The court summarizes some of the plaintiff’s concerns: all [] [D]efendants acted with malice against [] [P]laintiff who is a member of a protected class “LGBTQ” as a self-identified gay individual, causing [] [P]laintiff to suffer monetary damages including loss of employment, and a wrongful suspension of his dental practicing privileges in Washington State and is serving to deprive him of future employment as a license practice practitioner [sic] in the State of Florida. This page gives you a sense of the complaints against the plaintiff. The plaintiff sued many defendants. I’ll focus on Se ..read more

In 2014, Medina sued Microsoft. Microsoft’s filings made some unredacted disclosures about Medina that were repeated in an unredacted court opinion, and those documents appeared on several websites that publish court documents. In 2020, Medina got the disclosures from the 2014 case sealed. He then sued the court document repository websites (and other defendants) for defamation, false advertising, and more. The trial court anti-SLAPPED that lawsuit. The appeals court affirms. I’ll concentrate on the Section 230 discussion. The court says Medina has no probability of prevailing against the repo ..read more

I previously described this case: Joseph Mercola ran a YouTube channel with 300k subscribers and 50M views. YouTube removed the channel for violating its medical misinformation policy (Mercola apparently peddled anti-vax views). Mercola sued YouTube for the usual things and got the usual outcomes. By the time the case reached the Ninth Circuit, the case had narrowed quite a bit. In the appeal, Mercola claimed that termination of his account violated the TOS’s provision that YouTube must provide reasonable advance notice of changed terms. But YouTube’s TOS said that it could remove ..read more

This case involves the Warroad High School girls’ hockey team. Warroad, Minnesota is located just a few miles south of the Canadian border, near the Northwest Angle, and hockey appears to be a big thing in town (e.g., the town calls itself Hockeytown USA). On October 30, 2023, a group of community members circulated a letter that seemingly accused head coach Marvin of player mistreatment and other misdeeds. Marvin sued a number of community members for their involvement with the letter, claiming defamation. The ruling I’m blogging today involves Kristin Coauette Johnson, whose relationship wit ..read more

This case involves Ryan Upchurch, who Wikipedia describes as “an American rapper, singer-songwriter, and comedian.” He has 3M+ followers at YouTube. For unspecified reasons, Upchurch started discussing the tragic and highly publicized disappearance of Kiely Rodni on his YouTube channel. (For a recap of Rodni’s story, see, e.g., this article). Kiely disappeared on August 6, 2022, and authorities claimed to have discovered her body on August 21, 2022. On August 21, Upchurch offered prayers for her family, and on August 22, Upchurch offered condolences to the Rodni family. The court summarizes ..read more

by guest blogger Guy Rub, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law A Web Scraper Beats a Platform: The Same Story, but Different It seems like we’ve been here before, and not that long ago. A platform sues a web scraper in the Northern District of California for (among others) a breach of its Terms of Service (ToS) —and the platform loses. In January, Meta lost such a claim against Bright Data. In March, X (formerly known as Twitter) lost its ToS breach claim against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), and just a few days ago, X lost again, this time to Bright Data. But ..read more

By Guest Blogger Tyler Ochoa Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court held 6-3 that assuming a copyright infringement claim is timely under the discovery rule of accrual, meaning that it was filed within three years of the date “when a plaintiff discovers or should have discovered an infringement,” there is no separate time limit on the amount of damages that a copyright owner may recover for the infringement.  Warner Chappell Music, Inc. v. Nealy, No. 22-1078 (U.S. May 9, 2024).  In so holding, however, the Court declined to resolve the logically antecedent question of whether the discover ..read more

By Kieran McCarthy Elon Musk may have done more to open the Internet to web scraping than any person or public interest advocacy group. Not that he meant to do this, mind you. He was trying to do the opposite. But by providing a foil in litigation against both the Center for Countering Digital Hate (“CCDH”) and Bright Data (the world’s largest seller of scraped data), he’s given judges in the most important district court in the country for tech legal issues, the Northern District of California, plenty of motivation to rule against him. As a result, judges have provided two landmark opinions i ..read more

The court summarizes: Plaintiff alleges that Defendants failed “to implement a child protective procedure whereby parents, school personnel, and other children[-]responsible persons would be able to protect against online bullying wherein the defendants’ products were foreseeably weaponized to facilitate online bullying,” and that, as a result of this failure, Plaintiff was harmed when he was subjected to hateful and bullying comments that were made about him on the “nrcs.anythings” Instagram account. The court concludes that this as a surprisingly easy Section 230 dismissal: ICS Provider ..read more

[This post got stuck in my drafts folder…sharing it now for completeness] I see many cases against government employees for posting and moderating content on social media. The topic is a doctrinal morass because many details can affect the analysis. Who set up the account? Were they employed by the government at the time? Even if the account was set up by the accountholder, do government employees have access to and actually use the account? Does the accountholder use other accounts that are more clearly related to their government work or political campaigning? Is the account “public” or “pri ..read more