Clients sometimes ask whether filing bankruptcy can protect them from Federal Trade Commission scrutiny. The saga of Joseph Rensin and his company BlueHippo provides an opportunity to review the limited protection bankruptcy provides from the FTC. For more on the underlying case see our prior blog posts here and here. Rensin, the owner of BlueHippo, has succeeded – at least temporarily – in his latest effort to avoid paying the $13.4 million judgment entered…

The Supreme Court recently plucked public access television out of your neighbor’s basement and clarified the state-action doctrine in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck. The result has made it all the more important for content creators to understand the types of entities hosting their content. So let’s drop the blue screen and roll cameras because we’re live in 5-4-3-2-1. The plaintiffs in Halleck alleged that MNN, the private nonprofit that manages the New York City public access…

On May 17, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would not hear an appeal in Supply Pro Sorbents, LLC v. RingCentral, Inc., apparently satisfied with a Ninth Circuit ruling that the inclusion of a one-line company identifier on a fax cover page was not in violation of the TCPA’s bar on unsolicited advertisements. In Supply Pro, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal of a Junk Fax Prevention Act (“JFPA”) claim, holding that…

A new decision out of the Middle District of Florida may signal further erosion of the FTC’s authority to seek monetary relief as it sets forth a heightened standard of proof the FTC must satisfy to support its disgorgement calculation. In FTC v. Vylah Tech LLC, the court found Vylah Tech, a small tech company, liable for disseminating false and misleading information regarding its computers. However, the court completely shut down the FTC’s demand for…

These days, Big Tech is Big News. While federal lawmakers have recently turned their attention to tech giants and their market power—and launched a broad antitrust probe to boot—a recent decision out of the D.C. Circuit may offer these companies some respite (for now). In a case that pitted fourteen locksmith companies against three tech giants, the appeals court ruled that the safe harbor protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”) applied…

About a month ago, we blogged about how the FTC brought its first-ever cases under the Consumer Review Fairness Act (CRFA) since the statute went into effect in 2017. Well, it looks like the FTC was just getting started, as it announced this week that it has issued administrative complaints and proposed orders against two more companies for allegedly violating the CRFA. To briefly recap, the CRFA prohibits businesses from including “gag clauses” in their…

Crowdfunding plays an important role in democratizing access to capital for small entrepreneurs, but as we’ve written before, entrepreneurs of every ilk need to remember that their representations to consumers need to be truthful, accurate and not misleading. Last month, the FTC filed a complaint against Douglas Monahan and his company iBackPack of Texas, LLC, alleging that Monahan and his company had violated Section 5 of the FTC Act by scamming consumers on crowdfunding…