Snap Wants to be a State Actor??–Kansas v. Snap
For decades, private Internet services have uniformly tried to avoid being legally characterized as government actors. If they become state actors, they must comply with Constitutional restrictions–meaning the Constitutionally required freedoms of speech and press would extend to their user-authors…
Op-Ed: Meta’s $5 Billion Deal with the State AGs to Take Down its Rivals
[This op-ed was first published by the San Jose Mercury News on Sept. 18, 2026.] Meta’s settlement with the state attorneys general has been touted as industry-redefining. Indeed, Meta desperately hopes it will be. Although Meta was the only industry…
Collaborators Using the ‘Instagram Collabs’ Feature May Forego a Section 230 Defense–Winer v. Mohammed
[I have so many Section 230 cases backlogged in my blogging queue, but this one is jumping the queue because of its comparative novelty.] This is a defamation case between a professor and a student in the Emory School of…
Lawyer’s Fee Agreement Gagging Client Reviews Is Illegal–LS Carlson Law v. Sedgwick
Katie Sedgwick is a former client of LS Carlson Law. It sounds like she didn’t love working with them. She negatively reviewed the firm on Yelp. I had difficulty finding the original review. In response, the firm sued her for…
CJEU Judgment on Geoblocking & Standards for Knowledge of Foreign Copyright Laws and Geoblocking Measures (Guest Blog Post)
by Prof. Marketa Trimble UNLV Boyd Law School Last month, while sitting at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, a passenger typed www.annefrankmanuscripten.org on her laptop to look up the website at issue in the latest judgment by the Court of Justice of…
Another Court Shuts the Door on “Yelp Law” Drive-By Lawsuits–Arterberry v. Peet’s
Last week, I blogged the Moss v. GoDaddy decision holding that a key part of California’s Yelp Law doesn’t authorize a private right of action. If you didn’t read that post, go read it now because this post assumes you…
More Data on Online Age Authentication Balk Rates
In a prior post, I surveyed the rates at which consumers do not complete online age authentication processes, what I call the “balk” rate. There is no single canonical balk rate. It varies by destination behind the authentication wall, the…
Apple Defeats Liability for Not Scanning iCloud Items for CSAM, But the Judge Was Not Pleased–Amy v. Apple
This case involves Apple’s handling of user-uploaded files hosted in private iCloud storage. Instead of adopting PhotoDNA to scan hosted files for CSAM, Apple created its own proprietary alternative, NeuralHash, which apparently wasn’t as good. So Apple U-turned on its…
Large Roundup of Section 230 Rulings
This blog post rounds up nearly 20 Section 230 cases (and adjacent cases), mostly from the past four months, that for whatever reason I didn’t cover in a standalone blog post. Section 230’s effects are waning overall, but this post…
Cloudflare Defeats Lawsuit Over Nonconsensual Intimate Imagery (NCII) on Facebook–Doe v. Cloudflare
This is a putative class action lawsuit. The named plaintiff provided intimate images to her then-fiance, who (after the breakup) created fake Facebook profiles of the plaintiff and uploaded her intimate images without consent (turning the images into NCII). She…