Section 230 Doesn't Apply to Publication of Private Emails--Crowley v. Faison

Faison runs the Sacramento chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM). She received several racist and offensive emails from an email address purporting to be Karra Crowley. Faison posted the emails to BLM’s Facebook page and identified Karra as the sender….

By guest blogger Lisa Ramsey, Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law Federal Circuit holds refusal to register a political message for T-shirts violates the First Amendment, but fails to acknowledge that these types of registrations can…

Bell published a short book in 1982. It contained a passage that has become a meme in the sports community. Bell has separately registered a copyright in the passage. Bell has filed at least 25 copyright lawsuits. This one has…

Copyright Office Rejects Registration for AI-Created Works

Thaler filed an application to register the copyright in this work, entitled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”: Thaler explained the work “was autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine” and he was “seeking to register this computer-generated…

Section 230 Immunizes TikTok for User-Posted Videos--Day v. TikTok

Day discovered videos on TikTok of her 2-year-old daughter being abused. That’s horrifying, but the opinion doesn’t address the many obvious followup questions, such as: where was the daughter during the abuse? who was abusing the daughter? was that person…

Airline Sues to Stop Popular Web-Scraping Service--American Airlines v. The Points Guy (Guest Blog Post)

by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy Those interested in web scraping legal issues had high hopes that the Supreme Court’s opinion in Van Buren v. United States last summer would provide clear guidelines on which types of online data access were…

How Fair Use Helps Bloggers Publish Their Research (Cross-Post)

[I published this post initially on the Association of Research Libraries blog in celebration of Fair Use Week 2022. Prayers for Ukraine.] Bloggers play an increasingly important role in the research ecosystem, especially as investigative journalism has declined. Bloggers often…

A Glimmer of Hope That the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) Won't Turn Into a Troll Factory

This is much-delayed blog coverage of the Copyright Office’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking addressing “procedures related to conducting an active proceeding, post-determination review, smaller claims, and the conduct of parties.” The NPRM would allow (1) anyone in a corporate family…

Section 230 Protects Google for Including Telegram In Its App Store--Ginsberg v. Google

The plaintiffs claim that violent extremists, anti-Semites, haters, and other malefactors use Telegram, and thus its availability in the Google Play Store violates Google’s Developer Guidelines. This is yet another remix of the old Noah v. AOL case, where a…

So Many Unanswered Empirical Questions About FOSTA

I read an article, “Sex Trafficking and Technology: A Systematic Review of Recruitment and Exploitation,” by Lindsay B. Gezinski & Kwynn M. Gonzalez-Pons (unfortunately paywalled). They did a comprehensive and systematic review to identify empirical studies that bear on online…