It’s Hard to Bind Former Subscribers to TOS Amendments–Brooks v. WarnerMedia
This is a VPPA case over Meta Pixels. 🙄🙄🙄 Everyone agrees this lawsuit will be going to arbitration per the HBO Max TOS. However, in 2022, HBO Max swapped arbitration providers from AAA to NAM. The opinion doesn’t clearly explain…
Coursera Wins a TOS Formation Battle, But With Heavy Losses–Ghazizadeh v. Coursera
This is a VPPA case 🙄. Coursera invoked the arbitration clause in its TOS. It gets the arbitration it wanted, but via a messy opinion that does not represent a clean approval of its TOS management practices. Check out how…
Facebook Defeats BIPA Face-Scanning Lawsuit–Zellmer v. Meta
It’s unexpectedly turned into “BIPA Week” here at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog. 🥳 Yesterday, I blogged about an unsuccessful BIPA challenge to PhotoDNA. Today, I’m blogging about an unsuccessful BIPA challenge to Facebook’s friend-tagging feature. Despite the festivities,…
Will Biometric Privacy Laws Undermine the Fight Against CSAM?–Martell v. X
This lawsuit involves the widely used PhotoDNA database, a cornerstone of the fight against online child sexual abuse material (CSAM). PhotoDNA renders hash values of identified CSAM items and then enables services to block images with identical hash values. In…
Ninth Circuit Does More Ninth Circuit Things in its Latest Section 230 Ruling–Diep v. Apple
Yet another cryptocurrency fraud case. 🙄 I previously described this case: This lawsuit relates to the “Toast Plus” app that was available in Apple’s app store. The plaintiffs claim it was a spoof app designed to steal cryptocurrency worth $5k…
Court Says Twitter Misused Litigation to Punish Defendants for Their Speech–X v. CCDH
Self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist Elon Musk is notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to criticism directed at him. (As the phrase goes, “he can dish it out, but he can’t take it“). This well-publicized lawsuit is an example of Musk waging lawfare…
Section 230 Applies to Claims Over Hijacked Accounts (Except Maybe Verified Accounts)–Wozniak v. YouTube
More Bitcoin litigation 🙄. This time, malefactors hijacked popular YouTube channels and uploaded videos promoting Bitcoin scams: First, scammers will breach YouTube’s security to unlawfully gain access to verified and popular YouTube channels with tens or hundreds of thousands of…
Tubi’s TOS Formation Fails–Campos v. Tubi
This is a Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) case 🙄 against the video streaming platform Tubi. Tubi sought to send the case to arbitration per its TOS. The court says no. The account signup page on mobile devices looked like…
Another Court Finds an “Enforceable Browsewrap.” MAKE IT STOP–Hawkins v. CMG
This is a Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) case against a media website, so you have good reason to wonder about the legitimacy and sincerity of the case. The named plaintiff created a WSBTV account by opting to log in…
Think You Understand Online Trespass to Chattels Law? Think Again–In re Meta Healthcare Pixels
This is one of the many pending “Pixel” cases. If you don’t recall, a “pixel” is a 1×1-pixel image file that is imperceptible to web visitors. A website adds code to its web page that summons the pixel from a…