The plaintiff made the full text of its blog posts available via RSS. Newstex, an aggregator, subscribed to the RSS feed as part of its “Index” service (which it ultimately discontinued because it wasn’t profitable). The service automatically generated summaries…
This is part 1 of a 2-part series covering social media ownership disputes. This dispute involves the online accounts of the Satanic Temple of Washington: two Facebook pages, one of which had 17,000 followers, a Twitter account, and a “google…
by guest blogger Tanya Forsheit Virginia has officially become the second state in the country to enact what many have called a “comprehensive” privacy law, the Consumer Data Protection Act (“CDPA”), with Governor Northam’s signature on March 2, 2021. For…
I’m pleased to share my newest essay, “The Crisis of Online Contracts (as Told in 10 Memes),” which describes the “crisis” of overly formalist contract assent doctrines online in a brief, breezy, and (I hope) fun format. The essay’s key…
Ancestry.com publishes 450,000 old yearbooks in the form of 730M records that contain, at least, “the person’s name, photograph, school name, yearbook year, and city or town (at the time of the yearbook).” Ancestry doesn’t disclose how it acquires the…
This case doesn’t break much new ground doctrinally, but it’s a characteristically clear opinion from Judge Koh that offers some helpful lessons/reminders. The app in question is called “Sideline,” “a paid service that allows users to create a ‘virtual,’ alternative…
[This post covers three recent print-on-demand cases. After the Ohio State writeup, keep reading for more fun and confusion.] Redbubble operates in the print-on-demand industry, but it’s adopted a different organizational structure than some of its competitors. Redbubble outsources manufacturing…
This is a data breach lawsuit. Plaintiff was a patron of a restaurant (PDQ) that suffered a breach that compromised credit card payment information. The breach occurred because a hacker gained access to customer data through “an outside vendor’s remote…
Lawsuits over voice-activated assistants (and other smart home devices) are interesting. Plaintiffs have been creative about who asserts the claims to navigate around the issue that often sinks class actions: arbitration. This has resulted in claims brought by neighbors, spouses,…
Section 230’s 25th anniversary sent me on a nostalgia kick, which prompted me to revisit some articles that influenced me when I first started thinking about Internet Law (I graduated grad school in 1994). Due to their age, many of…