Amazon has just announced Project Zero to potentially assist brand owners in combatting counterfeit goods by removing products likely to be fake from the online retailer’s platform. Project Zero would allow brand owners to designate product listings for removal, instead of undergoing Amazon’s prior reporting and removal process, which required brand owners to report counterfeit

digital copyright displayDoes your business or publication link or embed copyrighted content on your website or social media? If you routinely do the latter, a recent decision in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York suggests that the tide is turning to the former.

Although this holding is merely persuasive outside of the Southern District of New York, there is a possibility that other districts could adopt the same reasoning, finding businesses liable for violating a copyright holder’s right of display by embedding content from third-party servers.Continue Reading Embed at Your Own Risk, Says a New York Federal Court: Embedding Copyrighted Images on Your Website and Social Media May Lead to Charges of Copyright Infringement

When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigates a case, it looks at it from the first contact the consumer has with a product or service through the end of the consumer experience. For many consumers, the first contact with a product comes through lead generation, where a “lead generator” tries to find consumers interested in a particular type of good or service and then sell those leads to marketers. The FTC released its staff perspective paper on lead generation in September. Demonstrating that the FTC’s interest in lead generation is not just academic, the FTC recently asked the Department of Justice to file a complaint on the FTC’s behalf against a collection of entities known as the Consumer Education Group, charging them with violating the Telemarketing Sales Rule. The complaint alleged that the Defendants made illegal outbound telemarketing calls — some using robocalls delivering prerecorded messages — to consumers on the national Do Not Call (DNC) Registry without consumers’ express written consent or a preexisting business relationship.
Continue Reading FTC Complaint Confirms Interest in Lead Generation