On May 11, 2022, the Fifth Circuit reinstated Texas state law HB 20 which allows private parties to sue tech platforms with 50M+ MAUs for their censorship of user-generated content based on “the viewpoint of a user or another person”. On May 13, technology lobbying groups NetChoice and the Computer...
“Loaded” Kodi set-top boxes are back in the copyright news again this week. (If you’re wondering what Kodi boxes are, and what they have to do with copyrights, here’s a backgrounder.) The CJEU has decided BREIN v. Wullems, a case involving the rights of communication to the public and reproduction...
The EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect in the spring of 2018, bringing with it a newly codified version of the “Right to Be Forgotten” (RTBF). Depending how the new law is interpreted, this right could prove broader than the “right to be de-listed” established...
This is the last of three posts on the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Mavrix v. LiveJournal. The first post considered the court’s conclusion that LiveJournal’s moderation and curation of user-submitted posts created a triable issue of fact on the question of the site’s eligibility for the section 512...
This is the second of three posts on the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Mavrix v. LiveJournal. The first post considered (and found fault with) the court’s conclusion that LiveJournal’s moderation and curation of user-submitted posts created a triable issue of fact on the question of the site’s...
The Ninth Circuit has decided Mavrix Photographs v. LiveJournal, and the outcome is in every respect bad news for LiveJournal. In some respects, it’s also bad for the safe harbors themselves, as I’ll explain below and in subsequent posts. The district court in the case granted summary judgment for...
Amazon’s latest effort to mitigate IP infringement in its third-party seller program is a ban on the sale of streaming media devices (“Kodi boxes”) that promote piracy. In addition to banning sales of the devices, Amazon reserves the right to destroy any offending physical inventory in its...
Late last month, I posted to SSRN a draft of my forthcoming article, “Notice and Takedown in the Domain Name System: ICANN’s Ambivalent Drift into Online Content Regulation.” The article takes a close look at ICANN’s role in facilitating a new program of extrajudicial notice and takedown in the DNS...