Ten Reasons Why California’s New Data Protection Law is Unworkable, Burdensome, and Possibly Unconstitutional (Guest Blog Post)
By guest blogger Jeff Kosseff [Jeff Kosseff is an assistant professor of cybersecurity law at the U.S. Naval Academy. The views in this post are only his, and do not represent the Naval Academy, Department of Navy, or Department of…
Q2 2018 Quick Links, Part 3 (Privacy, Advertising, E-Commerce)
Privacy * Financial Times: How the wealthy use privacy laws to keep out of the news. GDPR as a pro-censorship tool * Techdirt: Companies Respond to the GDPR By Blocking All EU Users * Financial Times: Data protectionism: the growing menace to global business…
Amazon Again Avoids Liability for Defective Marketplace Item–Fox v. Amazon
This is a product liability lawsuit against Amazon due to a hoverboard purchased via Amazon that caught on fire. Plaintiffs bought the hoverboard from the Amazon site in November 2015 as a Christmas gift for their son. The son used…
Constitutional Challenge Against FOSTA Filed–Woodhull v. US (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Alex F. Levy Pres. Trump signed the “Allow Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” (FOSTA) into law on April 11, 2018. As many critics predicted, the law had an immediate chilling effect on a significant amount…
Catching Up on FOSTA Since Its Enactment (A Linkwrap)
Some links of note about what’s happened since the enactment of the Worst of Both Worlds FOSTA: * ReplyAll podcast on the Worst of Both Worlds FOSTA’s harmful effects on sex workers. One sex worker reports she knows of 13…
Lawsuit Over Cancer-Curing Honey Ads Still Sucks–Abid v. Google
Abid markets cancer-curing honey. He bought AdWords to promote his MightyHoney website. Google rejected the ads. He sued Google pro se for a variety of claims. The court previously granted Google’s motion to dismiss with leave to amend. My prior…
TWiT’s Trademark Lawsuit Against Twitter Sent Back to the Drawing Board
The popular and long-running show “This Week in Tech,” commonly called TWiT, sued Twitter. TWiT provides audio and video content branded under the TWiT trademark. It alleges that Twitter’s offering of video services and content under the TWITTER brand infringes…
YouTube Defeats Another Remove-and-Relocate Lawsuit–Song Fi v. Google
The YouTube “remove-and-relocate” cases involve similar facts. A YouTuber uploaded a video and promoted it. YouTube suspected irregularities with the promotion, removed the video from its initial URL (breaking inbound links, stripping the comments, and resetting the like and view…
The Ninth Circuit STILL Thinks Keyword Metatags Matter in 2018–Adidas v. Skechers
Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit ruled about trademarked stripes on tennis shoes. To me, legally weaponizing dots in three lines on a shoe predictably leads to wasteful and possibly anti-consumer litigation. However, instead of critiquing the opinion generally, I’ll isolate just…
Another Court Says Competitive Keyword Advertising Doesn’t Cause Confusion
This is a lawsuit between two Alzheimer’s-related non-profit organizations, the Alzheimer’s Association (the more established and better-funded group) and the Alzheimer’s Foundation (the relative upstart). I blogged a prior 2015 ruling. The potential for brand collisions in consumers’ minds seems…