Seattle attorney Shakespear Feyissa was accused of attempted sexual assault while attending Seattle Pacific University in 1998.  He was never charged with a crime and naturally, not convicted.  But since the allegations were covered in the school paper’s online edition they are cached in Google and easily uncovered for anyone who searches his name.

SPU agreed to remove the story from the school paper but when administrators approached the student editors they said no way.  Chris Durr, editor of The Falcon Newspaper said:

We explained to them, if they wanted to start down a path of removing historical archives and pulling it from the public sphere, what they’re doing is censorship.  We basically said, sorry, we have principles in journalism that don’t allow us to put stuff in the memory hole and pretend it never happened.

(“Seattle attorney finds that the Internet won’t let go of his past”, Seattle Times, Aug. 15).

Benjamin Legeri, a/k/a BennyBaby, wants $1 million in damages, saying he wouldn’t have posted sketch and parody videos had he known he wouldn’t get a chance to be cut in on the ad revenue. (David Chartier, “YouTube user sues Google for his slice of the traffic”, Ars Technica, Aug. 15).

It will come as no surprise to anyone who surfs the Web much that many parked domains and 404 error pages on otherwise active websites carry Google keyword ads. (If you don’t know what a parked domain is, this is one; if you don’t know what a 404 error page is, here’s ours.) It might also seem reasonable that ads in these locations would be glanced at and even clicked on by some non-trivial number of visitors, who will often be looking for information on the relevant topic (that’s the idea behind keywords) and, frustrated in their initial search for content, might be ready to check out an advertiser’s substitute content. However, Boston lawyer Hal K. Levitte professes great dismay and consternation that 15 percent of the $887.67 he spent on his ad campaign went toward placements in such inferior spots, resulting in 693 clickthroughs and no actual conversions to prospect or client status. So he’d like class action status to sue for fraud and unjust enrichment on behalf of all other Google ad customers (Legal Blog Watch, Jul. 16).

P.S. From comments, reader J.B.:

Not sure what’s fraudulent here, when Mr. Levitte set up his ad campaign in Google AdWords he was given the opportunity to specify whether he wanted his ads to appear only on Google search result pages, or also in other places such as these parked domains.

In addition, Google gives you the option to pay less for clicks from these “inferior” spots, because as he found out, they often result in less-desirable visitors.

We in the technology world have a saying for people like Mr. Levitte: “RTFM”

In advertising; class actions; Google

• Federal judge: asking employee to get coffee not an intrinsically sexist act [Legal Intelligencer]
• Kilt-clad Montgomery Blair Sibley, at press conference, adds certain je ne sais quoi to tawdry Larry Sinclair sideshow [Sydney Morning Herald]
• Remind us why Florida Gov. Crist is supposed to be an acceptable veep pick? [PoL]. Also at Point of Law: Hill’s FISA compromise may end pending telecom-privacy suits; interesting Second Circuit reverse-preference case on New Haven firefighters.
• Virginia bar authorities shaken by charges that Woodbridge attorney Stephen T. Conrad pocketed $3.4 million in injury settlements at clients’ expense [Va. Lawyers Weekly; case of Christiansburg, Va. lawyer Gerard Marks ties in with first links here]
• U.K.: Local government instructs staff that term “brainstorming” might be insensitive to persons with epilepsy, use “thought showers” instead [Telegraph; Tunbridge Wells, Kent]
• Big personal injury law firm in Australia, Keddies Lawyers, denies accusations of client overcharging and document falsification [SMH]
• Will this be on the bar exam? Massachusetts law school dean eyes war crime trials culminating in hanging for high officials of Bush Administration [Ambrogi and more, Michael Krauss and I at PoL]
• “Just another cash grab”? New Kabateck Brown Kellner “click-fraud” class actions against Google AdWords, CitySearch [Kincaid, TechCrunch/WaPo]
• Former Rep. Bob Barr, this year’s Libertarian presidential candidate, is no stranger to the role of plaintiff in politically fraught litigation [six years ago on Overlawyered, and represented by Larry Klayman to boot]

And so the divorce case winds up generating massive demands for hard drive contents and other electronic discovery. Draconian spoliation sanctions, as exemplified in the Morgan Stanley-Perelman and Zubulake-UBS Warburg cases, make a potentially fatal trap for the unwary:

Defense lawyers complain that their clients often are forced to supply voluminous information at great cost with little benefit. And because there is so much more information potentially subject to a discovery order, the chances are greater that a client might violate the order by inadvertently deleting data.

“Does this enhance justice? Not usually,” said Tess Blair, a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius L.L.P., who heads the 1,350-lawyer firm’s electronic-data-discovery unit. “It becomes a weapon in many cases.”

(Chris Mondics, “Ediscovery profoundly changing lawyering”, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jun. 8).

• Screening firm hired by Beaumont, Tex.’s Provost Umphrey to do mass silicosis x-rays at Pennsylvania hotels is fined $80,500 for breaking various state rules, like the one requiring that a medical professional be on hand [Childs]
• Milberg Weiss’s special way of obtaining perfectly pliant clients — that is to say by bribing them under the table — harmed other class members by increasing fees but not settlement sums, suggests a new study by St. John’s lawprof Michael Perino for Ted’s project at AEI [Carter Wood @ PoL]
• Time for Texas to join many other states in requiring lawyers to inform clients when practicing without professional liability insurance [SE Texas Record; earlier here, here and here]
• Lawyers, in concert with their public pension fund allies, jockey for control of securities case against Bear Stearns [Gerstein/NY Sun]
• Another court, this time in California, rules that a screw maker can’t sue a law firm on the claim that its solicitation of potential claimants wrongly portrayed the company’s products as defective; amicus brief from state trial lawyers group and Sen. Sheila Kuehl says relevant provisions of state’s “SLAPP” law were “meant to protect plaintiffs groups, not companies” [The Recorder via ABA Journal; earlier case from Tennessee]
• Most lucrative Google AdSense words still dominated by asbestos and other personal injury practice, the top terms being “mesothelioma treatment options” ($69.10 per click, and the point of obtaining the click is not to provide treatment options), “mesothelioma risk” ($66.46), and “personal injury lawyer michigan” ($65.85) [CyberWyre via NAM "Shop Floor"; more here, here, etc.]

I’ve now succeeded in transferring the site’s pre-2003 archives to the new WordPress platform, which means they’ll be indexed along with more recent posts; no more having to do separate searches in each of two indexes. Moreover, I’ve gotten the old URLs of those archives to redirect seamlessly to the new. Coming up soon: getting the old URLs of the MT-based 2003-2008 archives to redirect to the new, as much as possible.

One unexpected result of the archive changeover: Google News interpreted the arrival of the archived files on WordPress as if they’d been newly published, which has (temporarily) much expanded our presence on that site. Fortunately, the archives are prominently marked as such, which should keep readers from mistaking them for recent reportage.

Also, Ted and I have been busy “tagging” a selection of recent and older posts. Tags display on the post itself, and those most used appear in a “tag cloud” toward the bottom of the rightmost column. Bear in mind that we’ve only made a small start toward tagging past posts, so if you follow the “California” tag, for instance, it will lead you to only seven California-related posts as of the moment.

Finally, the little gavel favicon in the navigation bar is back.

• Ninth Circuit, Kozinski, J., rules 8-3 that Roommates.com can be found to have violated fair housing law by asking users to sort themselves according to their wish to room with males or other protected groups; the court distinguished the Craigslist cases [L.A. Times, Volokh, Drum]
• Class-action claim: Apple says its 20-inch iMac displays millions of colors but the true number is a mere 262,144, the others being simulated [WaPo]
• U.K.: compulsive gambler loses $2 million suit against his bookmakers, who are awarded hefty costs under loser-pays rule [BBC first, second, third, fourth stories]
• Pittsburgh couple sue Google saying its Street Views invades their privacy by including pics of their house [The Smoking Gun via WSJ law blog]
• U.S. labor unions keep going to International Labour Organization trying to get current federal ground rules on union organizing declared in violation of international law [PoL]
• Illinois Supreme Court reverses $2 million jury award to woman who sued her fiance’s parents for not warning her he had AIDS [Chicago Tribune]
• Italian family “preparing to sue the previous owners of their house for not telling them it was haunted”; perhaps most famous such case was in Nyack, N.Y. [Ananova, Cleverly]
• Per their hired expert, Kentucky lawyers charged with fen-phen settlement fraud “relied heavily on the advice of famed trial lawyer Stan Chesley in the handling of” the $200 million deal [Lexington Herald-Leader]
• Actor Hal Holbrook of Mark Twain fame doesn’t think much of those local anti-tobacco ordinances that ban smoking on stage even when needed for dramatic effect [Bruce Ramsey, Seattle Times]
• Six U.S. cities so far have been caught “shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners.” [Left Lane via Virtuous Republic and Asymmetrical Information]

Updates:

• The Canadian Transportation Agency (as part of its regulation of airline ticket prices) has ruled that obese passengers are entitled to have two airline seats for the price of one, which will no doubt encourage further suits against the American practice. (h/t Rohan) One looks forward to the Canadian lawsuits complaining that an obese passenger wasn’t adjudged obese enough to get a free second seat. [Australian; Toronto Star; Gunter @ National Post; earlier on Overlawyered]
• Also in Canada, Ezra Levant defends his free speech rights against a misnamed Alberta “Human Rights Commission” over his republication of the Danish Muhammed cartoons. [Frum; National Post; Steyn @ Corner; Wise Law Blog; Youtube; related on Overlawyered]
• Alleged car-keying attorney “Grodner is now under investigation by the state’s Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, sources said. Commission officials declined to comment Thursday.” [Chicago Tribune; Jan. 4]
• “Life is short—get a divorce” attorney Corri Fetman parlays her tasteless billboard (May 10; May 8) into tasteless Playboy topless-modeling and advice-column gig. In the words of Alfred E. Neuman, “Blech.” On multiple and independent grounds. Surprisingly, Above the Law avoids the snark of noting that the lead paragraph of Fetman’s law firm web site bio includes a prestigious 23-year-old quote from a college professor’s recommendation for law school. [Above the Law; Chicago Sun-Times; Elefant]
• Wesley Snipes (Jun. 11; Nov. 2006) appears to be going for a Cheek defense in his tax-evasion trial—which is hard to do when you’re a multimillionaire whose well-paid accountants explicitly tell you you’re violating the law. (Remember what I said about magical incantations and taxes?) [Tampa Tribune; Quatloos]
• Accountant Mark Maughan loses his search-engines-make-me-look-bad lawsuit (Mar. 2004) against Google, which even got Rule 11 sanctions. (That happened in 2006. Sorry for the delay.) More on Google and privacy: Jan. 16. [Searchenginewatch]
• Bribed Mississippi judges in Paul Minor case (Sep. 8 and much more coverage) report to prison. [AP]

Reuters reports on a nuvo-media catfight — and just look who the cat drags in:

Google Inc. took a swipe at media conglomerate Viacom Inc., which is suing the Internet search leader and its video sharing site YouTube for $1 billion over “massive copyright infringement.”

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, speaking with reporters at a hotel bar at the 25th annual Allen & Co. moguls meeting, said litigation was the foundation of the company that owns the MTV Networks, Paramount movies studio, and video game developer Harmonix.

“Viacom is a company built from lawsuits, look at their history,” Schmidt said on early Friday.

He makes that sound like a bad thing!

• Google beats Perfect 10 in Ninth Circuit appeal over copyright suit over thumbnail images. (Earlier: Feb. 06, Jul. 05, Nov. 04.) [LA Times; WaPo; Bashman; Perfect 10 v. Amazon (9th Cir. 2007)]
• Judge thinks better over Brent Coon’s attempt to intimidate local press through subpoenas. Earlier: Apr. 24. [WSJ Law Blog]
• US Supreme Court throws out punitive damages ruling in Buell-Wilson case, lets rest of decision stand. Earlier: Jan. 4 and links therein. Beck and Herrmann also discussed the case in March in the context of a larger discussion of the appropriateness of issuing punitive damages against a company that relied on government safety standards in good faith. [LA Times; AP].
• Big LA Times piece on the still-pending Extreme Makeover suit, where a family seeks to hold ABC responsible for an intra-household dispute over the spoils of a reality show. Earlier: Mar. 4, Aug. 12, 2005. [LA Times]
• KFC may have won on trans-fats litigation, as David reported May 3, but they capitulate to Jerry Brown’s pursuit of Lockyer’s equally bogus acrylamide suit over the naturally-occurring chemical in potatoes (Oct. 05, Aug. 05, Aug. 05, May 05, Apr. 04, etc.). KFC will pay a nuisance settlement of $341,000 and will add a meaningless warning in California stores. (Tim Reiterman, “KFC to tell customers of chemical in potatoes”, LA Times Apr. 25).
• McDonald’s sued over hot coffee. Again. One of the allegations is that McDonald’s failed to secure the lid, which is a legitimate negligence suit, but there’s also a bogus “failure to warn me that coffee is hot” count. [Southeast Texas Record; and a Southeast Texas Record op-ed that plainly read Overlawyered on the subject]

• Whoops! Insurer’s lawyer backtracks and scrambles for cover after saying some Miami/Dade judges “are being paid off” [Daily Business Review; possibly related, scroll to mention of Miami near end]
• Climate’s different up there: Google and Wikipedia sued for libel in Canada over user-generated content [Rob Hyndman]
• Lawyers implicated in Ky. fen-phen scandal are owners of Curlin, horse that placed third in Kentucky Derby [Courier-Journal, Sun-Times, Sports Network, WSJ law blog]
• “As a lawyer, I hear stories about lawsuit abuse all the time,” but Judge Pearson’s pants suit takes the cake [Nasty Brutish & Short; also lively discussion at Digg]
• Ramps of gold: serial ADA-suit filers George Louie, David Gunther and others launch wave of sidewalk suits against Northern California towns [Contra Costa Times]
• $250 fine for releasing a balloon into the air in New Hampshire? Criminalizing nearly everything [National Law Journal; also Ayn Rand]
• Helpful, if scary: “12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs To Know” [Aviva Directory]
• U.K. lawyers ordered to pay back tens of millions of pounds in excessive fees earned for representing sick miners [Times Online Apr. 16, Apr. 25, Apr. 10; Telegraph]
• Did Rosie O’Donnell come out for loser-pays on ABC’s “The View”? Someone please get a transcript [Bill Boushka]
• Japan doesn’t furnish us with much material, but here’s one about magicians suing TV broadcasters for revealing secrets behind coin tricks [Above the Law]
• Sensitivity vs. sensitivity: female drummers allowed to sue over their (culturally authentic) exclusion from ritual drumming at Native American powwow [five years ago on Overlawyered]

In response to my post below about inadequate sanctions in the Econo Lodge case, Stephanie Mencimer asks how the costs of frivolous litigation can be so oppressive, how it can cost millions of dollars to defend against them, given that — in her view — the defendants can just hire paralegals to prepare boilerplate responses.

Well — as Ted points out in the comments to her post — I had said “thousands,” not “millions.” But the bigger problem with what she wrote is that she dramatically underestimates the burden and cost of litigation. We’ll put aside the fact that her proposal — to have paralegals file boilerplate responses — would constitute legal malpractice on the part of the defense attorney. Of course it’s cheaper when cases can be decided (as Mencimer suggests) “with no discovery, no depositions and apparently not even a court appearance” — although it’s not clear from the Econo Lodge case that in fact there were no court appearances. But other cases, even ones that are completely meritless, require a lot more before the defendant can be vindicated.

Case in point: Kinderstart v. Google. The complaint was yet another attempt to sue Google over its rankings of web pages for search results. (Another suit along those same lines: Mar 1) Only part of the case was frivolous (the federal judge awarded sanctions against the plaintiff on two points (PDF of sanctions decision), but the entire case was meritless, as the court ruled (PDF). Google is a private business, and the courts keep rejecting the notion that lawyers should decide how Google can rank websites. Every claim made by Kinderstart was resoundingly rejected; Eric Goldman has the gory details.

But even though the case was dismissed before discovery even began, that didn’t make it — contrary to the beliefs of so many anti-tort reformers such as Mencimer — quick. In fact, it took a full year to dismiss the case (and there’s always the possibility of appeal). So why, if it was such a loser, did it take so long? Because after the court dismissed it the first time, the judge allowed the plaintiffs to amend the complaint; in all there three versions of the complaint filed. Google had to respond to each one, and there were in-court hearings each time Google moved to dismiss the case. Google also had to file an anti-SLAPP motion, a motion to strike the complaint, and a motion for sanctions.

Google “won” this case, and even won a yet-to-be-calculated sanctions award. But in the end, it took a year and Google spent, conservatively, tens of thousands of dollars to do it, even without discovery. Now, I don’t expect every non-lawyer to realize how long and expensive the legal process is — but Mencimer holds herself out as a pundit on tort reform; you’d think she’d have a little more of a sense of how the system works.

(Previous mention of this case, Oct. 2006.)

A county judge in Texarkana, Ark., where the action happens to have been filed, has approved Google’s settlement of a nationwide lawsuit over advertisers’ losses allegedly attributable to “click fraud”, that is to say, non-bona fide clicks on their ads. “By settling claims made in the plaintiffs’ class-action lawsuit, Google will give advertising credits that are the equivalent of a $3.80 refund on every $1,000 spent in its advertising network during the past 4 1/2 years. No one will receive cash except the lawyers, who will split $30 million.” (”Judge approves $90 million settlement in Google click fraud case”, AP/San Francisco Chronicle, Jul. 28). Numerous class members had objected, calling the proposed settlement unfair and inadequate “because it includes poor calculations, excessive attorney fees and e-mailed class notices that look like spam.” Similar lawsuits “still are pending against other defendants, including Yahoo Inc.; Time Warner Inc.’s America Online; and Ask Jeeves”. (Amanda Bronstad, “Google ‘Click Fraud’ Settlement Criticized”, National Law Journal, Jul. 19).

Six of the eight most expensive Google AdSense search terms are for attorneys (the other two are for mortgage and loan refinancing), with “mesothelioma lawyers” topping the charts at $54.33. A regularly updated page can be found here. (CyberWyre blog, Mar. 23 (h/t Slim)). Earlier search-engine follies: Apr. 8, 2004; Nov. 18, 2004.

(“McDonalds coffee lawsuit” [sic] goes for $0.67, which is a shame, because the top ten links all refer back to ATLA’s propaganda on the subject. Perhaps if our blogging readers could link to our coverage…?)

Update: Clearly, there’s a lot of competition for that “mesothelioma lawyer” keyword, given the $54.33 price; this is because there is a lot of easy profit to be made on mesiothelioma cases by lawyers: there are so many defendants, and so many cases, that attorneys and defendants find it cheaper to settle for nuisance sums, which add up quickly to an automatic profit for the attorney, even if the case is tried and lost against recalcitrant defendants who dare to expose themselves to lottery litigation (cf. also POL Jun. 10, 2005). The interesting question is what market failure has occurred such that this gigantic profit is not being competed away by, say, offering clients a smaller attorneys’ fee. This is surplus that should be going to clients, not to Google. Is there collusion not to lower attorneys’ fees? If consumer advocates cared about consumers, rather than attorneys, we might see some investigation into the matter.

I’ve refused to publish a few comments. Reasons why in the jump.

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Because aggregating headlines, first sentences of stories, and (sometimes) tiny little thumbnails of pictures constitutes an outrageous trampling on the French news service’s intellectual property, it wants at least $17.5 million in damages. (”AFP sues Google for news aggregation”, PhysOrg.com, Mar. 20). We covered the issue Nov. 9.

“Perfect 10″ is an unsuccessful California pornography business that has branched out into the litigation business with the same results. The company is justifiably upset that disreputable pornographers are stealing their copyrighted photos for their web sites. (We know you’re shocked to hear that some pornographers are disreputable, but we call ‘em like we see ‘em here at Overlawyered.) But unsatisfied with the results of suing fly-by-night operators, they tried to sue the billing services these sites used. These suits were mostly shut down; a federal court held that billing services that aren’t responsible for web site content are not, well, responsible for web site content. (A billing service that did regulate content did not fare so well. Perfect 10 Inc. v. Cybernet Ventures Inc., 213 F. Supp. 2d 1146.)

Then Perfect 10 took on credit card companies Visa and MasterCard. The credit card companies noted that they processed millions of transactions a day, and could not do so economically if they had to be responsible for enforcing property rights of third parties, and compared it to a company “send[ing] a notice to the electric company supplying power to people infringing its rights and say ’shut them off.’” The Northern District of California threw those cases out.

With this track record, you’d think the media would be more skeptical now that the company has sued Google for providing a search engine with which someone can find web sites that infringe Perfect 10’s copyright, instead of giving company president Norman Zada an unrebutted platform, but the idea of a lawsuit over pictures of naked women is apparently too titillating to resist. Because, of course, a search engine shouldn’t just index the web, but should have intelligent spiders that test the propriety of the web sites indexed. Perfect 10 seems to be trying to get around this problem with their lawsuit by alleging that Google prioritizes search engine results for participants in its Ad Sense program and is lying to the public when it says its search engine results are objective. One wonders why Google doesn’t more prominently feature this benefit of sending them money, as well as about the Rule 11 basis for this allegation. Meanwhile, I guess we should be happy that Bo Derek never sued Perfect 10. (Wendy Davis, “Adult Publisher Sues Google For Copyright Infringement”, MediaDailyNews, Nov. 23; AP, Nov. 23; Lisa Baertlein, Reuters, Nov. 22; Chris Gaither, “Porn Firm Sues Google Over Photos”, LA Times, Nov. 20; Brenda Sandburg, “Strange Bedfellows”, The Recorder, June 7; Gretchen Gallen, “Perfect 10 Sues Visa/MasterCard”, XBiz, Jan. 29). Other Google lawsuits: Nov. 9, Aug. 9, Mar. 28.

Though a smash success with readers, Google News is still in “beta” status three years after its launch and has not attempted to become economically self-sufficient through the sale of advertising. “The reason: The minute Google News runs paid advertising of any sort it could face a torrent of cease-and-desist letters from the legal departments of newspapers, which would argue that ‘fair use’ doesn’t cover lifting headlines and lead paragraphs verbatim from their articles.” (Adam Penenberg, “Google News: Beta Not Make Money”, Wired News, Sept. 29). Update Mar. 21: Agence France-Presse sues Google.