Trump's Twitter Tantrums Are Affecting How Judges Evaluate Online Discourse--US v. Cook

The state unsuccessfully prosecuted Cook for drug offenses. “Not content to quietly accept his victory, Cook made disparaging remarks on the internet about various players in his Calhoun County prosecution.” The government prosecuted him again, this time for the federal…

IMDb has a subscription service, where subscribers can remove their age from their personal profiles (this feature wasn’t at issue in this case), and a free service, where IMDb displays an actor’s age (compiled from unspecified sources) even if the…

This is one of several lawsuits by unhappy Google advertisers, each claiming that Google screwed them out of Google’s self-interest. (A reminder that advertisers always feel screwed because they believe they deserve more customers for less money). Anti-Google lawsuits tend…

"Shitty Media Men" List Operator Doesn't Qualify for Section 230 (Yet)--Elliott v. Donegan

[Note: I will blog the Senate Judiciary Committee’s EARN IT bill in a blog post next week, after I stop crying.] This case involves a Google spreadsheet called “Shitty Media Men,” created by the defendant. The defendant’s goal was to…

Want to Learn More About Section 230? A Guide to My Work (UPDATED)

I’ve written a lot on Section 230 over the years. I thought it might be helpful to provide a narrated and highly selective bibliography: The Basics An Overview of the United States’ Section 230 Internet Immunity. This is the one-stop…

The USPTO believed that “generic.com” domain names were almost always generic and therefore unregistrable. On that basis, it denied registration for Booking.com. The Supreme Court holds that generic.com domain names aren’t necessarily generic, which means they have the potential to…

A Review of the "Final" CCPA Regulations from the CA Attorney General

On June 2, the California Attorney General’s office (the DOJ) released hundreds of pages of new material about its CCPA regulations, including 11,000+ words of its “final” regulations and a 59 page “final statement of reasons” purportedly explaining the DOJ’s…

My Interview With Mathew Ingram Regarding Section 230

[Note: I did this interview with Mathew Ingram in late February–before the recent flood of new anti-Section 230 activity in DC that I still need to blog. I had always planned to share it here, but the issue got backburnered…

Running Geotargeted Advertising Confers Personal Jurisdiction--UMG Recordings v. Kurbanov

The plaintiffs brought a copyright infringement lawsuit in the Eastern District of Virginia federal court. The defendants include FLVTO and 2conv, two Russian-based websites that enable users to engage in stream-ripping of YouTube videos and other sources (i.e., extracting the…

Court Upholds Formation of a Lengthy Contract Presented on a Mobile Device--Hidalgo v. AAU

The plaintiffs are suing over a data breach. The defendant sought to invoke its arbitration clause in its membership agreement. The court finds the contract formed and sends the case to arbitration. The case involves the following screenshot as part…