Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal News Blogs -> Legal Blog Watch

Legal News

: Legal Blog Watch

How's That Ad Campaign Doing? -- Search Me!

By Brendan McKenna

Ever have one of those weeks when a lot of things you take for granted begin to change on you? Take last week, for example. Under legislation that came up before San Francisco's Board of Supervisors (pdf), that city -- popularly derided for taking away innocent tykes' fast-food toys and prying plastic bags out of shoppers' cold not-yet-dead hands -- could become the first in the United States to ban the unsolicited distribution of the Yellow Pages. The San Francisco Chronicle's Rachel Gordon reports that the proposal would bar phone companies and other distributors and publishers of Yellow Pages phone books from leaving the material on doorsteps and in building lobbies without first getting permission to do so. (White pages are exempted from the proposal.) According to board president David Chiu, who's spearheading the measure, many of the estimated 1.5 million-plus Yellow Pages distributed in the city each year get tossed -- unopened -- in recycling bins (or worse, presumably). "If we're serious about the environment, it's time we recognize that phone books are a 20th century tool that doesn't meet the business or environmental needs of the 21st century," Chiu says. However, a trade group for the $13 billion-a-year...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on February 08, 2011 (boomark / email).