Prof. Goldman’s Statement on the Supreme Court’s Demolition of the Internet in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton
[Note: Greetings from Shanghai, where it’s almost 1 am and the Supreme Court has just demolished the Internet. I’m posting these remarks and then heading to bed, where I will curl up in a fetal position as I question everything…
YouTube Again Defeats FOSTA Lawsuit–In re YouTube Trafficking Litigation
[Note: my blogging hiatus is due to a trip to China. I will return to the US this weekend and presumably resume my regular blogging cadence then.] This is a confusing lawsuit that has been through several names, including “Sarah…
Reddit Defeats Lawsuit Over WallStreetBets Subreddit–Rogozinski v. Reddit
This is one of those oh-so-stupid hard-eyerolling lawsuits that I blog for coverage purposes, but I blog it joylessly and with annoyance at the wasted time. I previously summarized this case: Jaime Rogozinski, a/k/a “jartek,” created the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, which…
Section 230 (Still) Applies to Contract Breach Claim–NJCCC v. McAleer
This case involves four main players: Newsmatics, which runs the EIN Presswire service, a pay-to-play press release distribution service. Frankly Media, one of Newsmatics’ distribution partners. Hwang, who submitted press releases to Newsmatics claiming that an NJ state court was…
After 20 Years, I Turned Off Google AdSense for My Websites
Soon after I launched this blog in February 2005, I signed up for Google AdSense. My goal was to make a little money and learn about the industry from the inside. In particular, if I was going to cover the…
Court Rejects Trespass to Chattels Claim Over Placing Cookies–Doe v. Tenet
This is a Meta pixels case. The pixel setup includes the placement of cookies on users’ devices. The plaintiffs argued that the cookie placement trespassed their devices. The court disagrees but gives plaintiffs leave to amend. (As usual, there is…
Clickwrap Formed Even When a Consumer Has Limited Time to Act–Washington v. Flixbus
This is a Meta Pixels case involving the bus service Flixbus. Flixbus successfully defends by saying that the plaintiff consented to the disclosures via its TOS. This is the screenshot in question: Sorry it’s hard to read, but the gist…
Reddit Challenges Anthropic’s Scraping to Create Generative AI Models (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy With as much scraping as is happening for AI training and enhancement these days, it’s amazing to me that there aren’t more lawsuits happening over scraping. The legal headlines are more of a trickle than…
A Review of the NYT v. Microsoft AI-Copyright Ruling (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp., 2025 WL 1009179 (S.D.N.Y. April 4, 2025), might be the most important case pending on the legality of scraping public data to create training data sets to build…
A Takedown of the Take It Down Act
By guest blogger Prof. Jess Miers (with additional comments from Eric) Two things can be true: Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) is a serious and gendered harm. And, the ‘Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and…