[Continuing with the blog’s celebration of its 20 year blogiversary, I’m sharing this reflection from Ethan Ackerman.] In the early oughts (zeros?)–right around Y2K, the .com crash and 9/11–the ‘series of tubes’ that was the Internet was, while still a…
Continuing with the blog’s celebration of its 20 year blogiversary, I’m sharing this reflection from Jess Miers. __ My name is Jess Miers, and I am a legal academic and a passionate advocate for the Internet. The blog holds a…
Six4Three developed an app called “Pikinis” (a/k/a “Pikini”), which enabled its users to search Facebook for photos of women in bikinis. 🙄 The app drew upon Facebook’s Graph API. Facebook later shut down Six4Three’s API access for what seemed to…
Two noteworthy rulings this week from the Fourth Circuit regarding TOS formation issues. Dhruva v. CuriosityStream, Inc., No. 24-1080 (4th Cir. March 10, 2025) Curiosity Stream is a paywalled site for documentary videos. The plaintiffs brought a Meta pixels case…
by guest blogger Riana Pfefferkorn Child sex abuse material, or CSAM, is a longstanding scourge on the Internet. Like the baseball diamond in “Field of Dreams,” if you build a service that allows file transmission or storage, someone will come…
Qian uploaded content to YouTube, which YouTube restricted in various ways. Qian sued YouTube for breaching its TOS. The district court granted summary judgment to YouTube. The Second Circuit affirms. YouTube’s TOS contained a standard reservation of rights to do…
Motekaitis and Kneass worked for USI. There were rumors about the circumstances of their departure. Marsh & McLennan (MMA) was contemplating hiring Motekaitis, but then an email from a USI employee (Kane) about Motekaitis spooked MMA. MMA employees allegedly circulated…
This case involves Viral DRM, which syndicates third-party videos of extreme weather events. It claims that 7News Australia downloaded videos from YouTube, stripped out the copyright management information (CMI), and incorporated the videos into its own videos that it uploaded…
Capital One has a “refer-a-friend” program for its customers. Capital One provides its customers with promotional content and a customer-specific referral URL. Customers can edit the content as they see fit, then send it to their friends (or their enemies…
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”…