alan levy

With the McCain campaign upset at how the DMCA (which he voted for) makes YouTube take down videos even if they might not have infringing content, we wondered if he would go beyond asking YouTube for special treatment, and instead push to fix the DMCA.

Paul Alan Levy writes "In a new post, I consider the Dozier-Riley controversy from a different angle.

Some ISPs knuckled under to Dozier's threats of trademark claims, while others stood up to him (or tried to do so).

We've written a couple times about lawyer John Dozier's highly questionable case against Ronald J.

Riley. As I've pointed out, even though I disagree with Riley on almost everything, and find that he regularly insults me and my family, Dozier's lawsuit seems highly suspect.

Most of the "lawsuit" is just a personal attack on Riley.

We've seen all sorts of cases of companies abusing trademark law over the years, but this latest one may be the most questionable -- and tragically, it may actually work.

It involves a site, Blockshopper that's basically a blog tracking publicly available info on real estate sales in certain neighborhoods around the country.

It recently had two posts about associates at the big law firm, Jones Day, buying property in Chicago, listing out the details, including the fact that the lawyers worked at Jones Day with their photos.

Paul Alan Levy writes in to let us know that following widespread press coverage of his challenge to the Republican National Committee to back down from suing CafePress over t-shirts that use the term "GOP" or show the RNC's elephant logo, that the RNC has in fact agreed to back down.

Apparently, a few years back, the Republican National Committee trademarked its elephant logo, along with "GOP", "Grand Old Party", and "Republican National Committee." And, here we are in an election year, and they're out trying to enforce those trademarks... against people who are trying to support the GOP and its candidates.

Paul Alan Levy the lawyer from Public Citizen who defended the bloggers in this case was kind enough to write in alerting us to another job well done by Public Citizen.

In this case, a NYC political blog site called Room 8 had some posts by an anonymous blogger criticizing some actions in the Bronx DA's office and the Bronx Republican Party.

Paul Alan Levy writes "In a new decision, a federal judge in Atlanta has rejected a claim by Wal-Mart that parody t-shirts and bumper stickers sold over CafePress.com, using the phrases "walocaust," and "wal-qaeda," violate its trademark.

Last week, the decision by a California court to have a registrar attempt to force Wikileaks offline got plenty of attention -- not the least of which was because the injunction had no impact on the site's IP address: 88.80.13.160.

Yet, much more troubling were the implications concerning why a judge in California would try to take down an entire site because of complaints from a Swiss bank about just a few documents on the site concerning a lawsuit in Switzerland.