Comments on the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton SCOTUS Oral Arguments on Mandatory Online Age “Verification”
Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, regarding a Texas law that requires adult-oriented websites to age-authenticate all users–minors and adults alike–before they can enter their “virtual” premises. If this sounds familiar, that’s because…
Catching Up on the Heavyweight Scraping Battle Between X and Bright Data (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy Last year, I wrote about how Elon Musk had inadvertently become web scrapers’ most powerful legal advocate. Not because he wanted to advocate for them. But rather, in seeking to enforce a no-scraping ban in…
Court Denies Preliminary Injunction Against Minnesota’s Anti-“Deepfakes” Law–Kohls v. Ellison
“Minnesota Statutes section 609.771 prohibits, under certain circumstances, the dissemination of ‘deepfakes’ with the intent to injure a political candidate or influence the result of an election.” The plaintiffs brought a pre-enforcement challenge to the law, but the court denies…
Copyright Battles Over City Council Videos
As the maxim goes, all politics are local. A corollary is that few political disputes are as nasty or vitrolic as local politics. When local disputes devolve into total warfare, the parties grasp for any legal leverage against their sworn…
2024 Internet Law Year-in-Review
My ranking of the top 10 Internet Law developments of 2024. 10) X/Twitter Embraces Partisan Bias. For years, MAGA has claimed that Internet company employees are liberals and therefore surely moderate content to favor their preferred team (the Democrats) and…
California’s “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act” Is Partially Unconstitutional…But Other Parts Are Green-Lighted–NetChoice v. Bonta
California SB 976, “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act,” is one of the multitudinous laws that pretextually claim to protect kids online. Like many such laws nowadays, it’s a gish-gallop compendium of online censorship ideas: Age authentication! Parental…
The Fifth Circuit’s Campaign to Undermine Section 230 Is Making Progress–AB v. Salesforce
This is a FOSTA case involving Backpage, but it’s against Backpage’s vendor Salesforce. That makes this a tertiary liability claim. Here are the steps in the plaintiffs’ alleged chain of liability: V) victims promoted in Backpage advertisements (plaintiffs) –> D1)…
Omegle Defeats Lawsuit Over User’s “Capping”–MH v. Omegle
I previously described this case: Omegle enables real-time video and text chats with users assigned at random. The case involves an 11 year old girl who was a first-time Omegle user. The complaint alleges that a malefactor John Doe manipulated…
Unfair and Impolite Tweets Aren’t Defamatory–Flynn v. Wilson
The plaintiff in this case is Mike Flynn, who served in important roles in the Trump 1.0 administration, got fired, and received a Trump pardon. I previously blogged his lawsuit against CNN. The defendants include Rick Wilson, a Lincoln Project…
Suspended Twitter User Loses Lawsuit Due to Section 230–Ryan v. X
[This blog post covers two decisions in the same lawsuit: the ruling on X’s initial motion to dismiss from September, which apparently never triggered my Westlaw or Lexis alerts, and then a ruling on X’s motion to dismiss the amended…