• CNET News.com, Wednesday, April 9, 2008 9:30 AM

CNET's Anne Broache reports that recent court rulings may be chipping away at Web 2.0's protective armor, also known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Under the DMCA, Web sites are protected from being held liable for the content posted by their users. Such protection has helped user driven sites like MySpace and YouTube flourish. However, the rules become somewhat murkier when users start infringing on each other's intellectual property, or when social media sites use a customer's image or likeness in their advertisements.

In the case of a New Hampshire woman against the FriendFinder network, which operates several dating sites (including some sexually explicit ones), U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante refused to dismiss plaintiff Jane Doe's argument that FriendFinder invaded her "intellectual property rights" under New Hampshire law by republishing snippets of her profile in ads for the online dating network on search engines and third-party Web sites. In other words, Jane Doe's so-called "right to publicity"-an individual's right to control how their name, image or likeness is used commercially-was being violated.

Broache believes that Judge LaPlante's ruling could be problematic for Web companies because "rights of publicity" are different in every state, whereas the DMCA is a federal law. Also, as Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University says, "we don't know what rules are; we have no good case law" establishing a prerequisite for publicity rights on the Web.

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