Category Archives: Intellectual Property

Meta tagging presents an interesting case for intellectual property law. Meta tagging refers to tags, or words, that web site designers place into the source of a web page. If you right click on a website and select view source, you can see these tags. They are a way of describing what the web site is about so that search engines can direct web surfers looking for particular information to sites that actually contain that particular information. As it stands, the law is unsettled as to whether it is lawful to use another’s trademarks in your meta tags. For example, if you operate a website that concerned all things Microsoft, you might be tempted to include meta tags on your pages with words of all of Microsoft’s products so that people searching for those things would go to your page. The competing legal concerns are whether this is a legitimate…
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In about six weeks, a big change in internet naming is set to start taking shape – May 1 marks the date that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) will release the first batch of applicants to have applied for a new generic top level domain (“gTLD”). This is the first time in the history of the internet that companies or individuals have been able to arbitrarily create the suffix that comes at the end of web addresses. In addition to “.com,” “.edu,” and the other ones to which we have grown accustomed, we could see anything – “.socialmedia” or “.cloudcomputing” are two examples. There are few restrictions as to what the new gTLDs can be. The character limit is a generous 64, and non-Latin characters are permitted, enabling languages like Russian, Arabic and Chinese to create domains in their native alphabets. Thus far, ICANN has received…
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Creativity and innovation are essential for social media and technology companies to grow. This is why we see leaders in the industry approach employee management a little bit differently than more rigid, traditional companies in years past. One of the things for which Google has become famous is for giving its workers time to work on their own projects. Engineers can have 20 percent of their time each week (a full day) to work on things that are not in their job descriptions. The idea behind the free time is to let the minds of smart people wander to puzzles and creations that differ from what the employees are normally working on. The 20 percent rule has worked well, leading to developments like AdSense, Google News and Google Maps. Google is not the only tech company that encourages its employees to be creative. Corel has a “virtual garage.” Its employees…
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