A Complaint’s Silence About Section 230 Helps It Survive Judgment on the Pleadings–Moretti v. Hertz
This is a class action lawsuit against car rental companies for an alleged “currency exchange rate scam.” Allegedly, the rental car companies quote foreign rentals in dollars but then actually charge customers in the local currency at an inflated exchange…
WARNING: Draft “No Immunity for Sex Traffickers Online Act” Bill Poses Major Threat to Section 230
I rarely blog about draft bills that have not yet been introduced. Sometimes those drafts never get introduced at all; other times, the draft bills are revised in key ways before introduction. This particular draft has been circulating for a…
Judge Balks At Section 230 Protection For Email Forwarding–Samsel v. DeSoto County School District
Today’s blog post covers a very long opinion (70 pages!) involving a school principal effectively firing a successful football coach in football-crazed northern Mississippi. If you want a taste of how much angst that can create, try to wade through…
eBay Isn’t Liable for Patent-Infringing Marketplace Sales–Blazer v. eBay
Blazer owns patent 8,375,624 for “Carpenter Bee Traps.” He filed NOCIs with eBay alleging the sale of infringing items on eBay. The court says “eBay has a policy to quickly remove listings when a [patent] NOCI provides a court order,…
Constitution Protects Publication of Politicians’ Home Address/Phone Number–Publius v. Boyer-Vine
Doe Publius (nice alias) runs the “The Real Write Winger” blog, hosted by WordPress. He was unhappy about California’s ammunition purchase registry, which publishes “the driver’s license information, residential address and telephone number, and date of birth for anyone who…
New Paper: “The Defend Trade Secrets Act Isn’t an ‘Intellectual Property’ Law”
Congress worked on the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) for years, yet the final product has a number of rough edges and curiosities. One example is the following sentence: This section and the amendments made by this section shall not…
Section 230 Protects Grindr From Harrassed User’s Claims–Herrick v. Grindr
This is a well-constructed and thoughtful Section 230 ruling. If this case keeps going in the same direction, it has the potential to become a major Section 230 precedent. Herrick claims that ex-boyfriend JC used Grindr to launch a vicious…
Copyshop Covered By “Non-Commercial” Creative Commons License–Great Minds v. FedEx
Great Minds developed a math curriculum called Eureka Math. It commercializes the Eureka Math materials itself but also released the materials pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike (CC BY-NC-SA) 4.0 license. Great Minds discovered at least two circumstances where school…
YouTube Defeats Another Remove-and-Relocate Case–Darnaa v. Google
YouTube has been sued a few times for removing a video based on its spam policies and then relocating it to a new URL because remove-and-relocate breaks in-bound links (and any associated marketing investments) and resets the view counter. This…
Copyright Office Q&A Session About The New Online DMCA Designated Agents Directory
By guest blogger Franklin Graves Last week, at the ABA’s Midyear Meeting in Miami, Florida, the Section of Intellectual Property Law’s Computer Program & New Technologies Committee hosted a Q&A event with the U.S. Copyright Office to discuss the new online DMCA Designated…