I’m reporting on a study by Bin Han, Chirag Shah, and Daniel Saelid called “Users’ Perception of Search Engine Biases and Satisfaction.” The authors showed two pages of Bing results to study participants. (An aside: Bing…really?) The first page was…
Maffick runs several Facebook pages. Due to Maffick’s possible ties to the Russian government, Facebook labeled the pages “Russia state-controlled media.” Maffick sued Facebook. In Sept. 2020, the court denied Maffick’s TRO request. Now, the court has dismissed the Lanham…
The initial interest confusion doctrine has always been a misguided doctrine that is too easy for plaintiffs to weaponize. Fortunately, the doctrine has been dying for over a decade. Few opinions mention it nowadays, and even fewer cite it in…
This is a tricky opinion to decipher. This opinion might say that Section 230 categorically doesn’t apply if the plaintiff claims an Internet service is defectively designed. That reading would largely reject the important First Circuit Doe v. Backpage ruling…
High Five Threads sells t-shirts and tchotchkes. It claims copyright and trademark protection for a depiction of upper and lower Michigan as two hands (left-most image below). People routinely depict lower Michigan as a hand, and apparently others envision the…
Today, the Oversight Board issued its decision regarding Facebook’s decision to suspend Trump’s account for two posts Trump made during the January 6 insurrection. The decision covers a lot of ground (it’s nearly 12k words), and I’ll only cover part…
This post recaps the court decisions analyzing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) so far. I only know of seven opinions as of May 1, 2021, a number that struck me as surprisingly small. (If you think I’m missing any,…
This is another lawsuit over a fiery Chinese-manufactured hoverboard sold through Amazon’s marketplace. In Bolger v. Amazon from August 2020, a California appellate court held that Amazon was strictly liable for marketplace items it fulfilled, and Section 230 immunity didn’t…
Minors allege that Amazon’s Alexa service improperly stores or utilizes their voiceprints. The district court denied Amazon’s request to force arbitration of the claims based on the fact that the plaintiffs, who were minors, were not signatories (or had not…
Long is a book author. He ran a Facebook business page to promote his work. An interloper, using the alias “Tammy Dorset,” gained administrator access to the Facebook page. Once in control of the page, Dorset allegedly posted items that…