The plaintiff runs R18, a Japanese-focused adult site. It has US copyright registrations for 50k+ videos. The defendant runs ThisAV, which the court describes as a Japanese-language video-hosting service. When I visited ThisAV (NSFW) this morning, it self-described (via Google…
I’ve regularly done a roundup post of my summer accomplishments when school starts. This year is a little different. I completed my last Internet Law class before Thanksgiving 2021 and had Spring semester off. Then, due to some personal circumstances…
This is another people search case with another rough outcome for defendants. If the defendants in these cases don’t get relief on appeal, I don’t know how the people search and yearbook industries are going to survive. [Note: this opinion…
hiQ was a data snarfer. Specifically, it was “a ‘people analytics’ company that provided information to businesses about their workforces based on statistical analysis of LinkedIn members’ wholly public profiles.” In May 2017, LinkedIn sent hiQ a C&D and blocked…
I filed comments with the CPPA on their proposed regulations pursuant to the CPRA. Read my comments here. Preparing those comments was a truly joyless task. Analyzing CPRA regulations is literally “read them and weep.” Some hot spots: The CPPA…
This is one of the dozens of lawsuits alleging that social media services addict kids. Those cases cover the same ground as CA AB 2408, which recently died in the California legislature. The plaintiffs’ lawyers are proceeding in court anyway….
[I published this anti-AB 2273 op-ed in Capitol Weekly. For more on the problems with AB 2273, see my deep dive and short explainer.] The California Legislature is aggressively pursuing several wide-sweeping and radical proposals to regulate the Internet. One…
Cudia was a patient of Premier Brain & Spine Institute, Inc., and Edward Rustamzadeh, M.D. In 2019, she reviewed them negatively on Yelp. (This appears to be her Yelp page, and she has an (obviously watered-down) review of the plaintiffs…
This is a pro se lawsuit against Match and Tinder for fake dating profiles in the plaintiff’s name. I’m going to focus on the publicity rights claim piece of the lawsuit. Match invoked Section 230. The court says that Match…
I’m going on a limb and saying that I believe this is the first appellate court upholding a 512(f) plaintiff win. The closest plaintiffs have gotten in the past is the Ninth Circuit’s Lenz case, which had plaintiff-favorable language but…