Preemptive Challenge to California’s Mandatory Editorial Transparency Law Lacks Standing–Minds v. Bonta
The plaintiffs in this case are Minds, Inc., Tim Pool, the Babylon Bee, and National Religious Broadcasters, which are (respectively): “a social networking app, an active social media content creator,…
YouTube Still Isn’t a State Actor–RFK Jr. v. Google
In 2020, the Ninth Circuit held that YouTube was not a state actor. It still isn’t. The plaintiff here is RFK Jr., the leading presidential candidate among the #MAGA base…
Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee (Guest Blog Post)
…trespass to chattels. This is why Eric—who has been covering this issue for a good while now—tags all scraping posts as “Trespass to Chattels.” The idea behind this legal theory…
My Comments to the USPTO About the SAD Scheme and Anticounterfeiting/Antipiracy Efforts
[I submitted the following comments to the USPTO] __ To: United States Patent and Trademark Office, Department of Commerce From: Prof. Eric Goldman, Associate Dean for Research, Santa Clara University…
Court Says No Human Author, No Copyright (but Human Authorship of GenAI Outputs Remains Uncertain) (Guest Blog Post)
…of human authorship, and the defendant, Stephen Thaler, expressly told the Copyright Office that the work at issue, titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” “lack[ed] traditional human authorship.” Eric previously…
Court Doesn’t Expect YouTube to Moderate Content Perfectly–Newman v. Google
This is one of several ideologically motivated lawsuits against YouTube for allegedly engaging in “discriminatory” content moderation. The initial cohort of plaintiffs were conservatives (Prager); but then as a purported…
Facebook Easily Defeats Lawsuit Over User Posts–Hicks v. Bradford
Whoa, what a flashback. 😵 We used to see lawsuits like this 15+ years ago, but we don’t see them any more because they are so obviously doomed by Section…
Ninth Circuit Easily Dismisses Account Termination Case–King v. Facebook
This is a standard account termination case. The specific facts don’t matter to the outcome, but I enumerate a little more detail in my prior blog post. The 9th Circuit…
512(f) Once Again Ensnared in an Employment Ownership Dispute–Shande v. Zoox
DMCA Section 512(c), the notice-and-takedown provision, codifies a simple paradigm. Copyright owners are in the best position to spot and redress infringement, so they should identify alleged infringement to services…
LawTuber Loses Defamation Case–Broughty v. Bouzy
Broughty, using an alias, runs the “Nate the Lawyer” channel, part of the LawTube community, with over a quarter-million followers and 27M views. Like many other LawTubers, he sided against…