Consumers Can’t Understand the Online Contracts They “Agree” To. Now What? (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Prof. Samuel I. Becher, Victoria University of Wellington [Eric’s introduction: I’ve repeatedly mentioned the “crisis of online contracts.” We routinely embrace the fiction of online contract formation despite the fact that we know people don’t read the contracts, they wouldn’t…
Facebook Defeats Pro Se Consumer Privacy Suit–Hassan v. Facebook
This is a pro se privacy lawsuit by 4 longtime Facebook users (from 2007-09). It covers a lot of the same topics as the dozens of pending privacy class action lawsuits against Facebook. Not surprisingly, as a pro se suit,…
Lessons from Bumble’s Choice of Law Clause–King v. Bumble
This is a lawsuit against the dating app “Bumble” challenging Bumble’s refund and renewal practices. Plaintiffs allege Bumble violated two California statues: (1) the Dating Service Law, and (2) the Automatic Renewal Law. The first requires dating services to give…
Russia Fucked With American Democracy, But It Can’t Fuck With Section 230–Federal Agency of News v. Facebook
The plaintiff FAN allegedly is part of a Russian government agency, Internet Research Agency, that undermined the integrity of our 2016 presidential elections. In other words, FAN apparently was a Russian troll operation. As part of its post-2016 election cleanup,…
Amazon May Be Liable for Marketplace Items–Oberdorf v. Amazon
In what could be a seismic ruling, the Third Circuit held that Amazon is a legally responsible seller of defective marketplace items, exposing it to potentially enormous liability. This represents the worst loss yet for Amazon over marketplace sales. However,…
Twitter Gets Another Significant Section 230 Win in Lawsuit by Suspended User–Murphy v. Twitter
Murphy had about 25,000 Twitter followers. She repeatedly referred to a trangender female as male in her tweets. Twitter suspended her account for “misgendering.” After more negative interactions between them, Twitter permanently banned Murphy. Murphy claimed that Twitter changed its…
Contract Breach Claims Against Google Survive First Amendment Defense–Dreamstime v. Google
Dreamstime sells stock photos. It alleges that Google partnered with its competitors and then maliciously downgraded Dreamstime’s visibility, first in organic search results and then in keyword ads. Google allegedly also kicked Dreamstime’s app out of Google Play. Dreamstime sued…
Terminated AdSense Publishers Can’t Get Their Accrued Earnings–eOnline v. Google
The plaintiffs are publishers that participated in the Google AdSense program. They outsourced much of their content development to a service called TextBroker that pays authors between 0.7 and 5 cents per word (i.e., a 1000 word article makes between…
Section 230 Protects Facebook’s Account and Content Restriction Decisions–Ebeid v. Facebook
Courts, at least in the Ninth Circuit, have collapsed the distinction between Sections 230(c)(1) and 230(c)(2). As a result, (c)(1) now routinely protects a service’s content filtering and account restriction decisions, which is nominally the job of (c)(2). This is…
Ex-Employee’s Continued Use of Twitter Account May Be Conversion–Farm Journal v. Johnson
This is another ownership dispute over a Twitter account. We last blogged this topic several years ago, and none of the disputes we’ve seen have resulted in any definitive rulings. Plaintiff publishes trade publications in the agricultural sector, including “The…