Section 230 Protects Google's Decision Not To De-Index Content--Bennett v. Google

Dawn J. Bennett was a financial advisor in major trouble with the SEC. She also has a sporting apparel company. She hired an SEO, Pierson, to improve the search engine indexing of her website. After a payment dispute, Pierson posted…

Does the Packingham Ruling Presage Greater Government Control Over Search Results? Or Less? (Guest Blog Post)

By guest blogger Heather Whitney [Heather is a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School (Spring 2017). She has also been Bigelow Fellow & Lecturer in Law at University of Chicago Law School (2014-2016) and a Googler (2007-2010). She will be…

Frequency of Courts' References to Emojis and Emoticons Over Time

[This is another excerpt from my Emojis and the Law paper.] In preparing the article, I gathered a dataset of all cases I could find in Westlaw and Lexis containing the word “emoticon” or “emoji.” This dataset is subject to…

Ban on Sex Offenders Using Social Media Violates First Amendment--Packingham v. North Carolina

Yesterday, the Supreme Court struck down a North Carolina law that banned registered sex offenders from using social media sites. It’s a rare treat to get a Supreme Court opinion delving into Internet content regulations, and as a bonus, this…

Trademark Registrations for Emojis

[This is another excerpt from my Emojis and the Law paper.] The Trademark Office has registered emoji trademarks. On January 20, 2017, I conducted a search in the TESS database for “emoji” and identified 385 records. At that time, most…

I blogged about this case last year. (This case is also indexed in our compendium of nonconsensual pornography cases). In my prior post, I described the facts: Franco Caraccioli is a third-year law student in San Diego. For reasons not…

As I mentioned before, I helped organize a series of essays at The Atlantic addressing the question: “Is technology hurting our democracy, and can it help save it?” The series is now complete, so I thought it was worth revisiting…

Copyright Registrations for Emoticons and Emojis

[This is the first of a series of excerpts from my Emojis and the Law paper. Note that I’ve created a new blog category for “Emojis”–the first new category in years!] In my Emojis and the Law paper, I analyzed…

by guest blogger Marketa Trimble On May 18, 2017, the European Parliament adopted with amendments the EU Cross-Border Portability Regulation (Regulation (EU) of the European Parliament and of the Council on cross-border portability of online content services in the internal market)….