2007 was a good year (the highest in the last six years) for venture capital investments, and was especially good for Internet and technology firms.  According to this report - Venture Capital Investments Climb - $29.4 billion in VC fundings were made in 2007, over half of which were made in biotech, internet firms, and "green" technology.  $4.6 billion of the total was made to Internet companies.  In addition, more than $34 billion was raised by VC firms for future investments, so the positive trend of investments looks good for the foreseeable future. 

If you’re considering raising venture money for your Internet business, now is the time to calculate what you need, create a well-thought out plan for how you would use the money, and work on your pitch. 

Google has released Hot Trends, a new feature that provides an ever-updated list of the 100 top search terms on Google.com.  It will also provide a historical view of popular search terms.  If your online business is built around catching the wave of popularity, this may be a list that you want to watch. 

Yahoo has a similar tool, Yahoo Buzz, that adds a nice feature by showing you the relative movement of the search terms from day to day.

Information Week has an excellent article entitled “How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community” that is well worth reading if you, like many of my internet clients, have user interaction features on your website. It discusses the challenges of managing a community website or forum to keep out the jerks that we have all seen infect a message board from time to time…

According to this CNET article, there are now approximately 137 million active users of the Internet in China. Compare that to the approximately 232 million internet users in all of North America and you can see all types of new business opportunities now and in the future for Chinese audiences…

Of course, if you read this article, you may be discouraged from trying, at least with an ecommerce site. It still seems like there is a lot of opportunity for content sites…

The U.S. Copyright Office announced today six new categories of exemptions for groups of users that may now legally break certain software locks that protect DVD’s and other types of software. Previously, breaking these software locks would have been considered a violation of the DMCA provisions that prohibit circumvention of technology that protect copyrights. The six groups are:

1. college professors grabbing portions of DVD’s for in-class educational use (and therefore copying portions of a copy-protected DVD)
2. computer programs for obsolete machines that originally required the actual hardware or media to work properly (for old technology)
3. computer programs that required a dongle (piece of hardware) to work when the dongles are now obsolete
4. technology that allows blind people to circumvent software locks of copy-protected books so they can enable audio.
5. cell phone owners may break software locks on their handsets so they can use them with competing cell carriers; and
6. researchers may break software locks for the purpose of testing for security issues of vulnerabilities.

These exemptions go into effect on November 27, 2006 and will remain until October 29, 2009. Now get out there and start using these exemptions. Well, wait 5 more days…

This post on the blog Techcrunch discusses a cease and desist letter that was delivered to the blog owner by an attorney for YouTube.com. If you have never been on the receiving end of a cease and desist letter from a large Silicon Valley law firm, you can check out the actual letter after the blog post.

The C&D letter covers both trademark law issues and website terms and conditions contractual issues. As the blog author states, the terms and conditions on the website may have been different when he initially reviewed them and may be changed now (which most good T&C’s allow a site owner to do, with continued use after the change signifiying acceptance). However, my quick read through the current YouTube T&C’s shows a lot of inconsistent provisions, which is usually seen in user agreements that are prepared by someone other than an attorney…

Most of you probably know that Google’s Adwords program operates off of keywords that are selected by the advertiser to trigger the display of the advertiser’s ads. Some of these keywords can be the trademark of a competitor. Obviously, companies whose trademarks are used in keywords by their competitors aren’t too happy with Google allowing this practice.

Recently, a federal court in New York dismissed a case against Google brought by Rescuecom in which Rescuecom claimed that Google’s sale of Rescuecom trademarks as keywords to its competitors amounted to trademark infringement. The judge held that it was not infringement because the use of the trademark was not “visible to the public.” The entire decision can be found here.

This is still a fairly unsettled issue and courts have decided differently around the country (when Google hasn’t privately settled the cases, like it did with Geico here in Virginia). This is obviously a big issue for Google’s business model and worth keeping an eye on as other cases proceed around the U.S. and around the world.

Amazon.com announced that they are now offering TV shows and movies for download from a wide variety of content providers, including CBS, MTV and the Discovery channel (but not ABC or NBC, interestingly enough). The shows and movies are playable on computers and digital portables, but not yet on your TV. Obviously, true on demand viewing of all shows and movies on your TV screen (rather than just on computer or portable digital player) is the ultimate winner for this area. Comcast and other home cable companies should be able to deliver that before anyone else but the opportunity is out there.? And it should be interesting to see what Disney (ABC) and NBC offer, given that they elected to stay out of this deal.
To jump start the new area, Amazon is offering a free trial of the service. Well, sort of. It’s in the form of a $1.99 rebate…

This story discussed Apple’s recent efforts to curb the use of “Pod” by other companies, claiming that they have the exclusive right to use “Pod” because of its incorporation in the name of Apple’s IPOD product. The articles goes on to state that “Lawyers acting for Apple have in recent days written to at least two companies that use the word “Pod” asking them to drop the word from their product names, though the wider extent of the legal challenge remains unclear.”

One avenue that we may see is that Apple’s next step, after cease and desist letters, is attempts to grab the domain names of these companies that contain “Pod” in them. For instance, one of the companies that received a cease and desist letter from Apple is “TightPods,” who sells protective covers for electronics. They are marketing through the website TightPods.com and it would not surprise me if they receive a domain arbitration complaint under the UDRP - which they should fight as being overreaching, of course. Other companies using “Pod” will probably have the same problem…

The U.S. Copyright hiked most of its fees effective July 1, 2006. Included in these hikes is the fee to designate an agent for DMCA notice purposes. The new filing fee is $80.00, an almost 3 times increase over the old filing fee of $30.00. It’s still a bargain, though, for potential immunity from lawsuits (if you comply with the requirements of the DMCA, of course).

If you are interested in learning more about DMCA immunity, whether it may apply to your website/company, and how to comply with the requirements, contact us. We would be happy to explain how it all works.