County Attorney’s Deletion of Constituent’s Facebook Comment May Violate First Amendment
Governments have embraced social media with zeal, from politicians and police departments taking to Twitter, to cities releasing apps designed for citizens to report potholes. A direct and instant communication link between the citizenry, and those governing it, can only be…
State Sup. Ct. Affirms Harassment and Breach of Peace Conviction for Posting Pages from Diary to Facebook
I blogged about this case a few years ago at the appeals court stage. (“Conviction for Posting Pages From Teenager’s Diary Via Mail and Facebook Partially Reversed“.) In a nutshell, the defendant was accused of taking, without permission, pages from…
Review Website Gets Hammered In Court–Consumer Cellular v. ConsumerAffairs
This is not a good opinion for the review website industry. However, the court’s harshest treatment turns on the idiosyncratic practices of ConsumerAffairs.com, which set a key Fourth Circuit Section 230 precedent in 2009 but whose current business practices probably…
North Carolina State Supreme Court Strikes Down Cyberbullying Statute
Dillion Price, the putative victim, was the subject of Facebook discussions by his high school peers. A classmate of Price’s posted a screenshot of a sexually themed text message Price allegedly sent him. Commentary ensued, and defendant Robert Bishop commented…
Yelp Forced To Remove Defamatory Reviews–Hassell v. Bird
[Warning: Brutally ugly opinion and long blog post ahead] The evisceration of Section 230 continues. Yesterday I explained that the last 12 months have been tough for Section 230 jurisprudence. Today’s opinion is worse than *all* of the cases I…
Some Thoughts on Thiel’s Lawfare Against Gawker
By now you’ve heard that Peter Thiel, a well-known Silicon Valley billionaire, has been waging a lawfare campaign against Gawker. The New York Times described his modus operandi: he retained a legal team to watch for cases against Gawker, then…
Google Must Answer Lawsuit For Manually Removing Websites From Its Search Index–E-ventures v. Google (Forbes Cross-Post)
You’d probably be hopping mad if Google manually kicked your website out of its search index; and if you’re an SEO company and Google also kicked all of your clients out, you’d probably feel pretty litigious. But courts have repeatedly…
‘Badass Lawyer’ Loses Lawsuit Over Parody Twitter Account–Levitt v. Felton
This is an awesome parody account/First Amendment case. Todd Levitt is a self-described “badass lawyer” (this description comes from his since-deleted Twitter account) and an adjunct instructor at Central Michigan University (CMU). His Twitter account looked interesting, to say the…
Talk on Section 230 and Consumer Reviews
In April, I gave a talk at the University of Sussex on Section 230 as economy policy by encouraging consumer reviews that improve marketplaces. If this sounds vaguely familiar, you’re not imagining things. I’ve been working on this paper since…
FTC Wins Deception Case Over Faux User-Generated Content–Fanning v. FTC
John Fanning challenged the FTC findings that the website he developed, named Jerk.com, materially misrepresented its attributes. On appeal, the First Circuit affirms. Jerk.com resembled Ripoff Report, but for people. The court’s description of the site and its offerings are…