Courts are increasingly being asked to decide when website operators are subject to personal jurisdiction, a potentially vexing problem, because websites generally lack a specific location.
The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California recently determined that a foreign company was subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts based, in part, on its social media activity.
This article considers recent appellate decisions in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada to consider the approach they have followed concerning the use of trademarks on the Internet and jurisdiction.
Now more than ever, courts are being asked to decide when website operators are subject to personal jurisdiction and can, therefore, be sued—a potentially vexing problem because websites can be accessed from almost anywhere on the globe.