Section 230 Applies to Publication of Court Documents–Medina v. Microsoft
In 2014, Medina sued Microsoft. Microsoft’s filings made some unredacted disclosures about Medina that were repeated in an unredacted court opinion, and those documents appeared on several websites that publish court documents. In 2020, Medina got the disclosures from the…
Ninth Circuit Rejects Another Lawsuit Over Account Termination–Mercola v. YouTube
I previously described this case: 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 for the usual things and got the…
NC Supreme Court Blesses Unilateral TOS Amendment to Add an Arbitration Clause–Canteen v. Charlotte Metro CU
In 2014, Phillips opened a checking account at Charlotte Metro Credit Union (CMCU) and “entered into a standard membership agreement.” The agreement included a unilateral amendments provision saying that CMCU “may change the terms of this Agreement. We will notify…
Section 230 Doesn’t Apply to “Editorializing” About Third-Party Content–Marvin v. Lanctot
This case involves the Warroad High School girls’ hockey team. Warroad, Minnesota is located just a few miles south of the Canadian border, near the Northwest Angle, and hockey appears to be a big thing in town (e.g., the town…
Defamation Claim Proceeds Against YouTuber’s Denialism–Robertson v. Upchurch
This case involves Ryan Upchurch, who Wikipedia describes as “an American rapper, singer-songwriter, and comedian.” He has 3M+ followers at YouTube. For unspecified reasons, Upchurch started discussing the tragic and highly publicized disappearance of Kiely Rodni on his YouTube channel….
A Peek Into the Long Tail of Facebook’s Litigation Docket
I’ve retired my old Quick Links format, so instead I’m rounding up a couple of Facebook cases that hit my alerts. Georgia Auto Group LLC v. Meta Platforms Inc., 2024 WL 2260718 (M.D. Ga. May 17, 2024) I’m blogging this…
X Corp. v. Bright Data is the Decision We’ve Been Waiting For (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Guy Rub, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law A Web Scraper Beats a Platform: The Same Story, but Different It seems like we’ve been here before, and not that long ago. A platform sues a web…
Supreme Court Fixes One Problem with the Copyright Statute of Limitations, But Punts Another — Warner Chappell Music v. Nealy (Guest Blog Post)
By Guest Blogger Tyler Ochoa Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court held 6-3 that assuming a copyright infringement claim is timely under the discovery rule of accrual, meaning that it was filed within three years of the date “when a…
Elon Musk’s Gifts to Web Scrapers (Guest Blog Post)
By Kieran McCarthy Elon Musk may have done more to open the Internet to web scraping than any person or public interest advocacy group. Not that he meant to do this, mind you. He was trying to do the opposite….
Section 230 Preempts Product Design Claims–Lama v. Meta
The court summarizes: Plaintiff alleges that Defendants failed “to implement a child protective procedure whereby parents, school personnel, and other children[-]responsible persons would be able to protect against online bullying wherein the defendants’ products were foreseeably weaponized to facilitate online…