Conflict of Laws Has Caught Up with Silicon Valley. Now Silicon Valley Needs to Catch Up on Conflict of Laws (Guest Blog Post)
By guest blogger Marketa Trimble On October 24 and 25, 2016, the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School hosted a conference entitled “Law, Borders, and Speech.” The excellent, thought-provoking conference featured panels of U.S. and international speakers, a…
Now the Seventh Circuit Is Shitting On Section 230–Huon v. Denton
Section 230’s trainwreck of a year adds another derailment. MAKE. IT. STOP. This case is a defamation-plus lawsuit over two stories, one published on Above the Law and the other by the Gawker property Jezebel. The Jezebel story described plaintiff…
Section 230 Ruling Against Airbnb Puts All Online Marketplaces At Risk–Airbnb v. San Francisco
San Francisco wants to curb Airbnb listings. It adopted a license-and-tax requirement for Airbnb vendors (who Airbnb confusingly calls “hosts”). Vendors widely ignored SF’s rules. To minimize its enforcement obligations, SF sought to deputize Airbnb as its enforcement agency. Thus,…
Section 230 Doesn’t Protect Amazon From Products Liability Claims–McDonald v. LG
This case involves an exploding cellphone battery. LG manufactured the battery and an Amazon marketplace vendor Safetymind sold it to the buyer. In addition to suing LG, the injured buyer sued Amazon for negligent failure to warn, negligence, and breach…
Constitutional Challenge to Section 230 Fails On Standing Grounds–AFDI v. Lynch
This lawsuit involves a facial attack on Section 230 on First Amendment grounds. The plaintiffs are unhappy that, protected by Section 230, social media companies have squelched some of their speech while allowing other speakers to promulgate content they don’t…
Backpage Can’t Challenge the SAVE Act–Backpage v. Lynch
I never had a chance to blog the 2015 SAVE Act, but I always meant to. It’s one of the rare times that Congress intentionally circumscribed Section 230. However, instead of amending Section 230 directly, Congress added a federal criminal…
Google Loses Two Section 230(c)(2) Rulings–Spy Phone v. Google and Darnaa v. Google
Section 230(c)(2) doesn’t get a lot of love from practitioners or academics because it doesn’t get a lot of love in court. At the motion to dismiss stage, plaintiffs often can get past a Section 230(c)(2) defense by alleging the…
Court Upholds Airbnb’s Terms of Service–Selden v. Airbnb
This lawsuit alleges that Airbnb’s “hosts” racially discriminate when accepting customers’ bookings. Airbnb sought to send the case to arbitration per its Terms of Service, which the plaintiffs challenges. Contract Formation Trying to sort through the nomenclature confusion created by…
2H 2016 Quick Links, Part 1 (Special Election Edition)
I’ve already cast my ballot, and I hope you will vote too. I don’t normally wade into election politics but there have been several election issues that touch on topics of interest to this blog. So, for the first time,…
Stock Music Library Wins DMCA Safe Harbor Defense–Hempton v. Pond5
Gordon Hempton, an “acoustic ecologist,” creates sound clips of nature. Pond5 runs a stock library–similar to an online marketplace–consisting of 20M content items, including music clips, uploaded by 58,000 registered users. “ckennedy342” is a Pond5 uploader who, it turns out,…