Plaintiffs sued their bank alleging various claims under state law. The bank moved to compel arbitration based on various online clickwrap agreements plaintiffs had entered into.
One of the clickwrap agreements required plaintiffs to scroll through the entire agreement and then click an “Acknowledge” button before continuing to the next step. Citing to the case of Meyer v. Uber, 868 F.3d 66 (2d Cir. 2017), the court observed that “[c]ourts routinely uphold clickwrap agreements for the principal reason that the user has affirmatively assented to the terms of agreement by clicking ‘I agree.'”
Similarly, for the other relevant agreements, plaintiffs were required to click a box acknowledging that they agreed to those agreements before they could obtain access to digital products. Again, citing to the Meyer case: “A reasonable user would know that by clicking the registration button, he was agreeing to the terms and conditions accessible via the hyperlink, whether he clicked on the hyperlink or not.” By affirmatively clicking the acknowledgement, plaintiffs manifested their assent to the terms of the these agreements.
Curtis v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., 2024 WL 283474 (S.D.N.Y., January 25, 2024)
In today’s brand-conscious marketplace, legal agreements between businesses often contain clauses allowing for publicity of the agreement itself and use of each other’s trademarks. This practice of mutual brand promotion can lend credibility to the involved parties and also serve as a powerful marketing strategy.
Understanding Publicity and Trademark Use Provisions
Publicity provisions in a legal agreement permit the parties involved to disclose specific details about their agreement to third parties. This could involve a simple announcement about the partnership or a more detailed disclosure about the agreement’s purpose and scope.
Trademark use provisions allow parties to use each other’s trademarks, logos, or brand names. This could be in marketing materials, on products, or in other forms of communication such as websites and social media content.
Why Include Publicity and Trademark Use Provisions?
While the specifics can vary, there are several general reasons why parties might wish to include these provisions:
Brand Awareness: Such provisions can help increase brand visibility and recognition, particularly when partnering with a well-known or highly respected company.
Credibility and Trust: The ability to publicize a partnership or to use a trusted brand’s trademark can lend credibility and foster trust among customers and stakeholders.
Market Penetration: For companies looking to break into new markets, a strategic partnership with a well-known brand can offer a significant advantage.
Key Considerations
Before including these provisions in an agreement, the parties should consider several key points:
Scope of Use: The agreement should clearly define what aspects of the agreement can be publicized and how each party’s trademarks can be used.
Quality Control: Trademark owners will want to ensure that their trademarks are used in a manner consistent with their own quality standards and brand identity.
Duration and Termination: It should be clear when the rights to publicity and trademark use begin and end, and what happens upon termination of the agreement.
Approval Process: Typically, any use of the other party’s trademark or any public disclosure of the agreement would require prior approval.
Indemnification: The agreement should include indemnification provisions to protect against any legal repercussions from the use of trademarks or publicity statements.
Publicity and trademark use provisions can be powerful tools in a legal agreement, offering enhanced brand visibility, credibility, and market penetration. However, they must be handled with care, considering the scope, quality control, duration, approval, and indemnification issues that may arise.
A statement of work – often called an “SOW” – is an important part of a technology contract. Here are three things to keep in mind when you are drafting and negotiating one.
Accurately define the services
The first thing to keep in mind when negotiating an SOW is to accurately and comprehensively define the scope of services. This benefits both the customer and the vendor. The vendor will know the SOW sets out a finite task list. That will help avoid scope creep. The customer can look at the statement of work and see whether the deliverables match the agreed-upon specifications.
Leave the legal language alone
The second thing to keep in mind when drafting an SOW is to focus on the technical, business and commercial issues, leaving the legal issues in the body of the agreement untouched. That way you don’t unwittingly affect the risk profile of the overall engagement.
You will amend the statement of work
The third thing to keep in mind is to recognize that you are likely going to amend the statement of work, or enter into subsequent statements of work. So you should use a good form that will enable you to add on these subsequent documents.
If you are a social media influencer, or are a brand looking to engage an influencer, you may need to enter into an influencer agreement. Here are five key things that should be in the contract between the influencer and the brand:
Obligations
Payment
Content ownership
Publicity rights
Endorsement guidelines compliance
Obligations under the influencer agreement.
The main thing that a brand wants from an influencer is for the influencer to say certain things about the brand’s products, in a certain way, and at certain times. What kind of content? Photos? Video? Which platforms? What hashtags? When? How many posts? The agreement should spell all these things out.
Payment.
Influencers are compensated in a number of ways. In addition to getting free products, they may be paid a flat fee upfront or from time to time. And it’s also common too see a revenue share arrangement. That is, the influencer will get a certain percentage based on sales of the products she is endorsing. These may be tracked by a promo code. The contract should identify all these amounts and percentages, and the timing for payment.
So what about content ownership?
The main work of an influencer is to generate content. This could be pictures posted to Instagram, tweets, or video posted to her story. All that content is covered by copyright. Unless the contract says otherwise, the influencer will own the copyright. If the brand wants to do more with that content outside of social media, that needs to be addressed in the influencer agreement.
And then there are rights of publicity.
Individuals have the right to determine how their image and name are used for commercial purposes. If the brand is going to feature the influencer on the brand’s own platform, then there needs to be language that specifies the limits on that use. That’s key to an influencer who wants to control her personal brand and reputation.
Finally, endorsement guidelines and the influencer agreement.
The federal government wants to make sure the consuming public gets clear information about products. So there are guidelines that influencers have to follow. You have to know what these guidelines are to stay out of trouble. And the contract should address what happens if these guidelines aren’t followed.
About the author:Evan Brown is an attorney helping individuals and businesses with a wide variety of agreements involving social media, intellectual property and technology. Call him at (630) 362-7237 or send email to ebrown@internetcases.com.
Plaintiff was bound by forum selection clause found in online terms and conditions.
Plaintiff sued TripAdvisor and some related defendants (including Viator, a company that TripAdvisor acquired) for a number of torts arising from an ATV accident that plaintiff had while on a tour in Mexico that she had booked online through defendants’ website. Defendants moved to dismiss, or in the alternative, to transfer the matter to federal court in Massachusetts based on the forum selection clause found in the Terms and Conditions that plaintiff agreed to when she booked the tour. The court granted the motion to transfer.
To purchase the tour, plaintiff was required to click on a “Book Now” icon, directly under which the following message was located: “[b]y clicking Book Now and making a reservation, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to be bound by Viator’s Terms and Conditions and Privacy Statement.” The phrase “Viator’s Terms and Conditions” appeared in blue underlined text, in the form of a hyperlink, which directed the consumer to the website’s Terms and Conditions.
Viator’s Terms and Conditions included a forum selection clause, which, in relevant part, provided:
[T]his agreement is governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA. You hereby consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of courts in Boston, Massachusetts, USA and stipulate to the fairness and convenience of proceedings in such courts for all disputes arising out of or relating to the use of this Website. You agree that all claims you may have against Viator, Inc. arising from or relating to this Website must be heard and resolved in a court of competent subject matter jurisdiction located in Boston, Massachusetts.
The court found that plaintiff had agreed to the forum selection clause, and that the clause was enforceable. In determining whether plaintiff was bound by the clause, the court was guided by “fundamental precepts of contract law.” More specifically, under New Jersey law, “[a] contract term is generally binding if the contract has been mutually agreed upon by the parties, is supported by valid consideration, and does not violate codified standards or offend public policy.” W. Caldwell v. Caldwell, 26 N.J. 9, 24-26 (1958).
Plaintiff had argued that the Terms and Conditions amounted to an invalid browsewrap agreement, because she neither received reasonable notice of their existence, nor provided an unambiguous manifestation of assent. Primarily relying upon Specht v. Netscape, plaintiff argued that she was not bound by the Terms and Conditions, because Viator’s website was designed so that a user can use its services without affirmatively assenting to the web page’s terms of use. According to plaintiff, she was ultimately permitted to purchase the ATV tour without ever being asked to check a box or click an “I Agree” button, or even acknowledge that the Terms existed. Without proper notice, plaintiff maintained that enforcing the forum selection was not appropriate.
The court disagreed. It found that the hyperlinked terms on defendant’s website adhered to the requirements of reasonable notice. Regardless of whether plaintiff was required to scroll through the Check Out page, the hyperlinked Terms and Conditions were conspicuously placed directly underneath the “Book Now” icon. Based on its location, therefore, the court found that the hyperlink was not hidden in an area of the screen that plaintiff was unlikely to notice, but, instead, was clearly displayed in a section of the webpage that she needed to review in order to effectuate her purchase of the ATV tour. Stated differently, the hyperlink was placed within the immediate proximity of an icon that plaintiff was required to click, for the purpose of confirming her purchase on defendant’s website.
About the Author: Evan Brown is a Chicago technology and intellectual property attorney. Call Evan at (630) 362-7237, send email to ebrown [at] internetcases.com, or follow him on Twitter @internetcases. Read Evan’s other blog, UDRP Tracker, for information about domain name disputes.
We all know that clickwrap agreements are preferable to browsewrap agreements, assuming, of course, the objective is to establish binding contracts between participants in online transactions. Nonetheless, some online platforms still (try to) rely on browsewrap agreements to establish terms of service. That avoidance of best practices gives us situations like the recent case of Hussein v. Coinabul, LLC, in which a federal court in Illinois refused to enforce a forum selection clause in a “bitcoin to gold marketplace” browsewrap agreement.
Plaintiff alleged that he sent about $175,000 worth of bitcoins to defendants in June 2013, expecting to get gold in return. (Plaintiff alleges he transferred 1,644.54 BTC. The average exchange value in June 2013 was $107.82/BTC. You can get historical bitcoin price data here: http://www.coindesk.com/price) When the gold never arrived, plaintiff sued for fraud.
Defendants moved to dismiss, citing a forum selection clause contained in a browsewrap agreement found on its website. That purported agreement required all disputes to be heard in the state courts of Wyoming, and for Wyoming law to apply. The court denied the motion to dismiss, finding that the browsewrap agreement afforded plaintiff neither actual nor constructive knowledge of its terms and conditions.
The court observed that the hyperlink that directed users to defendants’ Terms of Service was listed among ten other hyperlinks at the bottom of each page. (See this Wayback Machine capture of the website from June 2013).
As for lack of actual knowledge, the court credited plaintiff’s allegations that he did not review or even know of defendants’ Terms of Service when he entered the bitcoin transaction. And there was no evidence to the contrary in the record.
And as for lack of constructive knowledge, the court found that the hyperlink, “buried at the bottom of the webpage – [was] without some additional act of notification, insufficient for the purpose of providing reasonable notice.”
Hussein v. Coinabul, LLC, No. 14-5735, 2014 WL 7261240 (N.D. Ill. December 19, 2014)
Customer did not like how software it had bought performed, so it stopped paying. Vendor sued for breach of contract, and customer argued that the agreement capped its liability at $5,000. Both parties moved for summary judgment on what the following language from the agreement meant:
NOTWITHSTANDING ANYTHING TO THE CONTRARY, THE TOTAL DOLLAR LIABILITY OF EITHER PARTY UNDER THIS AGREEMENT OR OTHERWISE SHALL BE LIMITED TO U.S. $5,000.
Customer argued that the sentence meant what it said, namely, that customer would not be liable for anything over $5,000. But the court read otherwise, holding that construe the language as excusing customer’s payment of fees would render those provisions calling for fees (which were much more that $5,000) meaningless.
The court observed that when parties use the clause “notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained herein” in a paragraph of their contract, they contemplate the possibility that other parts of their contract may conflict with that paragraph, and they agree that the paragraph must be given effect regardless of any contrary provisions of the contract.
In this situation, the $5,000 limitation language was the last sentence of a much longer provision dealing with limitations of liability in the event the software failed to function properly. The court held that the rule about “notwithstanding anything to the contrary” applies if there is an irreconcilable difference between the paragraph in which that statement is contained and the rest of the agreement.
There was no such irreconcilable difference here. On the contrary, reading in such difference would have rendered the other extensive provisions dealing with payment of goods and services meaningless, which would have violated a key canon of construction.
IHR Sec., LLC v. Innovative Business Software, Inc., — S.W.3d —, 2014 WL 1057306 (Tex.App. El Paso March 19, 2014)
Evan Brown is an attorney in Chicago, advising clients on matters dealing with software licensing, technology, the internet and new media.
I’m speaking about open source at John Marshall Law School’s 53rd Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference on February 27. More info here (warning – PDF!).
To prepare, I’m going over some important cases dealing with copyright licensing in general, that is, cases that deal with copyright licensing but not open source. In case you’re interested, here’s a writeup I just did of the classic case of Graham v. James, 144 F.3d 229 (2d Cir. 1998):
Graham contracted with James for James to develop a custom file retrieval program for use in connection with a CD-ROM compilation that Graham published. The two had an oral agreement whereby Graham would pay $1,000 to James for each new version of the CD-ROM, plus $1 for each disc sold.
After Graham and James had a falling out, Graham continued to use the program James wrote in subsequent versions of the CD-ROM. Graham had removed a copyright notice from the program’s source code, and did not pay the promised royalties. The two ended up in litigation against each other with James accusing Graham of infringing the copyright in the program.
After a bench trial, the lower court found in favor of James on the copyright infringement claim. Graham sought review with the Second Circuit. On appeal, the court vacated the judgment and remanded.
There was no dispute that a license agreement had been formed. Graham argued that at best, James could recover for breach of contract for the removal of the copyright notice and the failure to pay royalties, but not copyright infringement. James presented a number of arguments in an attempt to show there was no license that authorized the use.
One argument that James made was that Graham breached the conditions of the license agreement (and thereby used the program outside the scope of the license) by removing the copyright notice and failing to pay royalties. The court rejected this argument, holding that such activities were mere breaches of contractual covenants between the parties and not a failure to satisfy conditions of the license agreement.
Citing to Nimmer, the court easily held that one does not have a cause of action for infringement when one fails to attribute the author. So there was no infringement resulting from that.
Under the circumstances, the nonpayment of royalties was not the failure of a condition for authorized use. Under New York law, there is a presumption that terms of a contract are covenants and not conditions. In this case, James turned over the program for use before any royalties were paid. Contract obligations that are to be performed after partial performance are not treated as conditions, but as promises (i.e., covenants).
Another argument James made (which the court also rejected) was that assuming, arguendo, the nonpayment of royalties and the failure to attribute were breaches of covenants and not failures to satisfy a condition of the license, the breach of the covenant was so material that the contract was terminated by rescission.
But rescission does not happen automatically upon a substantial breach. The nonbreaching party must “manifest his intention to rescind within a reasonable time.” In this case, the record did not show that James rescinded the license to Graham.
Since James failed to show the absence of a licensing agreement or a failure to satisfy a condition of the agreement, the court vacated the copyright infringement judgment.
