Technology & Marketing Law Blog

This is a copyright infringement lawsuit among pro se litigants. The dispute sideswipes YouTube, but YouTube is able to exit on a motion to dismiss. The plaintiff claims a copyright in a book, Drug Lords of Oakland. The defendants operate a YouTube channel, Evil Streets TV. The plaintiff says that the defendants posted 15 videos, each of which narrated a chapter from his book, plus some videos included copyrighted photos from the book. The court implies the dispute roughly followed a DMCA…

This is a very recent Emojico SAD Scheme enforcement (filed last week). I’ve blogged a few Emojico cases before (see the link list below). Indeed, my interest in the SAD Scheme started with an Emojico case, so I pay a little extra attention to their litigation pratfalls. Here, a court easily and instantly flyswats away their bogus case. Emojico started with the standard SAD Scheme argument that all of the defendants are counterfeiters, which necessarily proves they are infringers, res ipsa…

This is a putative class action lawsuit. The named plaintiff provided intimate images to her then-fiance, who (after the breakup) created fake Facebook profiles of the plaintiff and uploaded her intimate images without consent (turning the images into NCII). She requested Facebook remove the images, and when that didn’t happen, she got the local sheriff’s office to serve a search warrant on Facebook, allegedly demanding removal of the images. (That doesn’t sound like how search warrants work,…

The plaintiffs are a husband-wife couple, Khan and Abdulhamid. They are both Muslim and ethnically Middle Eastern. The plaintiffs bought a house in the Island Lake of Novi residential community in suburban Detroit. Halmaghi was the seller’s listing agent. The plaintiffs allege that Halmaghi made various racist remarks during the sales process. The husband posted a negative online review of Halmaghi. After that, Halmaghi kicked them out of the private Facebook group she administered called…

Scammers used Mike Huckabee’s name and image to hawk CBD products in Facebook ads. I’m not in the ad’s target audience, so it blows my mind that anyone would buy anything because Huckabee touted it (or was falsely claimed to). The question in this case is whether Facebook is liable for the scammy ads. The lower court dismissed the case due to the scienter requirements of Arkansas’ publicity rights statute. At the same time, the lower court rejected Section 230 due to the atrocious Anderson v.…

I’m blogging this case only because it’s one of those “what are we even doing here?” lawsuits. Cases like this belong in the CCB or, better yet, should not be brought at all! * * * The case involves a photo called the “Parker Train Photo.” It was taken in 1962, but it was first published in a book in 2000. The plaintiff claims it licenses the photo for fine art reproductions for up to $5k each. Messiah ran a blog initially entitled “Ask Fashion Kitty.” In 2009, she wrote a post entitled “Style…

The blog post covers two cases involving scammy ads on Facebook that were part of a pump-and-dump for Chinese penny stocks. The first two rulings came in March. In the Bouck case, the court rejected Facebook’s Section 230 defense because Facebook’s generative AI allegedly contributed to the ad copy. In the Suddeth case, the court accepted Facebook’s Section 230 defense because the plaintiffs focused on algorithmic amplification. Although the Bouck case initially overcame Section 230, in an…

Created by ChatGPT Jan. 2026 Censorship efforts tend to come in fads. Censors get fired up about a new censorship theory and try it out, but the experiment tends to not satisfy them (either because it’s struck down or doesn’t scratch their censorship itch enough) and they move onto the next censorship fad. Rinse and repeat. Around 2020, a censorship fad was to impose common carriage obligations to restrict the editorial decision-making of Internet publishers. This fad triggered a lot of…

This case involves a Texas statute (Senate Bill 2420, the App Store Accountability Act) requiring app stores to age-authenticate their users and obtain parental consent (among other requirements). I oppose this law and all other online age authentication mandates. The district court enjoined the law after applying strict scrutiny. On appeal, the Fifth Circuit embraces its characteristic chaos. First, it stayed the injunction without issuing an opinion. This is always terrible. Lifting the…

by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy On March 9, 2026, Judge Chesney granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Amazon v. Perplexity, concluding Amazon was likely to succeed on its CFAA and California Penal Code section 502 theories. If you’re familiar with the CFAA, the outcome of the preliminary injunction opinion was what you might expect. But it is underwhelming in some new and interesting ways. It is, in my opinion, a shockingly poor effort to grapple with CFAA applicability to agentic AI…

According to her website (sorry, no link love here), Katherine Starr is a 2-time Olympian (she swam on Great Britain’s swim team under the name “Annabelle Cripps“) and a sexual abuse survivor. She now spends a lot of time thinking about the law, self-describing as a “legal theorist.” Her website has a page where she offers “legal strategy services.” Note: I checked her LinkedIn page and she didn’t indicate that she has a law degree or is licensed to practice as a lawyer. Legal training or a law…

There have been thousands of SAD Scheme cases in the Northern District of Illinois, but this extensive litigation activity has produced only a small handful of Seventh Circuit opinions. This lack of appellate review has played a major role in perpetuating the SAD Scheme. District court judges have repeatedly found ways to rationalize bogus arguments from plaintiffs (often because no defendant was around to correct them), even dicey arguments that seemed unlikely to survive an appeal. I and…

In search engine parlance, the “bounce” rate is the percent of searchers who click on a search results link and then immediately hit the back button. High bounce rates usually signal that something has gone wrong. Either the destination website didn’t appeal to the user enough to convert them to engage more, or the search result wasn’t what the consumer was looking for (or both). Created by ChatGPT May 2026 I’m going to analogize bounce rates to the rate that consumers fail to overcome age…

[I’ve been sitting on this ruling for almost a month because blog posts like this are time-consuming and emotionally draining to write. It may not look it, but this post took about 6 hours to write.] This case involves a terrible tragedy: genocidal violent attacks on the Rohingya minority in Myanmar at the beginning of the 2010s. The plaintiffs sued Facebook for its role in the attacks, such as its alleged algorithmic turbocharging of rage content posted by its users. Despite the tragedy, the…

This court summarizes: “At the core of Taddeo-Waite’s complaint is his desire to hold X liable for allegedly maintaining a graphic and upsetting post on its platform, amplifying the reach of that post, and hampering the extent of Taddeo-Waite’s own content.” In a prior ruling, the court upheld Twitter’s TOS and sent the case from D. Conn. to N.D. Tex. In my prior post, I wrote: “The relocation of the case from Connecticut to N.D. Tex. only delays the inevitable. This case is doomed due to…

I’ve posted a transcript of a conversation between me and my TSPA and TSF cofounders Adelin Cai and Clara Tsao, guided by Amanda Menking of TSF. In the conversation, we discuss the origin stories of the Trust & Safety Professional Association and the Trust & Safety Foundation. I hope telling their origin stories highlight some of the opportunities and strategic threats facing the Internet today. The transcript is a chapter in a remarkable new book entitled “Trust, Safety, and the Internet We…

This is the remand of the troubling Ninth Circuit Section 230 decision in Bride v. YOLO. As you may recall, the plaintiffs claims that YOLO made statements about its content moderation and the safety of its environment that the plaintiffs believe were not true; and based on that, YOLO should be liable for users’ physical and emotional harms. In its prior ruling, the Ninth Circuit said that Section 230 doesn’t apply to promise-based claims. That ruling allowed the plaintiffs to proceed against…

In one of Judge Alsup’s last rulings before he retired, after a bench trial he rejected LegalForce’s trademark claims over the LawFirms logo (the first logo was pre-litigation; the defendant switched to the second logo during the litigation). (Reminder: LegalForce runs Trademarkia). It was a classic Judge Alsup move. The plaintiff’s dubious assertions survived a motion to dismiss, but Judge Alsup hammered the plaintiff when its proof ultimately didn’t support its claims. In my prior blog post,…

The court describes the video in question (as alleged): an anonymous social media account and online “persona” known as Rain Drops Media (“Rain Drops”) published a defamatory video falsely suggesting that Eizenga was an abusive partner who battered Monroe Capri Bryant (“Bryant”), a young social media influencer. The video in question consists of a collage of other social media posts and clips from Bryant’s live-stream featuring Plaintiff and Bryant together along with a caption that reads,…

Abbigail Rajala posted a critical review of her dating experience with Nikko D’Ambrosio on the Chicago subboard of Facebook’s Spill the Tea group. According to the district court, D’Ambrosio “sued anyone remotely associated with those posts for all possible, imaginable claims, including the woman who dated him and her parents, women commenting on posts, the operators of the Facebook group, and Facebook itself.” The district court dismissed his case. The Seventh Circuit affirms, says parts of…

This is a run-of-the-mill photographer copyright enforcement action. As a commission for an advertiser, Vedros created a photo that depicts “a dog placing its front paws on a scale with a cat nearby, and shows both animals looking at the dog’s weight….[including] removing the dog’s collar and placing it next to the scale.” The defendant breeds English Labrador dogs and operates a website emlabradors.com. [A reminder: adopt, don’t shop.] The breeder’s website included a blog, and on February 4,…

The named plaintiff is a professor. The defendant is a website, Academia, that helps professors share their works publicly. Academia heavily promotes its “Mentions” service that tracks a professor’s mentions and citations. [Historically, I have used a variety of free services to track my vanity mentions. Most are gone or unreliable at this point, but I don’t think I would pay for this service]. New Academia accountholders will immediately get this email promotion: Clicking on the “View your…

Two more account termination/content removal cases fail, like dozens before them. Tate v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 2026 WL 1146745 (N.D. Cal. April 28, 2026) This case involves the manosphere enthusiasts the Tate bros, Andrew and Tristian. Instagram terminated six of their accounts for “promoting’ dangerous individuals or organizations’ or for inciting misogyny.” Due to the Tate bros’ legal entanglements in Romania, the bros claimed their deplatforming was connected to “a broader, ideologically…

[This is a ruling from a month ago…I just learned about it.] The court starts out: “Plaintiff’s pursuit of a preliminary injunction in this “Schedule A” patent infringement suit fizzled out after plaintiff abandoned its appeal of my order denying that relief.” The bond amount was $10k. One of the restrained defendants sought damages out of the bond. The defendant claimed $94k of damages due to the TRO. The court said the evidence supporting the $94k wasn’t adequate. As a plan B, the defendant…

By guest blogger Sarah Fackrell, Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law Plaintiffs are often allowed to choose their own forum. But they’re not supposed to be able to choose their own judge. And yet, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, some Schedule A plaintiffs appear to be doing just that. For example, the maneuver I call “defendant pinching” generally goes like this: Plaintiffs will file Schedule A cases against some number of defendants. If they draw…

Prior blog post. This 11th Circuit decision involves the following screen: In a split opinion, a majority says this TOS formation failed: Zeus chose to bury the page containing that agreement behind a hyperlink that itself was written in small, gray text that Tejon did not have to click. This text was located beneath large, red action buttons that Tejon did have to click. Was the hyperlink text enough to put Tejon on notice that clicking on the large, red buttons would subject him to binding…

This is a rare Seventh Circuit opinion on the SAD Scheme (it’s nonprecedential). The defense didn’t contest the appeal, but even without opposition, the rightsowner still whiffs. The court contextualizes the case: Intellectual property lawsuits like this one have flooded the Northern District of Illinois. In a typical case, the IP holder files trademark or copyright infringement claims against multiple foreign merchants selling goods on e-commerce platforms like Amazon or Etsy. The plaintiff…

The defendant offers a browser extension that displays popup windows over e-commerce sites showing price comparison information. Enterpreneurs have been trying to make this sort of functionality happen since the late 1990s. Maybe this browser extension will succeed where thousands have failed before. An online retailer objected to the popup window and sued. We saw a spate of lawsuits over third-party modifications to a web page, such as framing, 20-25 years ago, testing many legal theories.…

This case involves two videos: a video of basketball legend Michael Jordan breaking up a fight, and a video interview with rapper Melle Mel. Videographer Delray Richardson owned the copyrights to both videos. Townsquare operates XXL, an online hip-hop news publication. A Twitter account, DailyLoud, posted the Jordan video to X. XXL embedded it in a story about the video. The Art of Dialogue posted the Melle Mel video to YouTube, and XXL embedded that in a story about the interview. XXL also…

by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy After the Supreme Court’s first and only CFAA decision in Van Buren v. US in 2021, I wrote that the Court “could have done 10% more work here and provided clarity on very key questions….[but SCOTUS] declined the opportunity to do so. In the end, there are remarkably few clear, declarative sentences in this opinion that provide guidance for future cases.” The Court intentionally left open many key questions. And so it should come as no surprise that there has…