Earlier this year, the Texas legislature enacted HB 20, a blatant attempt to censor social media service. The Texas law emulated a similar Florida censorship law. In June, a Florida district court enjoined based on the First Amendment and Section…
Earlier this year, Texas enacted a brazenly censorial #MAGA bill, HB 20. My blog post analyzing the law. The law goes into effect on December 2 if it’s not enjoined, so a court decision should come in the next few…
A year ago, at the nadir of the Trump era, Congress attached the CASE Act to an unrelated must-pass bill and authorized a new “small claims court” for copyright owners (called the Copyright Claims Board, or CCB) housed in the…
[I did an interview for a student research project on emojis as evidence, which I’m sharing here.] Tell us a little bit about yourself! What do you work with today? What’s your background and how did you get the role…
Sammamish is a city in the greater Seattle metro area. It operates a Facebook page entitled “City of Sammamish – Government.” City employees post about events, public safety, and more. The city also livestreamed its city council meetings on its…
Cameron Atkinson self-describes as “a Christian, a trial and appellate lawyer at Pattis & Smith, LLC, a former business consultant, a published constitutional scholar, and a general hell-raiser.” Publicly testing his appellate/Conlaw chops and hell-raising skills, he took his own…
The plaintiffs claim a third party, Dolan, “engaged in a pattern of behavior that resulted in the harassment of the Plaintiffs on her social media accounts” due to “Facebook and TikTok’s failure to take down [ ] false abusive posts…
In July, Trump sued Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook for terminating his accounts in three separate doomed-to-fail lawsuits. The lawsuits were filed in Trump’s home court of Southern District of Florida. The three defendants all filed motions to transfer the cases…
Though it might surprise you, copyright can protect individual emoji depictions. However, determining when they are copyrightable is a subtle art. This summer, the Copyright Review Board issued an interesting decision about the registrability of emojis. Though it won’t be the…
Pro se litigants often claim that Internet services are state actors. Those claims have been universally rejected by courts. Yet some legislators and regulators, funded by our tax dollars, are taking the same meritless position… Sescey v. YouTube, 2021 WL…