Garage Party - A Fun Way to Reduce DWI

We had a garage party last night. With all the DWI cases I handle where people had a few drinks and then drove home, this idea came to me. Wouldn't it be nice if you could go somewhere, have a few drinks, and not worry about driving home?There's more to this. First, one of the motivators was that we now have a refrigerator in our garage. We bought new appliances. While we got rid of the others,

Guest Blogger

Happy to have a guest blogger on our blog. My associate David Cooper is now contributing. His first blog post is on suspended licenses.

Suspended License: Why you should care and act quickly

Why should you care? If you are driving in New York State and you have forgotten to answer a ticket or never heard back from the court you may be suspended. If your license or privilege to drive (for out-of-state drivers) in New York is suspended and you are stopped while driving in New York, there is a very good chance you will be charged with a crime, known as Aggravated Unlicensed Operation in

Loza's Paper on Violent Video Games Makes Top 10 List

SSRN has named my paper, "Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger: A Rising Ninth Circuit Case on the Constitutionality of States' Regulation of Minors' Access to Violent Video Games," to its Top Ten download list for constitutional issues.

The paper was published last year in The Computer and Internet Lawyer.

SSRN (Social Science Research Network) is a leading Web site for academic publications. It was co-founded in 1994 by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Jensen and other distinguished academicians. Today, it is a Top 40 academic research site. It touts more than 193,000 works in its electronic library with new journal affiliations coming online each week.

For more on SSRN from The New York Times, click here.

To see my SSRN Author Page and to view and download my legal publications, click here.

To request more information, please post a comment here.

Cybersquatting on Social Networks - Register Your Trademarks Today!

In lay person's terms, cybersquatting is the use of a domain name that infringes another's trademark rights.

An example: Company C has federally protected rights (read, a registered federal trademark) in the words "Coca Cola," and Company B abusively registers an Internet domain name, cocacola.net. Here, trademark infringement creates the likelihood that consumers will be confused as to the source of Company C's goods and services. In this example, a consumer may visit the cocacola.net Web site where she or he expects to see information about how to buy Coca-Cola beverages and other products. This confusion harms the federally-protected Coca Cola brand.

There is more to cybersquatting and trademark infringement, of course, but these are the basic ideas behind the federal Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and trademark protection generally. (Here's a USPTO backgrounder in its Report to Congress on the ACPA.)

Enter Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and other social networking sites.

A concern has developed where users may be creating social networking profiles with "names" that may cybersquat on others' protected brands.

Facebook just announced on Wednesday (June 10th) that it will begin providing access to vanity URLs tomorrow (June 13th, 12:01am). (This means that a user's Facebook URL can read <http://www.facebook.com/username>, instead of a random number-based URL.) These vanity URLs will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Facebook explains that this new vanity URL service will make it easier to locate FB pages. There is a serious concern, however, that this will open the doors for a flood of trademark infringers and cybersquatters.

To address this concern, FB is giving holders of federally-registered trademarks owners the opportunity to block requests for URL extensions using their marks.

To register your registered mark with FB, take this simple steps NOW before the vanity URL gates open just after midnight tomorrow:

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights.

2. Complete the simple form. (You'll need your trademark registration number at hand.)

3. You'll receive a submission acknowledgment email from FB.

4. FB will then examine your submission and, if approved, will withhold your mark from the public reservation process that begins tomorrow.

Be ahead of the curve and get your mark registered today.

If you need assistance, email me at ELoza@TechnologyLawGroup.com for Technology Law Group's brand of intellectual property and Internet legal services.

Why shouldn't I hire a lawyer to beat my ticket?

Saw something on the web that got me laughing. Back in '05 I did a post about lawyer marketing on the web. I critiqued some websites that claimed to help people with their tickets.Well, someone from speedticketbeaters -dot- com tried to post a comment on that old blog post. I don't allow these sites to promote themselves through my blog. But it was funny. The comment asserted, among other things,

Drunk Driving articles in the Wall Street Journal

Two good articles in the Wall Street Journal this week.Yesterday there was a discussion of drunk driver data by The Numbers Guy - Carl Bialik. It talks about statistics on the risks of driving at varying blood-alcohol content (BAC) levels. Bialik briefly mentions flaws in breath testing. Hopefully he'll do a more complete discussion in the future. The day before there was an article, Drunk

County Court update

A new milestone for our court directory - we now have 6000 courts in our database - see below.There's about 1500 in NY; 240 in CA; about 200 in the New England states (MA, CT, RI, VT and NH - we haven't done Maine yet); 600 in NJ; 168 in FL; GA has 500 and we're still adding more; 132 in Illinois; nearly 300 between MD, VA and DC; 220 in NC; roughly 600 apiece in Ohio and PA; and there's

Supreme Court Denies Review of Cyberspace Privacy Case

The United States Supreme Court has declined to take up an appeal in Sodomsky v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.


The original challenge brought by Sodomsky sought to suppress evidence of child pornography found on his computer.


Sodomsky had taken his computer to Circuit City to have a DVD burner installed. The technician doing the work encountered the files, including multiple video files, on Sodomsky's computer. The technician reported the matter to the authorities who then sought to prosecute Sodomsky.


On appeal, the Pennsylvania Superior Court reversed the lower court, which had held that the files were inadmissible.


The Court stated, "If a person is aware of, or freely grants to a third party, potential access to his computer contents, he has knowingly exposed the contents of his computer to the public and has lost any reasonable expectation of privacy in those contents." See 939 A.2d 363, 369 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2008) (emphasis supplied).

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed with the Superior Court's decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review the ruling.

Click here for today's Associated Press report picked up by the Mercury News and other publications. For the Superior Court's decision, click here, search using "Sodomsky," and see the opinion dated Feb. 8, 2008.

For Internet, intellectual property, and international legal matters and other excellent Technology Law Group services, please contact ELoza@TechnologyLawGroup.com.

New York Speeding Ticket - Piece by Piece

We added a new page to our website with a breakdown of a typical New York speeding ticket. Please post any comments or suggestions on this blog post.

Lawyer Websites and Spelling

I was just looking at a lawyer website and it had some animated graphics. Below is an image I clipped from the animation.Maybe it's just me, but I think clients are a bit less likely to hire a lawyer who spells poorly. Click on the image below and it should enlarge a bit and be easier to read. The key words should be "traffic" and "rights".