There Is No Bottom When It Comes to Section 230 Reform Proposals (Comments on the Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act)
When I first saw the Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act. my draft version didn’t identify its sponsors. I assumed it was yet another sloppy and unserious Section 230 reform proposal from representatives like Rep. Gosar or Gohmert. You can imagine…
Section 230 Protects Securities Exchange–Saveene v. Remo
This case involves an alleged case of corporate hijacking. The plaintiff alleges that it bought a controlling interest in a corporate entity opaquely named American Diversified Holdings Corp. (“ADHC”) from Remo. Remo then allegedly dissolved the Nevada entity and, without…
Announcing A Major Virtual Event, “Lessons from the First Internet Ages,” on Nov. 2-3, 2021
This year, I have been serving as a Knight Foundation visiting scholar along with Prof. Mary Anne Franks of University of Miami. I’m excited to publicly announce our project. Working with the Knight Foundation team, including John Sands, we assembled…
Eleventh Circuit Rejects “Material Support for Terrorists” Case–Colon v. Twitter
This is one of the many lawsuits against social media services for allegedly providing material support to terrorists. These cases have all failed–with the partial exception of the Ninth Circuit meltdown (3 judges; 3 opinions) in Gonzalez v. Google LLC,…
TOS Supports Injunction Against Web Scraping–Southwest Airlines v. Kiwi
This is a scraping lawsuit brought by Southwest airlines against Kiwi.com. The court issues an injunction restricting Kiwi from scraping Southwest’s website. Southwest does not allow online travel agencies to sell Southwest flights without the approval of Southwest. Its terms…
Cloudflare Isn’t Liable for Providing Services to Alleged Infringers–Mon Cheri Bridals v. Cloudflare
The plaintiffs claim copyright ownership in wedding dress designs. They also claim that knockoff retailers are infringing those rights. Frustrated by the whack-a-mole enforcement efforts against individual retailers, the plaintiffs sued Cloudflare for providing support services to them, including caching,…
Trump Has to Litigate His Must-Carry Lawsuit in YouTube’s Home Court–Trump v. YouTube
In July, Trump et al sued Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in Florida for terminating his accounts. At the time, I laid out a 6-step prediction for how things would go: We’ve reached Step 2 in the YouTube case. Based on…
The Legal Implications of Datacenter Location (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Marketa Trimble The location of a datacenter matters—the location of third-party datacenters affects companies’ (datacenter customers’) decisions whether to use the datacenters for colocation or other services. Part of any assessment of the suitability of a datacenter…
Does the First Amendment Permit Government Actors to Manage Social Media Comments?–Tanner v. Ziegenhorn
This case involves Tanner’s comments on the Arkansas State Police’s Facebook page. The court’s ruling raises interesting, but troubling, questions about any government actor’s ability to enable reader comments on social media. The Manually Deleted Comment One State Police post…