In 2024, Congress enacted, and President Biden signed, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which bans “foreign adversary” ownership of certain types of Internet services. The bill specifically bans Bytedance/TikTok by name. TikTok and its users challenged…
[A much longer post is forthcoming. A few initial remarks] [Update: the longer post is live, and it includes these remarks and 4,000 other words. I recommend you read that instead of this] The Supreme Court’s ruling will foster more…
Zaful is an online retailer with a trademark that seemingly rhymes with…awful? It claims copyright in 1,800+ product shot photos and says TEMU merchants are infringing those product shots in their listings. (Longtime readers know how I feel about copyright…
Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, regarding a Texas law that requires adult-oriented websites to age-authenticate all users–minors and adults alike–before they can enter their “virtual” premises. If this sounds familiar, that’s because…
This case is a throwback in every way. We rarely see lengthy (this one clocks in at 46 pages), detailed, and philosophical Section 512(c) opinions any more, and we only get this one because of the case’s extreme age. Capitol…
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy Last year, I wrote about how Elon Musk had inadvertently become web scrapers’ most powerful legal advocate. Not because he wanted to advocate for them. But rather, in seeking to enforce a no-scraping ban in…
“Minnesota Statutes section 609.771 prohibits, under certain circumstances, the dissemination of ‘deepfakes’ with the intent to injure a political candidate or influence the result of an election.” The plaintiffs brought a pre-enforcement challenge to the law, but the court denies…
As the maxim goes, all politics are local. A corollary is that few political disputes are as nasty or vitrolic as local politics. When local disputes devolve into total warfare, the parties grasp for any legal leverage against their sworn…
My ranking of the top 10 Internet Law developments of 2024. 10) X/Twitter Embraces Partisan Bias. For years, MAGA has claimed that Internet company employees are liberals and therefore surely moderate content to favor their preferred team (the Democrats) and…
California SB 976, “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act,” is one of the multitudinous laws that pretextually claim to protect kids online. Like many such laws nowadays, it’s a gish-gallop compendium of online censorship ideas: Age authentication! Parental…