Internet — guides, checklists and articles
55 practical documents on Internet, newest first.
By document type
- Articles (16)
- Guides (15)
- Toolkits (12)
- Checklists (11)
- Forms (1)
Documents
- Domain Name and Digital Identity Toolkit: gTLDs, the Clearinghouse, and Recovery · Toolkit — A brand's digital identity spans domains, handles, app listings, and on-chain names, and only one of those layers has a real dispute system. This toolkit maps…
- Assessing and Defending a Section 230 Position: A Practitioner's Guide to the Three Elements, the Carve-Outs, and Early Dismissal · Guide — This guide is the working sequence for evaluating and defending a Section 230 position from the day a complaint arrives to the order on the motion. It starts…
- Promotion Launch Checklist: Structure, Official Rules, Registration, Platform Terms, and Winner Documentation · Checklist — This checklist takes a promotion from the marketing request to the closed file, with gates at the points where a mistake cannot be corrected later. It begins…
- Advising a Political Campaign or Advocacy Organisation: A Practitioner's Guide to Content Clearance, Likeness, Platform Rules, and Disclaimers · Guide — A working guide to advising campaigns, committees, advocacy organisations, and the vendors who produce their content. It opens with the operating environment…
- Content Moderation Checklist: Policy Scope and Drafting, Notice and Appeal Design, Enforcement Records, Transparency Reporting, and Jurisdictional Overlays · Checklist — This checklist audits a content moderation programme in the order the work has to be done, which begins with the decision record rather than with the policy. A…
- Online Terms and Consumer Contracts Toolkit: Formation, Arbitration, and Dark Patterns · Toolkit — An online contract is only worth what its formation record can prove, and most companies cannot prove theirs. This toolkit works the formation spectrum from…
- Endorsements, Influencers, and the Law of Paid Praise · Article — Paid praise is now a multibillion-dollar advertising channel governed by a body of law most of the people using it have never read. This article explains the…
- Clearing and Filing for Virtual Goods, NFTs, and Digital Collectibles: A Practitioner's Guide · Guide — This guide is the operational half of the Rightsy article on trademarks in virtual worlds, and it assumes you know why Jack Daniel's changed the expressive-use…
- Marketplace and Platform Liability Toolkit: Intermediaries, Sellers, and Accounts · Toolkit — Platforms sit between every brand and every infringer, and the law governing them is a patchwork of two safe harbors, one common law doctrine, and a great deal…
- UDRP vs. Lawsuit: Recovering an Infringing Domain · Article — Someone has your brand in a domain name and you want it back, which means choosing between a contract-based administrative proceeding that ends in about two…
- UDRP Complaint — Template · Form — This is a complete, filing-ready UDRP complaint with every variable bracketed, organized around the three elements a complainant must prove under Paragraph…
- UDRP Complaint Checklist · Checklist — A phased, filing-ready checklist for assembling and submitting a complaint under ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. It covers the threshold…
- Responding to a UDRP Complaint · Guide — You have been named as the respondent in a UDRP proceeding and you have twenty days to save a domain name you believe is legitimately yours. This guide is the…
- Filing a UDRP Complaint to Recover a Domain · Guide — This guide walks a trademark owner through recovering a squatted or infringing domain name under ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, from…
- Cybersquatting and the ACPA · Article — The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125(d), gives a trademark owner something no arbitration panel can give: a federal judgment,…
- UDRP vs. Federal Lawsuit: Picking the Right Weapon for Domain Disputes · Article — Someone registered your brand as a domain, and you have two real choices: a UDRP complaint that can move the name in about sixty days for a four-figure fee, or…
- The Twenty-Six Words and Their Limits: Section 230, Platform Immunity, and What It Never Covered · Article — Section 230 is twenty-six words of statutory text that decide whether a platform case ends at the pleadings or costs seven figures, and almost every published…
- Running a Compliant Promotion: A Practitioner's Guide to Official Rules, Registration, Bonding, Prizing, and Winner Verification · Guide — This guide runs a promotion from the first email to the closed file, in the sequence the work actually has to happen. It starts with the four intake questions…
- Nobody Cleared the Soundtrack: Political Campaigns, Advocacy Media, and the Rights Behind the Message · Article — Political and advocacy media is produced at speed, under pressure, by people whose first concern is the message. The rights underneath it are the same rights…
- Running a Content Moderation Programme: A Practitioner's Guide to Policy Drafting, Appeals, Transparency, and Regulatory Exposure · Guide — This guide is for counsel building or repairing a content moderation programme. It is organised around the observation that legitimacy in this function comes…
- Platform Liability and Section 230 Toolkit · Toolkit — Section 230 is narrower than its critics assume and broader than most complaints allow for, and the difference between those two propositions decides whether a…
- Platform Account Risk Checklist: Ownership, Verification, Backups, and Appeal Readiness · Checklist — Every business that depends on a platform is one automated decision away from a very bad month, and the work that determines the outcome happens before the…
- Trademarks in Virtual Worlds: NFTs, Digital Goods, and the Rogers Line After Jack Daniel's · Article — When a digital artist minted a hundred images of fur-covered handbags and called them MetaBirkins, he produced the first jury verdict in American trademark law…
- Keyword Advertising Compliance and Enforcement Checklist · Checklist — This checklist runs a paid-search trademark matter from intake to docketing in eleven phases, each a set of concrete actions rather than principles. It starts…
- Free to Enter, Expensive to Run: Sweepstakes, Contests, and the Law of Promotions · Article — A promotion is a lottery unless the organizer removes one of three elements, and running an illegal lottery is a criminal exposure that ordinary marketing…
- Domain Portfolio Checklist: Registration, Renewal, Monitoring, and Recovery · Checklist — Fifteen phases that take a domain portfolio from an unknown pile of registrations to a controlled program with an enforcement calendar. The order is deliberate…
- Deciding What Stays Up: Content Moderation, Platform Policy, and the Rules Nobody Voted For · Article — Every platform that hosts user content becomes a private regulator. The rules it writes are enforced against people who never agreed to them in any meaningful…
- Managing Platform Account Risk: A Practitioner's Guide to Verification, Appeals, and Continuity · Guide — This guide is the operational companion to the article on platform suspensions, and it is organized the way the work actually happens: what to build before…
- Website and App Launch Legal Checklist: IP, Terms, Privacy, and Compliance · Checklist — This checklist takes a website or mobile app from naming to the post-launch docket in ten phases and roughly 110 concrete actions, each one a filing, a…
- Running a Keyword and Paid-Search Trademark Program: A Practitioner's Guide to Monitoring, Complaints, and Enforcement · Guide — This guide is the operating manual for a paid-search trademark program, built around sixteen numbered stages that run from setting the internal rule to closing…
- Online Terms Enforceability Checklist: Assent Flow, Notice Design, Modification, Arbitration, and Evidence of Acceptance · Checklist — This checklist establishes whether a company's online terms can actually be enforced, and then builds the capability where they cannot. It opens with the…
- Online Brand Protection Toolkit: Domains, Marketplaces, Platforms, and Search Ads · Toolkit — Online brand abuse arrives on six surfaces at once — domains, marketplaces, hosted platforms, paid search, social handles, and the gray channel — and each…
- Building a Domain Name Portfolio and Enforcement Program: A Practitioner's Guide to Sunrise, Claims, URS, and Recovery · Guide — This guide builds a domain program from an audit to an enforcement calendar, and it is organized around the finding that most domain loss is administrative…
- Content Liability Checklist: Pre-Publication Review, Source and Substantiation Records, Retraction and Correction Handling, Anti-SLAPP Assessment, and Insurance Tender · Checklist — This checklist audits the content liability position of a publisher, newsletter, research firm, or review business in the order the work has to be done. It…
- When the Platform Turns You Off: Account Suspension, Verification, and Brand Presence · Article — A brand can lose its entire online presence in an afternoon, and the law offers less protection than most people assume. Terms of service are contracts drafted…
- Content Moderation and Platform Policy Toolkit: Rules, Appeals, Transparency, and Regulators · Toolkit — Content moderation began as a customer service function and became a regulated activity, and most platforms are still operating processes designed for the…
- Buying a Competitor's Name: Keyword Advertising and the Death of Initial Interest Confusion · Article — Buying a competitor's trademark as a search keyword is lawful in most of the United States, and this article traces the two questions every keyword case turns…
- Launching a Website or App Without Legal Debt: A Practitioner's Guide to the Pre-Ship Legal Stack · Guide — This guide sequences the legal work that has to happen before a website or app ships, as fifteen numbered stages on a T-minus calendar running from six months…
- Building Terms of Service That Survive a Motion to Compel: A Practitioner's Guide to Assent Design, Notice, Modification, and Records · Guide — This guide takes a company from a terms of service that cannot be enforced to one that can, and it is written for the lawyer who will have to sign the…
- After .COM: New gTLDs, the Trademark Clearinghouse, and the Modern Domain Portfolio · Article — The domain name system stopped being a list of .COM registrations more than a decade ago, and most corporate domain strategies never caught up. This article…
- Political Campaign and Advocacy Media Toolkit: Clearance, Likeness, Platforms, and Disclaimers · Toolkit — A campaign advertisement is assembled at speed, from other people's material, by an organisation that will disband after the election. It is then published to…
- Managing Defamation and Content Liability: A Practitioner's Guide to Pre-Publication Review, Retraction, Anti-SLAPP, and Insurance · Guide — This guide is for counsel building a content liability programme for a publisher, newsletter, research firm, review site, or any business whose product is…
- Virtual Goods and Digital Brand Toolkit: NFTs, Game Items, and Online Identity · Toolkit — A brand that exists only in physical goods now has an infringement problem in places it never sold anything, and the doctrine governing those places is a mix…
- Running an E-Commerce Counterfeit Enforcement Program: A Practitioner's Guide to Test Buys, TROs, Asset Freezes, and Platform Takedowns · Guide — This guide is the operational half of the Rightsy article on Schedule A litigation, and it treats litigation as the last of eight layers rather than the first.…
- Defamation and Content Liability Toolkit: Review, Retraction, Anti-SLAPP, and Coverage · Toolkit — Copyright tells a publisher what it may reproduce. It says nothing about the far larger risk of being sued for what a piece actually says. This toolkit…
- The Legal Layers of a Website: IP, Contracts, Privacy, and the DMCA Before You Ship · Article — A website or app is not one legal object but five stacked layers, and each layer answers to a different body of law. This article maps what is actually…
- Terms That Actually Bind: Online Contract Formation, Arbitration Clauses, and Why Courts Refuse to Enforce Your Terms of Service · Article — A company's terms of service are worth exactly as much as its ability to prove a particular user agreed to a particular version on a particular day, and most…
- Website and App Launch IP Toolkit: The Pre-Ship Legal Stack · Toolkit — This toolkit is the curated route through everything Rightsy publishes on getting a website or mobile app legally ready to ship, organized as the nine…
- The Sentence That Costs You: Defamation, Publisher Risk, and the Liability That Copyright Does Not Cover · Article — Content businesses spend their legal budgets on copyright and get sued for defamation. The two risks look similar from a distance and behave nothing alike:…
- Keyword Advertising, SEO, and Search Marketing Toolkit · Toolkit — Search is where most American trademark disputes now happen, and almost none of them resolve the way clients expect. This toolkit maps the whole subject — the…
- Platform Content Liability Checklist: Section 230 Elements, Carve-Outs, Moderation Records, and Escalation · Checklist — This checklist runs the platform-liability posture end to end, in the order the work should actually be done - before a complaint arrives, and again the week…
- Building an Influencer and Endorsement Compliance Program: A Practitioner's Guide to Disclosures, Contracts, and Enforcement · Guide — This guide is the operational half of the Rightsy article on endorsement law, and it assumes you know what a material connection is. It builds a working…
- Schedule A Defendants: Mass Joinder, Frozen Accounts, and the Rise of the SAD Scheme · Article — A single complaint names four hundred anonymous online sellers, is filed under seal, and produces an ex parte order within days that freezes every one of their…
- Campaign and Advocacy Content Checklist: Music and Footage Clearance, Likeness and Endorsement Records, Parody and Fair Use Assessment, Platform and Disclaimer Compliance, and Takedown Response · Checklist — A ten-phase working checklist for campaigns, committees, advocacy organisations, and the vendors who produce their content. Phase one sets the four standing…
- Promotions and Advertising Compliance Toolkit: Sweepstakes, Claims, and Substantiation · Toolkit — Promotions and advertising sit at the intersection of criminal lottery statutes, federal consumer protection law, self-regulatory review, and competitor…