by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy A series of prominent web-scraping lawsuits are revisiting the fundamentals of public data access. And in so doing, with a slight reframing of a relatively settled legal issue, major platforms are challenging the presumption that…
Cordova publishes videos on a YouTube channel,”Denver Metro Audits.” He claims that the defendants republish substantial portions of those videos on their YouTube channel, “Frauditor Troll Channel.” Cordova sent DMCA takedown notices targeting the defendants’ videos, but the defendants counternoticed…
This is a pro se/IFP case, so odds were high it was going to fail no matter what. Brooks says two of his TikTok accounts were terminated and another demonetized. He claims the account restrictions violated the First Amendment because…
This is one of numerous FOSTA cases seeking to hold Salesforce liable for providing vendor services to Backpage. I describe these as “tertiary liability” cases because Salesforce’s involvement is three hops away from the victim: sex trafficking victim <== Backpage…
Prior blog post. I previously summarized the case: You may recall that the RNC claimed that Gmail’s spam filter was biased against Republican spam. The centerpiece of this claim was an academic study that the RNC intentionally misinterpreted, to the…
Currently, the Northern District of Illinois judges do not apply consistent standards for SAD Scheme joinder. Some judges still permit the joinder of dozens or hundreds of seemingly unrelated defendants in a single case; other judges essentially make SAD Scheme…
In 1991, Congress enacted the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The TCPA is a telephone exceptionalist statute–by design, the TCPA regulates telemarketing phone calls differently than other forms of marketing. I considered some implications of advertising medium regulatory exceptionalism in…
By guest blogger Kieran McCarthy If you have ever wondered why big incumbents keep running to the Northern District of Texas the moment someone builds a tool that makes switching easier, comparing prices easier, or generally makes the internet work…
I previously summarized this case: Athos owns the copyrights to many classic Mexican films. Users regularly upload its film clips to YouTube. These uploads have irritated Athos since 2014. However, Athos rejected YouTube’s fast-lane options for copyright owners (such as…
This is a long-running class action copyright case (filed in 2020!) led by the photographer Blaine Harrington (now deceased). The plaintiffs complain about user-uploaded photos appearing in Pinterest’s off-website notifications to its users (e.g., email, in-app, and mobile push). This…