Search

In the article, the author discusses website accessibility law issues under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and how to address them. ADA aims to eliminate discrimination based on disabilities. Also cited are the rapid rise of federal lawsuits due to violations of ADA's Title III and the efforts by foreign governments and standard-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to ensure internet accessibilityfor all users.

Background: Parents of children with food allergies (CwFA) experience reduced quality of life (QoL) and may have reduced access to in-person interventions in the COVID-19 pandemic. This trial developed and evaluated an online, self- help, information provision website, aimed at improving QoL in parents of CwFA. Methods: In a single-blinded, randomised controlled trial (RCT), participants were randomised to either receive access to the website or a waiting-list control. At baseline, post- intervention (week 4) and follow-up (week 8), measures of parental food allergy-related QoL, depression, anxiety, stress, intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and self- efficacy were obtained. Results: A total of 205 participants were randomised; 97% were females, 91% white and 78% educated ≥ degree level, with a mean age of 38.95 years (SD = 6.89). 44.9% (n = 92) were retained at follow-up. The arms did not significantly differ on any outcome at any time point. For a sub-group of participants above the clinical cut- off for depression at baseline, the intervention may have improved QoL. Participants reported the website content as useful and accessible, but accessed it infrequently. In baseline data, IU and self-efficacy were significantly associated with QoL. Conclusion: While the COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged greater provision of online interventions, our RCT suggests this particular website is not suitable for this population in general, although future research could examine its efficacy for depressed parents of CwFA, to increase confidence that the sub-group finding was not a Type 1 error. The baseline data suggest IU and self-efficacy remain potential proximal targets for intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN TODAY'S WORLD, WE INTERACT AND COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER INSTANTANEOUSLY THROUGH THE CLICK OF A BUTTON. WITH THE INTERNET, INFORMATION HAS NEVER BEEN MORE READILY AVAILABLE THAN IT IS NOW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Turkish Studies - Social Sciences is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA) and the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice can solve predatory litigation. It mentions increase in website accessibility lawsuits where plaintiffs allege violations of Title III of the ADA. It also mentions DOJ promulgate regulations in which the level of website compliance will depend upon the website's intended use and website accessibility standards.

In this study, we ask what drives the success or failure of various supply-side anti-piracy enforcement actions such as piracy website blocking. We do this in the context of three court-ordered events affecting consumers in the United Kingdom: We first study Internet Service Providers’ blocking of 53 video piracy sites in 2014 and of 19 piracy sites in 2013, and we then study the blocking of a single dominant site, “The Pirate Bay,” in 2012. We show that blocking 53 sites in 2014 caused treated users to decrease piracy and to increase their usage of legal subscription sites between 7% and 12%. It also caused an increase in new paid subscriptions. We find similar results for the blocking of 19 piracy sites in 2013. However, blocking a single site in 2012 caused no increase in usage of legal sites but instead caused users to increase visits to other unblocked piracy sites and VPN sites. We find evidence that increased search and learning costs associated with piracy drive the effectiveness of blocking multiple sites rather than just one primary site. This suggests that to increase legal IP use when faced with a dominant piracy channel, the optimal policy response must block multiple channels of access to pirated content, a distinction that the current literature has not made clear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As news publishers search for business models that can sustain professional journalism, other online media companies (e.g., Netflix and Spotify) have been remarkably successful at attracting subscribers. One possible consequence is that subscribers to these services will also be more willing to pay for online news because they have become used to the idea of paying for online media. Alternatively, it could be that people who pay for online media feel they have less time and money to spend on online news. Using survey data from six countries, we found (1) a positive individual-level association between paying for any form of online media (e.g., films, music, books, software, and premium information access) and paying for online news and (2) a positive association between paying for entertainment media specifically and paying for online news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information displayed on an e-commerce site can be used not just by the intended customers but also by competitors. While retailers enhance service quality by linking inventory systems to Web servers and making stockout information available in real time, that stockout information could also be used by competitors in determining their prices on current stocks. In this paper, we examine the effect of such proactive use of information in the setting of e-commerce retailing where duopoly retailers set their prices of a commodity that is in short supply. We show that when customer reservation value is relatively high and retailers are differentiated in fill rate, both retailers choose the dynamic pricing strategy in equilibrium. By investing in Web scraping technology, retailers automatically monitor each other's stock status and dynamically adjust prices contingent on rival's stock availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) website.

The article explores the tension between the burden that undefined website accessibility standards place on private businesses and the need for disabled Americans to have full access to websites. It mentions overview of Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and how Title III relates to website accessibility standards. It also explores the burden businesses face trying to comply with inconsistent standards.

Although providing accessible online services to people with disabilities is a legal requirement in the U.S for the federal government and highly recommended for other government agencies, severe accessibility issues persist on Egovernment portals. One potential cause of this problem is that the government lacks strong incentives to adopt a higher accessibility standard because people with disabilities constitute a small proportion of E-government users. By demonstrating that website accessibility is positively associated with usability, this study provides a potential solution to incentivize the government to adopt a higher accessibility standard. To test the relationship between accessibility and usability, 342 county government online portals were selected by a stratified sampling method. The conformance of the homepage of the websites to the WCAG 2.0 accessibility standard was evaluated using an automated tool. Then, an 18- item heuristic checklist was assembled based on prior works and used to assess the usability of the websites. After controlling for the potential confounding factors such as broadband availability and county budget, the correlation between the usability and accessibility scores was tested. The analysis shows a significant positive relationship exists between the usability and accessibility scores. This positive relationship suggests that improving the accessibility could also enhance the usability of websites. As a result, the online experience of non-disabled users could also be improved. The finding of the study implies that web accessibility could be approached and framed from a different perspective: it does not only benefits users with disabilities but also general users. This positive relationship could be leveraged to give the government more incentives to make E-government portals more accessible to people with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Irish Rowing Archives, a digital collection of historical materials related to Irish rowing, founded by Kieran Kerr. The collection started as Kerr's project to digitize his collection of regatta programs, which he shared with similarly minded friends. The article also discusses the history of rowing in Ireland, the lack of a central repository for historical materials, and Kerr's efforts to create a website, database, and forum to share the materials.

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including accessibility and disability laws that govern websites in the U.S., the design of digital maps, and the accessibility of websites by the U.S. Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMCs).

Using interactive digital maps is now common practice for most universities. Increasingly, more users are introduced to their academic workplaces through online content such as Google Street View and virtual tours. Students with disabilities depend on environmental information to navigate the barriers they face on campus. While most webmasters for postsecondary institutions in the United States know their legal obligations for accommodation in the delivery of web content, legal conformance does not necessarily reflect awareness for social or spatial considerations in the design of campus digital maps. This study discusses an accessibility audit and content analysis of these interactive maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that business and professional communication practitioners, instructors, and students, besides becoming better informed about the legal context of website accessibility, should also become more aware of the ethical considerations of creating digital communication products that are inherently accessible for people with disabilities. Through a detailed review of the most important legal cases in the United States and discussion of ethical considerations concerning website accessibility for the disabled, we provide possible entrance points that will help instructors bring ethical considerations into the discussion of website accessibility. We urge instructors to regularly include disability in discussions of accessibility cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that internet infrastructure deployment is progressing at a rapid pace in the African continent. A flurry of recent research has quantified this, highlighting the expansion of its underlying connectivity network. However, improving the infrastructure is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to exploit it. This article measures the availability and utilisation of web infrastructure in Africa. Whereas others have explored web infrastructure in developed regions, we shed light on practices in developing regions. To achieve this, we apply a comprehensive measurement methodology to collect data from a variety of sources. We first focus on Google to reveal that its content infrastructure in Africa is, indeed, expanding. That said, we find that much of its web content is still served from the US and Europe, despite being the most popular website in many African countries. We repeat the same analysis across a number of other regionally popular websites to find that even top African websites prefer to host their content abroad. To explore the reasons for this, we evaluate some of the major bottlenecks facing content delivery networks (CDNs) in Africa. Amongst other factors, we find a lack of peering between the networks hosting our probes, preventing the sharing of CDN servers, as well as poorly configured DNS resolvers. Finally, our mapping of middleboxes in the region reveals that there is a greater presence of transparent proxies in Africa than in Europe or the US. We conclude the work with a number of suggestions for alleviating the issues observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web content filtering is one among many techniques to limit the exposure of selective content on the Internet. It has gotten trivial with time, yet filtering of multilingual web content is still a difficult task, especially while considering big data landscape. The enormity of data increases the challenge of developing an effective content filtering system that can work in real time. There are several systems which can filter the URLs based on artificial intelligence techniques to identify the site with objectionable content. Most of these systems classify the URLs only in the English language. These systems either fail to respond when multilingual URLs are processed, or over-blocking is experienced. This paper introduces a filtering system that can classify multilingual URLs based on predefined criteria for URL, title, and metadata of a web page. Ontological approaches along with local multilingual dictionaries are used as the knowledge base to facilitate the challenging task of blocking URLs not meeting the filtering criteria. The proposed work shows high accuracy in classifying multilingual URLs into two categories, white and black. Evaluation results conducted on a large dataset show that the proposed system achieves promising accuracy, which is on a par with those achieved in state-of-the-art literature on semantic-based URL filtering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify antecedents of e-finance continuance intention with Alibaba’s Yu’E Bao as an example.Design/methodology/approach An online questionnaire was used to collect the data (n=293), and partial least squares structural equation modeling was employed for data analysis. Four e-finance features (perceived reputation, website quality, e-finance familiarity and situational normality) are introduced with trust acting as a moderator between the users’ satisfaction and continuance intention to use an e-finance platform.Findings The results find that website quality, familiarity and situational normality can influence perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU). PEOU and PU, together with reputation, are positively associated with confirmation which further leads to satisfaction. The positive effects that satisfaction and trust have on e-finance continuance intention are confirmed, and trust is found to be a significant moderator on the relationship between satisfaction and continuance intention.Practical implications The findings can be used to guide e-finance providers to improve their platform design and services to retain users.Originality/value This study combines the theory of trust, Technology Acceptance Model and Expectations Confirmation Theory to investigate the factors that influence the continuance intention in the context of e-finance in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the enforcement of California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) 2018 in the U.S. business enterprises. Topics discussed include data protection law of California, importance of consumer data protection, laws on data exchanges in the region and website access policies over there.

This study discusses the importance of the internet to improve the competitive edge of Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Ekonomi Inaba (Inaba School of Business) Bandung compared with other universities. The STIE Inaba Bandung's website www.inaba.ac.id serves as a communication medium to provide information for students, lecturers, and the general public. This research adopted a survey method to analyse the effects of website design and information quality on user satisfaction. A total of 39 questionnaires were distributed to 2016 first-semester postgraduate students from Management Studies. A quantitative method by using structural equation model, partial least square SEM - PLS, was used to analyse the data. Findings showed that website design and quality of information had a positive effect on user satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Romanian Case Law Review / Revista Română de Jurisprudenţă is the property of Universul Juridic Publishing House and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study aims to determine the effect of political competition, local government's size, local government's financial independency, audit opinion, and complexity of government to the availability and accessibility of regional financial information (IKD) on the official website of the local government. The measurement of the availability of IKD used component total of LKPD and APBD 2015, while the measurement accessibility of IKD used index of IKD. The population of this study is all of local governments on Java Island that consist of regency government, and district government. The amount of local governments is 119. To collect the data, the writer took 91 local governments from the population as the sample by using Purposive Sampling. The writer also used documentation technique to collect data. Research data analysis uses descriptive analysis statistical and multiple regression analysis with SPSS version 21. The result of this research showed that political competition and audit opinion gives effect to IKD availability on the first research model. The second research model results are political competition and complexity of government gives effect to regional financial information accessibility. The conclusion of this study explain political competition, audit opinion and government complexity affect the availability and accessibility of IKD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use and continuous use of the website in the developed countries universities are predominant, and the developing countries universities are heightening their effort in the aspect of education technology. The reason why one university website is better than the other concerning quality and accessibility is the focus of this study and this prompt evaluation of 141 Universities in Nigeria across the Federal, State, and the Private ownership. We opted for a hybrid approach to cover the gap in the previous studies. WebQual and SITEQUAL as a framework is adopted based on the web analytical tools. The study contributes theoretically by combining two website quality theories to explain the inhibitors, improvement, quality and future updates of Nigeria Universities websites based on ease of use, processing speed, aesthetic design, interactive responsiveness, entertainment, trust and usefulness and come up with a new WebFUQII model. The contributes to methodology by using web diagnostic hybrid tools that gives more explanatory power. The study also gives managerial implications and guides future direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the creation and implementation of a high-impact, hands-on assignment that both challenges and transforms students' perception of the power of information. The author created a web-based project in which students designed, organized, and promoted their own web portal for peers who were struggling with substance abuse addiction. In order to create buy-in from the students, the assignment's purpose centered on the concept of digital citizenship. The idea behind this concept is to encourage students to use information ethically and to help their fellow digital citizens find and use information ethically as well. In realizing the power of credible, useful information, the project aimed to encourage students to use this power to help their peers who may be struggling. Once the students demonstrated a firm understanding of information literacy, the assignment provided the challenge to put their abilities to practice in student-led small groups that were each in charge of a section of the website. The structure of the class mirrored a workplace environment where the teams set deadlines that were approved by group vote. In the end, each of the students had a hand in creating an open access website that included information that could help their peers in the “real world.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors propose a new index called IPABA (Identification, Presence, Audience, Browsability, Accessibility) for determining the potential visibility of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Spain and Mexico on the basis of their official websites. This index is based on a checklist which includes new categories and items that influence the visibility of these websites. The sample is exhaustive, comprising the 114 Mexican and Spanish websites that are the official, government-sanctioned online representations of the World Heritage Sites in question. The results reveal changes in social behavior with regard to communication. The majority of the websites assessed had an overall score that was acceptable with more than 650 points out of a possible 1000, although differences were observed between countries in terms of presence on social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 2017 case Packingham v. North Carolina which deals with freedom of speech rights under the American Constitution's First Amendment, the nation's public forum doctrine, and the constitutionality of a North Carolina statute which prohibits sex offenders from accessing commercial social networking Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Protections for minors and petitioner Lester Gerard Packingham are assessed.

The article discusses the U.S. Health Information Technology for Economic & Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) in relation to the legal, ethical, and practical aspects of the process of making online electronic health record-based patient portal Web sites accessible for everyone. Services for patients with disabilities and limited health literacy are examined, along with efforts to prevent health care disparities, America's Rehabilitation Act, and Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The accessibility of a website means that everyone including people with disabilities can perceive, understandand interact with the website.In this study, accessibility of the 38 higher education institution websites of Cyprus Island has been evaluated. The accessibility assessment was carried out to verify compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The main goal of this study is to determine whether people with disabilities can access and use websites of the Cyprus Island higher education institutions and to raise awareness about web accessibility. It can be conclude that none of the evaluated websites are error free and most of them do not achieve an acceptable web accessibility level of compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is increasingly acknowledged that open data has the potential to change the way that government, citizens, and organizations exchange, access, and use data. Canada's Open Government Initiative directly supports a more transparent, accountable, and participatory approach to freely licensed, machine readable data at all levels of government. Our research presents an analysis of British Columbia's current open data initiatives. We have developed and tested a heuristic evaluation tool that we applied to all municipal open data websites in British Columbia. The technique assesses the content, accessibility, and functionality of these sites and their associated data. We argue that there is a lack of attention paid to the usability of open data portals in current evaluation tools. In addition, using metrics developed by the Open Data Barometer, we qualitatively assess the data found for specific usability characteristics. Finally, following research on how smaller municipal governments conceive of open data, we test if there is a link between the size of a municipality and the efficacy of their open data portal. Through this analysis, we aim to provide a clearer understanding of how Canada's open data movement is being translated at the smaller and mid-sized city scale in British Columbia. Réduction d'échelle : Comprendre l'influence des initiatives de données ouvertes dans les villes de taille intermédiaire et plus petite en Colombie-Britannique, au Canada Il est de plus en plus admis que les données ouvertes sont susceptibles de changer la façon dont le gouvernement, les citoyens et les organisations échangent, ont accès et utilisent les données. L'initiative de gouvernement ouvert du Canada appuie directement une approche plus transparente, plus responsable et plus participative à l'égard des données sous licence libre, lisibles par des machines à tous les niveaux du gouvernement. Notre recherche présente une analyse des initiatives actuelles de données ouvertes en Colombie-Britannique. Nous avons développé et testé un outil d'évaluation heuristique que nous avons appliqué à tous les sites Web municipaux de données ouvertes en Colombie-Britannique. La technique évalue le contenu, l'accessibilité et la fonctionnalité de ces sites et leurs données connexes. Nous soutenons qu'on ne porte pas suffisamment attention à la convivialité des portails de données ouvertes dans les outils d'évaluation actuels. De plus, en utilisant les paramètres développés par le Baromètre des données ouvertes, nous évaluons qualitativement les données trouvées pour des caractéristiques particulières de convivialité. Finalement, à la suite de la recherche sur la façon dont les plus petites administrations municipales conçoivent leurs données ouvertes, nous avons vérifié s'il existait un lien entre la taille d'une municipalité et l'efficacité de son portail de données ouvertes. Par le biais de cette analyse, notre objectif est d'améliorer la compréhension de la façon dont le mouvement des données ouvertes du Canada se traduit à l'échelle des villes de taille intermédiaire et plus petite en Colombie-Britannique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mining web usage data of e-business organizations is essential to provide knowledge about clients’ web utilization patterns, which can help these businesses in landing at vital business choices. Because of non-deterministic web access behavior of web clients, web user session data is usually noisy and imperfect. Such imperfection has a negative impact on pattern discovery process. One of the real issues associated with the prevalently used Fuzzy c-Means (FCM) and Fuzzy c-Medoids (FCMdd) methods is that they are not robust against the noise, because a single outlier object could lead to a very different clustering result. In this research we propose a robust Fuzzy c-Least Medians (FCLMdn) clustering framework to deal with the user session data contaminated with noise and outlier user session objects, with the objective of improving the quality of the extracted patterns. To deal with the high dimensionality of user session data which may contain noise and outliers, a fuzzy set theoretic approach for assigning fuzzy weights to user sessions and associated URLs has been proposed. Our results clearly indicate that quality of user session clusters formed using FCLMdn algorithm is much better than those using FCM and FCMdd algorithms in terms of various cluster validity indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research work presents a large-scale study of the problems in realworld web applications and widely-used mobile browsers. Through a large-scale experiment, we find inconsistencies in Secure Socket Layer (SSL) warnings among popular mobile web browsers (over a billion users download). The majority of popular mobile browsers on the Google Play Store either provide incomplete information in SSL warnings shown to users or failed to provide SSL warnings in the presence of security certificate errors, thus making it a difficult task even for a security savvy user to make an informed decision. In addition, we find that 28% of websites are using mixed content. Mixed content means a secure website (https) loads a sub resource using insecure HTTP protocol. The mixed content weakens the security of entire website and vulnerable to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Furthermore, we inspected the default behavior of mobile web browsers and report that majority of mobile web browsers allow execution of mixed content in web applications, which implies billions of mobile browser users are vulnerable to eavesdropping and MITM attacks. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for website developers, users and browser vendors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today websites are the tools most commonly used to access information. People with disabilities face difficulties accessing or using information, and the importance of website usability in their lives needs to be recognized. Visually impaired students need to be able to use university websites that inform them about the opportunities and events taking place on campus. This study aims to evaluate the usability of a university website by visually impaired students. In this research, six visually impaired students were interviewed. The assistive technologies they use, as well as the various web pages they wished to use unaided were identified. Following data collection, usability tests were conducted and satisfaction surveys were completed. The usability test was done with five visually impaired students. They were asked to think aloud while performing 11 tasks involving their university's web pages, including the main page and the pages of student affairs, library and departments and then to accomplish these tasks. In this test, five tasks were not successfully completed by all students. According to the test results, finding final exam dates on the academic calendar posed major difficulties, and accessing the course schedule web page was the task that required the most time. The test results indicated the need for a search engine on each page, a text version for all pages, rearrangement of the web link sequences with tabs and more information about visuals. Suggestions related to the visually impaired students' needs were offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The information in government web sites, which are widely adopted in many countries, must be accessible for all people, easy to use, accurate and secure. The main objective of this study is to investigate the usability, accessibility and security aspects of e-government web sites in Kyrgyz Republic. The analysis of web government pages covered 55 sites listed in the State Information Resources of the Kyrgyz Republic and five government web sites which were not included in the list. Analysis was conducted using several automatic evaluation tools. Results suggested that government web sites in Kyrgyz Republic have a usability error rate of 46.3 % and accessibility error rate of 69.38 %. The study also revealed security vulnerabilities in these web sites. Although the 'Concept of Creation and Development of Information Network of the Kyrgyz Republic' was launched at September 23, 1994, government web sites in the Kyrgyz Republic have not been reviewed and still need great efforts to improve accessibility, usability and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gumushane Universty Electronic Journal of the Faculty of Communication / Gümüshane Üniversitesi Iletisim Fakültesi Elektronik Dergisi is the property of Gumushane Universitesi Iletisim Fakultesi Elektronik Dergisi (e-GIFDER) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study traces appeals to authenticity, over time, in the promotional material of leading social-networking sites (SNSs). Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the public-facing websites of major SNS platforms--beginning with Friendster in 2002--were sampled at six-month intervals, with promotional language and visuals examined for authenticity claims. The authors tracked these appeals, with attention to changes in promotional copy, through to July 2016, among the most popular social media services (as determined by English-language web presence and active monthly user figures or, when unavailable, reported network size). The study found that nearly all SNSs invoked authenticity--directly or through language like "real life" and "genuine"--in their promotional materials. What stood out was the profoundly reactive nature of these claims, with new services often defining themselves, openly or implicitly, against legacy services' inauthenticity. A recurring marketing strategy, in other words, has been to call out competitors' phoniness by substituting (and touting) some other, differently grounded mode of authenticity. Since the affordances of social sites, even those touting evanescence or anonymity, make them vulnerable to similar charges, the cycle gets replayed with numbing regularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 6 July 2016, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales upheld the validity of injunctions requiring the five leading internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK to block consumer access to websites marketing counterfeit goods and infringing trade marks. Significantly, the ISPs, as intermediaries for the infringement, were burdened with the costs of implementing the blocking injunctions. The ruling confirms the status of online blocking injunctions as an important tool for brand owners seeking to prevent the online infringement of their trade marks. The decision is a logical extension of the rights afforded to trade mark owners to reflect the rights given to copyright owners, and made express under UK copyright legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]