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...
In defending Facebook against government scrutiny by invoking First Amendment rights, we’ve overlooked the legal consequences for CDA 230 and risk constitutionalizing the web.
In the wake of recent reporting of Facebook’s alleged liberal curation of its trending newsfeed and Sen. John Thune’s...
The Facebook Trending Topics controversy has been analyzed from many angles, but there's been virtually no attention paid to the single most troubling aspect of the story: a Senate inquiry into Facebook's editorial decision-making process. My Slate column on the issue is here.
Jonathan Taplin’s op-ed (Do You Love Music? Silicon Valley Doesn’t) in the May 20 edition of The New York Times perpetuates a powerful dichotomy that has come to dominate debates surrounding copyright reform, specifically with respect to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): you’re either for...
April 2016 in Retrospect is available here:
http://www.internetjurisdiction.net/observatory/retrospect/2016-april/
Good data about Notice and Takedown can be hard to find. Jennifer Urban and Laura Quilter’s seminal 2006 study has long been the gold standard, combining rigorous number-crunching with what must have been incredibly tedious substantive review of the copyright claims in DMCA notices. Now Urban, along...
This is the last of four posts on the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECHR) rulings in Delfi v. Estonia and MTE v. Hungary. In both cases, national courts held online news portals liable for comments posted by their users – even though the platforms did not know about the comments. Those rulings...
This is the third of four posts on the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECHR) rulings in Delfi v. Estonia and MTE v. Hungary. In both cases, national courts held online news portals liable for comments posted by their users – even though the platforms did not know about them. These rulings...
This is the second of four posts on real-world consequences of the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECHR) rulings in Delfi v. Estonia and MTE v. Hungary. Both cases arose from national court rulings that effectively required online news portals to monitor users’ speech in comment forums. The first...
Last summer, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) delivered a serious setback to free expression on the Internet. The Court held, in Delfi v. Estonia, that a government could compel a news site to monitor its users’ online comments about articles.* This winter, the Court’s...