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...
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...
My Twitter feed tells me that today is the fifth anniversary of the day the Internet “went dark” in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). For anyone who needs a reminder, SOPA and PIPA were pieces of copyright legislation touted by their...
The Internet is full of trolls. So it’s no surprise that notice and takedown systems for online speech attract their fair share of them – people insisting that criticism of their scientific research, videos of police brutality, and other legitimate online speech should be removed from Internet...
This blog post is excerpted from our filing in response to the U.S. Copyright Office's 2016 Notice and Request for Public Comment on notice and takedown practice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The entire filing is available here.
16. How effective is the counter-notification...
Watch out! Fake news is coming to get you! Lock your doors and iPhones, guard your dogs and children, and hold on to your comb overs! But is fake news so bad, and isn't some, all, or most of it legally protected parody?
According to the New York Times, "fake news" is "pure fiction masquerading as...
With the Second Circuit’s recent decision in EMI v. MP3Tunes, the formerly small body of case law interpreting § 512(i) of the DMCA – the “repeat infringer” provision – continues to grow. Last year, for example, district courts held service providers ineligible for safe harbor for...
In 2013, in a lecture at Columbia University, Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante announced an ambitious vision for the “Next Great Copyright Act.” That vision appropriately included a prominent role for the Copyright Office in helping policy makers work through some difficult issues...
A few weeks ago, after I published a blog post raising the question of what might happen to CDA 230 when internet intermediaries like Facebook invoke First Amendment protections – which civil liberties lawyers’ were calling on Facebook to do in the wake of the controversy over its trending newsfeed...