Joseph Mercola ran a YouTube channel with 300k subscribers and 50M views. YouTube removed the channel for violating its medical misinformation policy (Mercola apparently peddled anti-vax views). Mercola sued YouTube for the usual things and got the usual outcomes. Mercola…
A Twitter user sued over his account suspension. The court dismissed the case without prejudice. Blog post coverage of that ruling here. The user tried again. Same result. Section 230. Twitter qualifies for the standard three-element test for 230: Twitter…
This is a competitive keyword advertising lawsuit. The plaintiff has a trademark registration for the “Nursing CE Central” mark for providing continuing education for nurses. [Note: if it’s not obvious, “CE” is an abbreviation for “continuing education.” Just like we…
The plaintiffs in this case are Minds, Inc., Tim Pool, the Babylon Bee, and National Religious Broadcasters, which are (respectively): “a social networking app, an active social media content creator, a satirical news website, and a nonpartisan association of Christian…
In 2020, the Ninth Circuit held that YouTube was not a state actor. It still isn’t. The plaintiff here is RFK Jr., the leading presidential candidate among the #MAGA base of the Democratic party. Even his relatives have condemned him…
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping. Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to…
[I submitted the following comments to the USPTO] __ To: United States Patent and Trademark Office, Department of Commerce From: Prof. Eric Goldman, Associate Dean for Research, Santa Clara University School of Law Date: August 22, 2023 Re: Comments regarding…
by guest blogger Heather Whitney To the surprise of no one, a D.C. district court granted summary judgment for the Copyright Office in Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 1:22-cv-01564 (D.D.C. Aug. 18, 2023), affirming the Copyright Office’s position that “a work…
This is one of several ideologically motivated lawsuits against YouTube for allegedly engaging in “discriminatory” content moderation. The initial cohort of plaintiffs were conservatives (Prager); but then as a purported “gotcha,” the law firm added LGBTQ (Divino) and people of…
Whoa, what a flashback. 😵 We used to see lawsuits like this 15+ years ago, but we don’t see them any more because they are so obviously doomed by Section 230. This case involves a shooting of police officers. Multiple…