Telephony Provider Didn’t Properly Form a “Telephone-Wrap” Contract–James v. Global Tel*Link
Plaintiffs filed a putative class over fees paid for calls made by inmates in New Jersey correctional institutions. At issue is whether they should be required to arbitrate their claims. Defendant, GTL, has the exclusive right to provide phone services…
Court Beats Down Another Competitive Keyword Advertising Lawsuit–Beast Sports v. BPI
If you’ve been keeping up with the blog over the past several years, you already know that competitive keyword advertising lawsuits consistently lose in court. So in that sense, today’s blog post isn’t telling you anything new. Yet, it’s still…
Courtney Love Defeats Twibel Claims–Holmes v. Love
Courtney Love Cobain, tweeting with two twitter users (“fairnewsspears” and “noozjunkie”), stated she: was fucking devasted when Rhonda J. Holmes, Esquire, of San Diego was bought off @FairNewsSpears perhaps you can get a quote Holmes was a lawyer who had…
Section 230 Doesn’t Protect Summaries of Third Party Remarks–Diamond Ranch Academy v. Filer
Diamond Ranch Academy runs a “residential youth treatment facility” in Utah. Chelsea Filer (nee Chelsea Papciak) runs a website, DRASurvivors.com, critical of Diamond Ranch Academy. Diamond Ranch Academy sued her for defamation and tortious interference in Utah. For reasons not…
Court Orders Uber To Control Its Google Search Results
What happens when national trademarks, used on the borderless Internet, conflict with regional trademarks? This is one of the most venerable topics in Internet Law; see, e.g., the Blue Note case from 20 years ago. More recently, Jake blogged about…
High Schooler’s “Murder” Tweet Isn’t “Cyberstalking”–State v. Kohonen
Ruh roh. Teens and Twitter. What could possibly go wrong? In 8th grade, SG reported Jessica Kohonen’s behavior, which led to her suspension. [Note: the court uses the alias JK in the opinion but the caption has Jessica’s full name….
Surveying Ten Years Of Top Internet Law Developments (Forbes Cross-Post)
I’ve been writing an annual list of top Internet Law developments for a decade, so I thought it might be fun to look back at my #1 ranked development in each of the past 10 years. Let’s take a stroll…
Hacky Sacker’s Publicity Rights Claim Against Energy Drink Tossed–Martin v. 5-Hour Energy Drink
Johannes (Ted) Martin was (and is currently) the world record holder for “most consecutive kicks (no knees)” of a hackysack. A five hour energy drink made an advertisement depicting an unknown actor claiming he performed several superhuman tasks, including breaking…
Ninth Circuit Resolves Two of the Facebook Sponsored Stories Lawsuits
The litigation over Facebook’s sponsored stories occurred what seems like eons ago. Recently, the last of it wrapped up (although the latest ruling is the subject of a petition for rehearing en banc). It generated lots of blog fodder, and…
Google Can Derive Undisclosed Economic Benefits From CAPTCHAs–Rojas-Lozano v. Google
This lawsuit alleges that Google benefits unfairly from consumers’ responses to Google’s CAPTCHA. Plaintiff, a Massachusetts resident, responded to a two word CAPTCHA prompt when signing up for a Gmail accout. She alleged that only one of the two words…