Sunday, March 27, 2011

Online marketer makes costly legal mistake

[caption id="attachment_2763" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Are you disclosing material connections?"][/caption]

Here’s a recent case that your Internet attorney is probably talking about. There’s a company that sells how-to-play-the-guitar DVDs online that goofed up and got nailed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Because of the mistake, the business will fork over $2

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Friday, March 18, 2011

Is your Facebook friend wagging the dog?

[caption id="attachment_2751" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Social Media Fraud By The Government?"][/caption]

When I was a young Internet attorney, there was a movie called “Wag the Dog.”

As you can see in the trailer below, in the movie, actor Robert De Niro’s character manipulates the public for the U.S. President by creating a fake war using film footage shot by a Hollywood

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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Court says no to Twitter social media secrets

[caption id="attachment_2714" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Social Media Like Twitter Lacks Privacy"][/caption]

As an Internet attorney, I don’t find it surprising that courts are giving the government access to personal information associated with social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook.

This means lawyers are probably going to get their hands on the same type of informat

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Friday, March 11, 2011

Announcing a new way to protect your website

[caption id="attachment_2702" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="New Internet Laws Book Business Website Owners"][/caption]

Internet Laws Question
Last year, I asked business website owners what they’d like to see in a book that reveals what you can do to protect yourself without paying an Internet lawyer.

The reason for this question is that many startup entrepreneurs simply cann

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Announcing a new way to protect your website

[caption id="attachment_2702" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="New Internet Laws Book Business Website Owners"][/caption]

Internet Laws Question
Last year, I asked business website owners what they’d like to see in a book that reveals what you can do to protect yourself without paying an Internet lawyer.

The reason for this question is that many startup entrepreneurs simply cann

Read more ...

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Why your online reputation stinks

Prospective clients come to me as an Internet attorney to clean up a mess when their reputation online has been damaged by negative content posted on third party sites, such as consumer protection websites. Because I focus on growing lawsuit-free Internet businesses, damage control after-the-fact seems like a waste of time because the issue typically could have been prevented in the first place.

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Thursday, March 3, 2011

Does Google have the right to slap your website?

As an Internet lawyer, I’m hearing the uproar out there because Google has changed its search engine algorithms to penalize websites that deliver “low-value” content.

Some website owners claim that a Google slap is illegal because it hurts their businesses. Can Google legally knock your site down in the search engine rankings?

Absolutely.

Google is a publicly-traded company (not own

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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Inside the dark side of the product launch game

As an Internet attorney and online business owner, I get to analyze many product launches. There are good products out there, ethical product launches, and product launch managers who know what they're doing when promoting things that bring value to the lives of customers who buy.

Let’s use a hypothetical launch to show you how things really work on the dark side of product launches. We're ta

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