Google's $90m
payout over click
fraud has been
approved by a US
court. Some
opponents had
claimed that the
figure was not high
enough to cover
losses, but an
Arkansas judge has
thrown the objection
out."
8. The Adam Walsh Child Protection And Safety
Act Of 2006 (also see
Update
40)
The Adam Walsh Child Protection & Safety Act has
been signed into Law by President Bush. The law is designed to stop sites with
potentially offensive material using meta tags to attract viewers under false
pretences.
"Whoever knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a
website with the intent to deceive a person into viewing material constituting
obscenity shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not more than 10
years," says the bill.
It carries a stiffer penalty for activity aimed at children: "Whoever
knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a website with
the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material harmful to minors on the
internet shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not more than 20
years."
Kubis, Sebastian, Digitalisierung von
Druckwerken zur Volltextsuche im Internet - die Buchsuche von Google ""Google
Book Search" im Konflikt mit dem Urheberrecht, ZUM 2006, 370-379
Volkmann, Christian, Aktuelle Entwicklungen in
der Providerhaftung im Jahr 2005, K&R 2006, 245-252
Stenzel, Igor, Anmerkung zum Urteil des KG vom
10.2.2006, Az. 9 U 55/05 - Haftung einer Meta-Suchmaschine, ZUM 2006,
405-407
Ott, Stephan,
Haftung für Hyperlinks - Eine
Bestandsaufnahme nach 10 Jahren, WRP 2006, 691-702
Ott,
Stephan, Links zu
Glücksspielseiten - eine Übersicht über die Rechtsprechung, NIP 3/2006,
13-24
Newsarchive
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