Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

The popular social networking site Facebook, valued in the billions of dollars, is facing legal action brought by a plaintiff who claims to be entitled to the lion’s share of the business.  The claim alleges that Paul Ceglia paid Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to develop the site in exchange for $1,000.  The contractual agreement which [...]

Recent online campaigns by Facebook users, such as ‘Quit Facebook Day’ illustrates the uneasiness and increasing lack of trust of Facebook as a custodian of people’s private lives. At the end of April this year four US senators sent a complaint letter to Facebook raising the alarm about the growing exposure of users, the complexity and bias of their privacy settings. In July 2009 Canada’s Privacy Commissioners Office found Facebook in contravention of their privacy laws and a request for investigation of Facebook was made by the EPIC to the Federal Trade Commission on grounds of Unfair Deceptive Trade Practices.

Social media for the legal profession This is part 2 of the blog post ‘Would the Zappos Social Media Policy be Right for you?’ which I began yesterday.  As mentioned there I want to briefly touch on some of the issues law firms may want to bear in mind when devising their social media policies. [...]

In the most recent episode of the Facebook usernames-for-companies saga the organisation has reduced the eligibility requirements to 25 fans.  In our previous discussion of Facebook usernames we noted with interest the volatile minimum number of fans requirement, which initially stood at 1000, was reduced to 25, and later increased to 100.  The return to [...]

Head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, Jim Gamble, is not convinced as the main social networking sites lag behind in providing sufficient security for our teens against the occurrence of cyber-bullying (please see statistics at the end of the BBC article on this topic) or paedophiles . Mr Gamble has suggested the [...]

OUT-LAW commented recently on Facebook’s offer to companies to notify them of any trade marks that they wished to reserve prior to the rolling out of the username system.  It was hoped that this would act to counter cybersquatting. So, Facebook’s recent announcement to companies who pre-registered to protect their company trade marks from misappropriation, [...]

When gossip website TMZ leaked audio of Christian Bale’s tirade against the Director of Photography on the new Terminator Film, the story quickly spread throughout the Internet. There were countless blog postings, lengthy threads on forums, enough Twitters to make it the number 1 trending story, and even a YouTube dance song mashup. A Google [...]

In 2005 the book Word Freak and the subsequent documentary Word Wars showcased the zeal of Scrabble players. Scrabble aficionados joined the virtual world in 2006 when the Scrabulous application was added to Facebook. The application allowed Facebook users to play a game remarkably like Scrabble online. Scrabulous was developed by two Indian computer programmers, [...]

Aaron Greenspan’s continuing dispute with Facebook owner, Mark Zuckerberg has taken the form of a petition to cancel Facebook’s trademark registration in the USA mentioned here. The origins of the dispute lay in Greenspan ’s claims to have had the original idea for the social networking company. Two interesting points arise from this – firstly [...]