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…
This is a standard account termination case. The specific facts don’t matter to the outcome, but I enumerate a little more detail in my prior blog post. The 9th Circuit panel’s very short narrative includes: “there is no private right…
DMCA Section 512(c), the notice-and-takedown provision, codifies a simple paradigm. Copyright owners are in the best position to spot and redress infringement, so they should identify alleged infringement to services and seek intervention when they see infringements. This paradigm, however,…
Broughty, using an alias, runs the “Nate the Lawyer” channel, part of the LawTube community, with over a quarter-million followers and 27M views. Like many other LawTubers, he sided against Heard in his coverage of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial….
Dr. Wilbur Hah is a board-certified cosmetic surgeon in Texas. In 2020, he performed procedures for four patients, Chesson, Gage, Melton, and Robinson (tragically now deceased). All of the patients signed a “Contract of Reasonable Expectations” that restricted “post[ing] any…