A Volcanic Opinion in the Fifth Circuit Destabilizes International Copyright Law—Vetter v. Resnik (Guest Blog Post)
By Guest Blogger Tyler Ochoa [Eric’s note: this is another Long Read post from Prof. Ochoa, clocking in at over 10k words.] Territoriality is a fundamental principle of international intellectual property law: each nation governs patents, trademarks, and copyrights within…
Relitigating hiQ Labs and Scraping Through the Lens of the DMCA 1201 Anti-Circumvention (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy A series of prominent web-scraping lawsuits are revisiting the fundamentals of public data access. And in so doing, with a slight reframing of a relatively settled legal issue, major platforms are challenging the presumption that…
It Takes a Lot for 512(f) Claims to Survive a Motion to Dismiss–Cordova v. Huneault
Cordova publishes videos on a YouTube channel,”Denver Metro Audits.” He claims that the defendants republish substantial portions of those videos on their YouTube channel, “Frauditor Troll Channel.” Cordova sent DMCA takedown notices targeting the defendants’ videos, but the defendants counternoticed…
Copyright Takedown Notices Don’t Require Services to Find and Remove Other Identical Copies–Athos v. YouTube
I previously summarized this case: Athos owns the copyrights to many classic Mexican films. Users regularly upload its film clips to YouTube. These uploads have irritated Athos since 2014. However, Athos rejected YouTube’s fast-lane options for copyright owners (such as…
DMCA 512(c) Safe Harbor Applies to Embedding–Harrington v. Pinterest
This is a long-running class action copyright case (filed in 2020!) led by the photographer Blaine Harrington (now deceased). The plaintiffs complain about user-uploaded photos appearing in Pinterest’s off-website notifications to its users (e.g., email, in-app, and mobile push). This…
2025 Internet Law Year-in-Review
2025 is the Trump 2.0 era, so you won’t find much upbeat news in this Internet Law year-in-review. 10. Are Websites Legally Equivalent to Exploding Coke Bottles? Traditionally, tort law distinguishes between tangible items (chattels) and intangible services. Several doctrines…
Schedule A: Ten Notable Developments in 2025 (Guest Blog Post)
By Sarah Fackrell, Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law It’s been a busy year on the Schedule A beat. In reflecting on the year, I’ve put together this quick round-up of ten of the top developments, in (rough)…
Google Can Assert a DMCA 512(d) Defense–Cengage v. Google (Catch-Up Post)
Textbook publishers are suing Google for its alleged role in facilitating what they consider to be mass piracy. In June 2025, the court partially denied Google’s motion to dismiss. Still remaining in the case are the plaintiffs’ contributory copyright infringement…
Are Robots.txt Instructions Legally Binding?–Ziff Davis v. OpenAI
Robots.txt files express a website’s preferences for robot access. Despite their venerability, there are not many cases discussing the legal implications of robots.txt files and robot exclusion headers.[FN] As a result, we still don’t know if they are legally effective…
Court Authorizes Unmasking Subpoena in Copyright Case–In re DMCA Subpoena to GoDaddy
The copyright owner Tamaris claims that 100+ websites, including “casinoestelar.com” and “powerbet.win,” infringe their copyrights. The copyright owner obtained a 512(h) unmasking subpoena and served it on GoDaddy. GoDaddy notified the site operator, who asked the court to quash the…