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. Twitter qualifies for the standard three-element test for 230: Twitter…
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, “CE” is an abbreviation for “continuing education.” Just like we…
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, a satirical news website, and a nonpartisan association of Christian…
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 of the Democratic party. Even his relatives have condemned him…
Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping. Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to…
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 School of Law Date: August 22, 2023 Re: Comments regarding…
Court Says No Human Author, No Copyright (but Human Authorship of GenAI Outputs Remains Uncertain) (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Heather Whitney To the surprise of no one, a D.C. district court granted summary judgment for the Copyright Office in Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 1:22-cv-01564 (D.D.C. Aug. 18, 2023), affirming the Copyright Office’s position that “a work…
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 “gotcha,” the law firm added LGBTQ (Divino) and people of…
Facebook Easily Defeats Lawsuit Over User Posts–Hicks v. Bradford
Whoa, what a flashback. 😵 We used to see lawsuits like this 15+ years ago, but we don’t see them any more because they are so obviously doomed by Section 230. This case involves a shooting of police officers. Multiple…
Ninth Circuit Easily Dismisses Account Termination Case–King v. Facebook
This is a standard account termination case. The specific facts don’t matter to the outcome, but I enumerate a little more detail in my prior blog post. The 9th Circuit panel’s very short narrative includes: “there is no private right…