As you may recall, this lawsuit relates to two American contractors in Jordan killed in a terrorist attack claimed by ISIS. The plaintiffs sued Twitter for providing material support to ISIS. In August, the judge dismissed the lawsuit on Section…
Rahul Manchanda, an attorney, claims he was defamed in Ripoff Reports and elsewhere. In 2013, he obtained a restraining order against some of the authors in New York state court. Manchanda then sought to expand that order to restrain Ripoff…
By guest blogger Marketa Trimble On October 24 and 25, 2016, the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School hosted a conference entitled “Law, Borders, and Speech.” The excellent, thought-provoking conference featured panels of U.S. and international speakers, a…
Section 230’s trainwreck of a year adds another derailment. MAKE. IT. STOP. This case is a defamation-plus lawsuit over two stories, one published on Above the Law and the other by the Gawker property Jezebel. The Jezebel story described plaintiff…
San Francisco wants to curb Airbnb listings. It adopted a license-and-tax requirement for Airbnb vendors (who Airbnb confusingly calls “hosts”). Vendors widely ignored SF’s rules. To minimize its enforcement obligations, SF sought to deputize Airbnb as its enforcement agency. Thus,…
This case involves an exploding cellphone battery. LG manufactured the battery and an Amazon marketplace vendor Safetymind sold it to the buyer. In addition to suing LG, the injured buyer sued Amazon for negligent failure to warn, negligence, and breach…
This lawsuit involves a facial attack on Section 230 on First Amendment grounds. The plaintiffs are unhappy that, protected by Section 230, social media companies have squelched some of their speech while allowing other speakers to promulgate content they don’t…
I never had a chance to blog the 2015 SAVE Act, but I always meant to. It’s one of the rare times that Congress intentionally circumscribed Section 230. However, instead of amending Section 230 directly, Congress added a federal criminal…
Section 230(c)(2) doesn’t get a lot of love from practitioners or academics because it doesn’t get a lot of love in court. At the motion to dismiss stage, plaintiffs often can get past a Section 230(c)(2) defense by alleging the…
This lawsuit alleges that Airbnb’s “hosts” racially discriminate when accepting customers’ bookings. Airbnb sought to send the case to arbitration per its Terms of Service, which the plaintiffs challenges. Contract Formation Trying to sort through the nomenclature confusion created by…