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May 2001 Volume 2, Issue 5
Editors: Cherie W. Blackburn Robert W. Pearce, Jr. John C. McElwaine
For more
information contact 1-800-237-2000 Nelson Mullins has more
than 250 attorneys firm-wide, with over 25 attorneys having
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$3.9
Billion Internet Banking Fraud Busted The
International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) announced the successful
cracking of an online banking fraud schemeworth an estimated $3.9
billion. Victims of the
fraud were duped by bogus “get rich quick” schemes involving fake
documents. The ICC learned
of the fraud when financial institutions alerted them to offers of
European banking guaranties, worth between $50 million and $400 million,
at highly-discounted prices on at least 29 different Web sites.
Through the ICC’s Commercial Crime Services member network, the
bank guaranties were confirmed to be fraudulent.
Once this determination was made, the ICC notified Utah-based
50megs.com, the Internet Service Provider of the offending sites, and
50megs.com shut down the sites. After
the sites were closed, the matter was turned over to criminal
investigators. Four arrests
have been made so far in San Francisco and Switzerland, and more may
follow. Russian
Hacker Makes Allegations Against Four U.S. Diplomats According
to a story that appeared on the front page of Moskovsky
Komsomolets, a Russian newspaper, diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in
Moscow tried to hire a Russian hacker to break into the Russian Federal
Security Service’s network. A
20-year old hacker, identified only as “Vers,” said he was asked by
four officials at the U.S. Embassy to hack into the Federal Security
Service’s network to copy, alter and delete files.
Vers claims that the four officials offered him $10,000.00 for
the job. It is believed
that the four officials were among the 50 diplomats ordered out of
Russia in March in response to the United States’ expulsion of 50
Russian diplomats, following the Feb. 18, 2001 arrest of F.B.I. officer
Robert Hanssen for espionage. Spurned
Lover Jailed for E-mail Hijack Chief
Justice Yong Pung How ordered that Lim Siong Khee spend a year in a
Singapore jail after bombarding his ex-girlfriend with obscene e-mails
and hijacking her account. Lim, a freelance computer consultant, was convicted of
illegally accessing an e-mail account last year.
He began sending obscene e-mails to his journalist ex-girlfriend
and eventually hijacked her account after a two-week relationship during
a trip to Europe in March 2000. He
read her messages and used the account to send lewd e-mails to his
former lover’s friends. Chief
Justice How called Lim Siong Khee a “nasty piece of work.” The
New York Times
Settles with the N.B.A. The
New York Times and the
National Basketball Association have reached a settlement in a lawsuit
regarding who owns the right to sell newspaper photographs taken at
basketball games. The N.B.A.,
as well as other sports leagues, has argued that depictions of their
events are their intellectual property and subject to their rules.
In response, news organizations including The
New York Times, have stated that the pictures and information they
gather are their own property, and that disseminating them is their
right under the First Amendment. Last
spring, The New York Times began selling on its Web site a collection of
photographs from its archives, including five photographs of the 1999
basketball playoffs. In
July 2000, the N.B.A. filed suit against The
New York Times in the New York State Supreme Court, contending that
selling the photographs breached a contract on the back of the
journalists’ press passes. The
press pass label prohibits the use of information on pictures from the
games except for reporting the news.
To settle the lawsuit, The
New York Times and the N.B.A. agreed that The
Times would display an N.B.A. logo on its Web site and in any
advertisements for the photographs.
The Times also agreed
to include a link to the N.B.A. on its Web site. MicroStrategy
Spends $3.2 Million on Domain Names According
to its annual report, MicroStrategy Inc., a Vienna-based software
company, spent $3.2 million on Internet domain names in the 12-month
period ending Dec. 31, 2000. Among the domain names that MicroStrategy purchased are “glory.com,”
“hope.com,” “courage.com,” “wisdom.com” and “idream.com.”
However, things are changing at MicroStrategy.
In early April, the company was forced to slash its workforce by
one-third. The company’s
stock has plunged from $330 last year to $2.46 as of the second week of
April. Many companies snapped up dot-com addresses for investment
purposes on the theory that they were a scarce resource.
A spokesperson for MicroStrategy stated that the company still
believes the domain names are worth the price the company paid for them.
Although Micro Strategy would not disclose the amounts paid for
the names, according to GreatDomains.com, a market place for domain
names, “wisdom.com” sold for $475,000, “glory.com” sold for
$115,000 and “speaker.com” sold for $120,000.
GreatDomains.com’s listing does not identify the buyers and
sellers on these purchases and, thus, it is not clear whether these
prices refer to Micro Strategy’s purchases or earlier transactions
involving the same domains. Yahoo!
Soon to be Porn-Free Over
the next few weeks, Yahoo! plans to pull all pornography-related
products from its site. In addition, the company will stop selling ad banner to
sellers of pornography. This
decision came two days after Yahoo! confirmed that it was selling adult
entertainment products, such as movies on DVD and video.
Although Yahoo! did not directly own any inventory of these
products, it sold third-party merchandise through its service, or let
people auction products on its site for free.
Yahoo! has been under considerable scrutiny in the past few weeks
following the Los Angeles Times
report that the company was expanding its online sales into sex-related
videos and DVDs.
Hacker
Steals 46,000 Client Records A
computer criminal claims to have stolen personal information on 46,000
customers from Web-hosting company ADDR.com.
The stolen data includes account names, passwords and credit card
information. Several victims of the theft have reported finding thousands
of dollars in fraudulent charges on their credit cards in recent weeks.
The criminal claims to have broken into ADDR.com’s computers
and stolen the firm’s entire customer data base.
When contacted by MSNBC.com, he would only identify himself as a
26-year-old from The Netherlands, however, he provided evidence of his
claim by e-mailing a portion of the stolen data amounting to 50 records.
According to MSNBC.com, the data appears to be legitimate.
MSNBC.com attempted to contact each of the 50
customers, and learned from at least four of the customers that
fraudulent charges had been billed to their accounts. ADDR.com is a large Web-hosting company that supports nearly
50,000 Web sites across the Internet, most of which are small business
pages. It is particularly
popular because the monthly hosting fee of $7.95 is among the lowest
rates available on the Internet. Value
Line Sues Former Employee for Cybersmear Value
Line, Inc. has brought suit against a former employee for criticizing
the company and its chief executive officer on the Internet.
The company filed suit in Manhattan state court against a former
research analyst and 10 anonymous parties listed as “John Does,”
alleging that the defendants libeled and defamed the firm and its CEO
Jean Bernhard Buttner, who owns 86 percent of the company.
Value Line is a money manager and fund researcher based in New
York. Two years ago, the
company sued a former co-manager of its Value Line Aggressive Income
Fund, after he called Mrs. Buttner an “old dodo,” among other things
on an Internet message board. Legal
experts estimate that some 120 cybersmear suits have been filed across
the country. The only other
Wall Street firm known to have filed such a suit is Credit Suisse First
Boston, the investment-banking unit of Zurich’s Credit Suisse Group. First
Asian Language Web Dispute Settled A
United Nations panel has ruled in favor of the Japanese pharmaceutical
company Sankyo in the first dispute over an Internet domain name in an
Asian alphabet. An
arbitrator for WIPO ordered the transfer of the two-character Japanese
name which corresponds to “Sankyo.com,” previously registered by Zhu
Jiajum. Sankyo argued that it had been using its name for more than
100 years. The company
argued that Zhu Jiajum, who had registered the domain name, had also
registered the names of other Japanese pharmaceutical companies, a fact
which suggested that he was cybersquatting.
Domain names with characters of Asian languages, like Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean, were introduced late last year as an alternative
to English. Others,
including Arabic and Thai, are to be introduced soon. Government
Web Sites Violate Consumer Privacy Rules Sen.
Fred Thompson, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, is
concerned that the Web sites run by the federal government continue to
violate consumer privacy rules put into effect by the Clinton
Administration. A survey
being conducted by the Inspector Generals’ office has determined that
64 sites continue to use “cookies,” which are small files stored on
a Web site visitor’s computer that allow sites to recognize and track
wanderings on the World Wide Web. In
June 2000, the Clinton Administration sharply restricted the use of
cookies by federal Web sites, allowing their use only when an agency can
demonstrate a “compelling need” to gather the data.
The inspector general for the Department of Education reported
that half of the Department’s pages collect personal information and
lack the required privacy policy. Sen.
Thompson said in a statement, "The federal government should be
setting the standard for privacy protection in the Information Age.” Universal
to Buy EMusic for $25 Million Universal
Music Group has agreed to buy MP3 retailer EMusic for nearly $25
million. This news follows
Universal’s announcement that Universal and Sony’s
music-subscription joint venture, Duet, will be distributed by Yahoo!.
Now there is speculation that Universal will use EMusic as an
additional outlet for Duet. Although
EMusic shares traded as high as $35 at their height nearly two ago,
shares have recently been trading below $1. EMusic operates the “RollingStone.com” and
“Downbeat.com” Web sites, and has exclusive rights to a catalog of
about 700 independent record labels. Canadian
Government Institutes UDRP Proceeding The
Government of Canada is looking to the dispute resolution procedure
established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
to obtain the transfer of domain names that sound a great deal like the
names of its own agencies. After
a year of threatening action against David Bedford, the government has
filed a proceeding under the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP)
requesting the transfer of 32 domain names registered by Bedford,
including “GovernmentOfCanada.com” and “TheGovernmentOfCanada.com.”
Although eResolution, of Montreal, Canada, is one of four
organizations authorized by ICANN to settle UDRP cases, the Canadian
government has filed its proceeding with the United Nations-backed World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). WIPO has been a leader in developing the concept of common
law trademark rights and was the first to hand over domain names to
famous people who had not actually registered their names as trademarks.
In a controversial decision, WIPO ordered that the domain name
“Barcelona.com” be transferred to the Spanish city of Barcelona.
However, in a subsequent decision, WIPO refused to order the
transfer of the domain name “PortOfHelsinki.com.”
There are currently two cases related to the City of Brisbane,
Australia pending before WIPO. A
spokesman for the Canadian government said that what is really at stake
is the need for Web surfers to be able to visit an Internet address that
appears to be related to a federal government department and find
“legitimate information.” Survey
Finds Web Users Don’t Turn Down Cookies In
the Internet world, “cookies” are not edible, rather they are used
by Web sites to store information about visitors to the site.
Researchers at California-based Websidestory took a sample of one
billion page views from high-volume sites during the month of February.
They found that cookies were rejected just 0.68 percent of the
time. Websidestory’s
General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer, Randy Broberg, admitted that
some Web surfers may not be able to disable cookies in their browsers.
He stated, however, that such a minute percentage indicates that
cookies are simply not a big concern among most Internet users.
Although Broberg did not address the issue, it is possible that
Web users surrender to cookies because many things on a particular site
would not work if the Web user did not surrender.
Although most dot-coms are keen on cookies and crave the
information on consumers and visitors obtained, their use has raised
continuing consumer privacy concerns. EDUCAUSE
to Take Control of “.edu” As
a result of a recent decision by the Commerce Department, EDUCAUSE, a
non-profit university technology consortium, will become the new
gatekeeper of the Internet address for educational institutions.
EDUCAUSE replaces VeriSign as the assignor of Internet addresses
ending in “.edu.” VeriSign
retains the right to assign addresses ending with “.com,”
“.org,” and “.net.” As managers of “.edu,” EDUCAUSE will be responsible for
handling the registration of Web sites for colleges and universities.
The “.edu” domain category has been restricted to four-year
colleges and universities almost since its inception.
However, several community colleges had obtained the “.edu”
addresses before the restriction took affect.
EDUCAUSE plans to allow the rest of the community colleges to
obtain the “.edu” address.
Credits: Newsletter, ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law, Vol. 5, No. 8 (April 2001); The Register; Newsbytes; The Standard; The Washington Post; MSNBC; The New York Times; C-NetNews.com; SiliconValley.com; Techonology.scmp.com; Las Vegas Sun; The Register; The Wall Street Journal |
