Green runs a YouTube channel called “Libertys Champion” (with 18k subscribers now). Green had a scuffle with a Pierce County security guard, so he submitted public records requests to obtain more information about the county’s security force. The county provided…
Do you remember this case? It was filed in 2009, back when MySpace was still bigger than Facebook. The copyright owners never sent Vimeo any takedown notices over the videos in question, but they still sued Vimeo for hosting them….
Section 230 and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) have always had an implicit conflict. The FCRA is an old-school regulation of electronic databases run by credit reporting agencies, who gather and republish third-party data. As a result, any FCRA…
I’ve heard many tragic stories from content reviewers about the personal challenges associated with their jobs, both during and after employment. As heartbreaking as those stories are, it’s never been clear to me what legal remedies might apply to those…
I’m reporting on a study by Bin Han, Chirag Shah, and Daniel Saelid called “Users’ Perception of Search Engine Biases and Satisfaction.” The authors showed two pages of Bing results to study participants. (An aside: Bing…really?) The first page was…
Maffick runs several Facebook pages. Due to Maffick’s possible ties to the Russian government, Facebook labeled the pages “Russia state-controlled media.” Maffick sued Facebook. In Sept. 2020, the court denied Maffick’s TRO request. Now, the court has dismissed the Lanham…
The initial interest confusion doctrine has always been a misguided doctrine that is too easy for plaintiffs to weaponize. Fortunately, the doctrine has been dying for over a decade. Few opinions mention it nowadays, and even fewer cite it in…
This is a tricky opinion to decipher. This opinion might say that Section 230 categorically doesn’t apply if the plaintiff claims an Internet service is defectively designed. That reading would largely reject the important First Circuit Doe v. Backpage ruling…
High Five Threads sells t-shirts and tchotchkes. It claims copyright and trademark protection for a depiction of upper and lower Michigan as two hands (left-most image below). People routinely depict lower Michigan as a hand, and apparently others envision the…
Today, the Oversight Board issued its decision regarding Facebook’s decision to suspend Trump’s account for two posts Trump made during the January 6 insurrection. The decision covers a lot of ground (it’s nearly 12k words), and I’ll only cover part…