Facebook Can Reject Unwanted Ads–Newton v. Meta
This is yet another online content removal lawsuit, and it reaches the obvious and inevitable result that dozens of cases have reached before it. The plaintiffs sought to run Facebook…
Anti-Vaxxer’s Lawsuit Over Channel Removal Fails–Mercola v. YouTube
Joseph Mercola ran a YouTube channel with 300k subscribers and 50M views. YouTube removed the channel for violating its medical misinformation policy (Mercola apparently peddled anti-vax views). Mercola sued YouTube…
Lawsuit Over Twitter Suspension Fails Again–Zhang v. Twitter
A Twitter user sued over his account suspension. The court dismissed the case without prejudice. Blog post coverage of that ruling here. The user tried again. Same result. Section 230….
Court Denies Injunction in Competitive Keyword Ad Lawsuit–Nursing CE Central v. Colibri
This is a competitive keyword advertising lawsuit. The plaintiff has a trademark registration for the “Nursing CE Central” mark for providing continuing education for nurses. [Note: if it’s not obvious,…
Preemptive Challenge to California’s Mandatory Editorial Transparency Law Lacks Standing–Minds v. Bonta
The plaintiffs in this case are Minds, Inc., Tim Pool, the Babylon Bee, and National Religious Broadcasters, which are (respectively): “a social networking app, an active social media content creator,…
YouTube Still Isn’t a State Actor–RFK Jr. v. Google
In 2020, the Ninth Circuit held that YouTube was not a state actor. It still isn’t. The plaintiff here is RFK Jr., the leading presidential candidate among the #MAGA base…
Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee (Guest Blog Post)
…trespass to chattels. This is why Eric—who has been covering this issue for a good while now—tags all scraping posts as “Trespass to Chattels.” The idea behind this legal theory…
My Comments to the USPTO About the SAD Scheme and Anticounterfeiting/Antipiracy Efforts
[I submitted the following comments to the USPTO] __ To: United States Patent and Trademark Office, Department of Commerce From: Prof. Eric Goldman, Associate Dean for Research, Santa Clara University…
Court Says No Human Author, No Copyright (but Human Authorship of GenAI Outputs Remains Uncertain) (Guest Blog Post)
…of human authorship, and the defendant, Stephen Thaler, expressly told the Copyright Office that the work at issue, titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” “lack[ed] traditional human authorship.” Eric previously…
Court Doesn’t Expect YouTube to Moderate Content Perfectly–Newman v. Google
This is one of several ideologically motivated lawsuits against YouTube for allegedly engaging in “discriminatory” content moderation. The initial cohort of plaintiffs were conservatives (Prager); but then as a purported…