This Week in the “DMCA Eating Copyright Law”: Cordova v. Huneault (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy A recent Northern District of California opinion in Cordova v. Huneault sent another bat-signal to those who follow this area of the law: copyright law in the context of public content is being consumed by…
Relitigating hiQ Labs and Scraping Through the Lens of 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…
AT&T Blocks T-Mobile’s Data Portability Efforts (Guest Blog Post)
By guest blogger Kieran McCarthy If you have ever wondered why big incumbents keep running to the Northern District of Texas the moment someone builds a tool that makes switching easier, comparing prices easier, or generally makes the internet work…
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…
Ninth Circuit Dismisses “Session Replay” Lawsuit–Popa v. Microsoft
This case involves “session replay” technologies, described as (cleaned up): the software embeds snippets of JavaScript computer code on a website, which then deploys on each website visitor’s internet browser for the purpose of intercepting and recording the website visitor’s…
Court Rejects Trespass to Chattels Claim Over Placing Cookies–Doe v. Tenet
This is a Meta pixels case. The pixel setup includes the placement of cookies on users’ devices. The plaintiffs argued that the cookie placement trespassed their devices. The court disagrees but gives plaintiffs leave to amend. (As usual, there is…
Reddit Challenges Anthropic’s Scraping to Create Generative AI Models (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy With as much scraping as is happening for AI training and enhancement these days, it’s amazing to me that there aren’t more lawsuits happening over scraping. The legal headlines are more of a trickle than…
Court Overturns a Bad Jury Verdict Against Scraping–Ryanair v Booking (Guest Blog Post)
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy This summer, I wrote that the jury trial between Ryanair and Booking Holdings ended in the strangest way possible. The jury returned a verdict that Booking Holdings had caused exactly $5,000 in legally cognizable “loss”…
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…
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…