Glassdoor Partially Fixes a Bad Section 230 Ruling–Nicholas Services v. Glassdoor
This case involves two interrelated companies in the private jet industry. One entity (Nicholas Air) was the public brand. The other entity (Corr Flight) provided all of the staffing to the public brand. Employees from the staffing company posted negative…
Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban, and Domestic and Foreign Censors Rejoice–TikTok v. Garland
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…
Initial Comments on the Supreme Court’s TikTok Ban Opinion–TikTok v. Garland
[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…
Comments on the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton SCOTUS Oral Arguments on Mandatory Online Age “Verification”
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…
Catching Up on the Heavyweight Scraping Battle Between X and Bright Data (Guest Blog Post)
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…
Court Denies Preliminary Injunction Against Minnesota’s Anti-“Deepfakes” Law–Kohls v. Ellison
“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…
Copyright Battles Over City Council Videos
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…
2024 Internet Law Year-in-Review
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’s “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act” Is Partially Unconstitutional…But Other Parts Are Green-Lighted–NetChoice v. Bonta
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…
The Fifth Circuit’s Campaign to Undermine Section 230 Is Making Progress–AB v. Salesforce
This is a FOSTA case involving Backpage, but it’s against Backpage’s vendor Salesforce. That makes this a tertiary liability claim. Here are the steps in the plaintiffs’ alleged chain of liability: V) victims promoted in Backpage advertisements (plaintiffs) –> D1)…