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…
[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…
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…
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…
[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…
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…