SMS has copyright registrations in photos of its pump dispensers. It claims that a rival, Pharmaaid, is selling identical products and displays SMS’s photos in its Amazon store and on product packaging. Here’s SMS’s purported visual proof of Pharmaaid’s infringements:…
The High Tech Law Institute invites you to participate in the 21st annual Works-in-Progress Intellectual Property Colloquium (WIPIP), which will be held February 2-3, 2024, at Santa Clara University School of Law, in Santa Clara, California. This is an in-person…
You may have heard of this legislative drafting trick before. The legislature passes a law that’s likely unconstitutional, but the law doesn’t provide for enforcement by any state actors. Instead, the law creates a “bounty” system that rewards bounty hunters…
The New York City Department of Sanitation runs an internal message board for employees. An as-yet-unidentified employee posted a message to the board regarding a civil-service test cheating scandal. The pseudonymous message claimed that the plaintiff leaked the answers to…
Kiwi Farms, operated by Joshua Moon, is best known for coordinating cyberattacks on individuals, especially people with disabilities. Few people would lament the site’s demise, but to date it has avoided legal exposure (1, 2) and survived multiple deplatformings (e.g.,…
[Sorry it’s take me this long to get this blog post off my desk. I hope it was worth the wait.] We’ve seen a flood of terrible Internet laws in the past few years, including the California Age-Appropriate Design Code…
This opinion indicates that Facebook–and by implication, every other ad network–could violate California’s Unruh Act (an anti-discrimination law) by targeting third-party ads based on age, gender, or other protected criteria. The court reaches this shocking conclusion by cutting several analytical…
This lawsuit involves a tragic and deadly fire at a VRBO rental. The court dismisses VRBO from the resulting lawsuit on Section 230 and other grounds. That conclusion would have been unremarkable except that the Ninth Circuit held that VRBO…
Loomer produces trash content, which got her banned at Facebook and Twitter. In response, she has brought several trash lawsuits, which have gone as well as you’d expect. Her latest trash lawsuit claimed that social media, the government, and Procter…
McGucken is a professional photographer who has appeared on the blog before. He claims that third party “contributors” uploaded his copyrighted photos to ShutterStock as part of ShutterStock’s licensing program. Specifically, McGucken claims that a total of 337 images were…