[Statute of] Queen Anne’s Revenge? Supreme Court Grants Certiorari in Allen v. Cooper

…a “taking,” the state action would have to deprive the plaintiff of nearly all of the work’s value (as the North Carolina statute may have done). It seems that the…

A Fight for Authorship and Ownership of 150+ Quilt Patterns, and Bad Business Planning (Guest Blog Post)

…Decker, Hyde Park, Chelsea Market, and Tale of 2 Gnomes. Lone Star Promotions is not a party to the state actions, even though Lone Star Promotions is the copyright claimant….

Recap of the Copyright Office’s Section 512 Study Roundtable

…practices changed? Carey: practices have changed, and ongoing litigation on this front. Isbell: are IAP terminations due to 512 repeat infringer policy “state action”? Rose: no, but it’s equivalent to…

Section 230’s Success in Under-the-Radar Cases

…engaged in viewpoint discrimination. Defendants are all private companies. DeLima has failed to allege any state action giving rise to the alleged violations of her First Amendment rights, and the…

Twitter Isn’t a Shopping Mall for First Amendment Purposes (Duh)–Johnson v. Twitter

…article, The “Sovereigns of Cyberspace” and State Action: The First Amendment’s Application–or Lack Thereof–to Third-Party Platforms, by Jonathan Peters. From the abstract: This Article analyzes the state action doctrine as…

President Trump Violated the First Amendment by Blocking Users @realdonaldtrump

…retweet or reply in the first instance. Defendants argued that blocking is not state action because it simply utilizes functionality made available to every Twitter user. The court rejects this…

Researchers’ Challenge to CFAA Moves Forward–Sandvig v. Sessions

…government raises a state action question and the court (with little discussion, and a cite to NY Times v. Sullivan and hiQ v. LinkedIn) disagrees. The court also rejects the…

YouTube Isn’t a Company Town (Duh)–Prager University v. Google

…a legal tool allowing virtual world participants to override the service’s editorial discretion (indeed, I wrote a counter-narrative to the state action argument back in 2005). Unfortunately for plaintiffs, the…

Yelp, Twitter and Facebook Aren’t State Actors–Quigley v. Yelp

…show state action because he has neither argued nor alleged that the government encouraged or coerced defendants to take the challenged actions — blocking him from their websites’ comments sections.”…

Does the Packingham Ruling Presage Greater Government Control Over Search Results? Or Less? (Guest Blog Post)

…all. Again, hard to know. But as interesting as that all is, Packingham’s implications for the state action doctrine seem even more so. As is well known by legal scholars…

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