New Media and Technology Law Blog

Latest from New Media and Technology Law Blog

March 30, 2020

Teami, LLC (“Teami”), a marketer of teas and skincare products, agreed to settle FTC charges alleging that its retained social media influencers did not sufficiently disclose that they were being paid to promote Teami’s products. The FTC’s Complaint also included allegations that Teami made unsupported weight-loss and health claims about its products, an issue that is beyond the scope of this blog post. The Stipulated Order for Permanent Injunction and Monetary Judgment was approved by…

New Media and Technology Law Blog

Supreme Court Rules That States Cannot be Sued for Copyright Infringement, For Now…

By Kevin Milewski

March 24, 2020

The U.S. Supreme Court’s busy intellectual property term (with six copyright and trademark cases) rolls on. On March 23, SCOTUS ruled in Allen v. Cooper, 589 U.S. ___, No. 18-877 (Mar. 23, 2020), that states, absent consent, may not be sued for copyright infringement. In particular, SCOTUS held that Congress did not have a sufficient constitutional basis to abrogate states’ sovereign immunity in copyright infringement actions when it passed the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act …

New Media and Technology Law Blog

Online Platforms Sidestep Claims over User Content Decisions and Social App Functions

By Jeffrey Neuburger

March 13, 2020

Despite continued scrutiny over the legal immunity online providers enjoy under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), online platforms continue to successfully invoke its protections. This is illustrated by three recent decisions in which courts dismissed claims that sought to impose liability on providers for hosting or restricting access to user content and for providing a much-discussed social media app filter. In one case, a California district court dismissed a negligence claim against…

New Media and Technology Law Blog

LinkedIn Files Petition to the Supreme Court in hiQ Web Scraping Case

By Jeffrey Neuburger

March 11, 2020

This past week, LinkedIn filed a petition for a writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Ninth Circuit’s blockbuster ruling in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., 938 F.3d 985 (9th Cir. 2019). The case concerned the scope of Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) liability associated with web scraping of publicly available social media profile data. In the appellate court ruling, the appeals court affirmed the lower court’s order granting …

New Media and Technology Law Blog

Protecting against Cybersecurity Threats when Working from Home

By Jeffrey Neuburger, Ryan Blaney & Kevin Milewski

March 11, 2020

With the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), many organizations are requiring or permitting employees to work remotely. This post is intended to remind employers and employees that in the haste to implement widespread work-from-home strategies, data security concerns cannot be forgotten. Employers and employees alike should remain vigilant of increased cybersecurity threats, some of which specifically target remote access strategies. Unfortunately, as noted in a prior blog post, cybercriminals will not be curtailing…

New Media and Technology Law Blog

Coronavirus and the “100% Work-From-Home” Scenario: Review Agreements with Vendors of Remote Access Technology

By Jeffrey Neuburger

March 9, 2020

As part of the response to the outbreak of COVID-19, many organizations are working on contingency and business continuity plans that include an all-employee “work-from-home” scenario. If it becomes necessary to implement such a plan, all employees of the organization will access the organization’s networks and systems remotely. Unfortunately, many organizations that are testing these plans are discovering that that their remote access technologies may not be able to handle, without significant degradation in performance,…

New Media and Technology Law Blog

Facebook Brings Suit against Mobile Marketing Firm for Siphoning User Data without Authorization

By Jeffrey Neuburger

March 8, 2020

In continuing its push to enforce its terms and policies against developers that engage in unauthorized collection or scraping of user data, Facebook brought suit last month against mobile marketing and data analytics firm OneAudience LLC. (Facebook, Inc. v. OneAudience LLC, No. 20-01461 (N.D. Cal. Complaint filed Feb. 27, 2020)). Facebook alleges that OneAudience harvested Facebook users’ profile data and device data in contravention of Facebook’s terms and developer policies. OneAudience purportedly gathered…

New Media and Technology Law Blog

The Coronavirus and Force Majeure Clauses

By Jeffrey Neuburger, Jordan M. Horowitz & Andrew Wingfield

February 28, 2020

Beyond the human toll of the current global health crisis, the coronavirus outbreak is having serious economic repercussions to the global economy and the supply chains on which it depends. Dun & Bradstreet reported, “at least 51,000 (163 Fortune 1000) companies around the world have one or more direct or Tier 1 suppliers in the impacted regions, and at least five million companies (938 Fortune 1000) around the world have one or more Tier…

New Media and Technology Law Blog

EU Releases “A European Strategy for Data”

By Jeffrey Neuburger

February 19, 2020

As 2019 came to a close, we looked ahead into 2020 and noted that data would continue to be a huge issue for the digital economy. We have not been disappointed. On February 19, 2020, the European Commission (the “Commission”) released its 35-page document entitled “A European strategy for data,” becoming just the latest of many developments in that area. The document lays out a vision as to how – through legislation, technical…

New Media and Technology Law Blog

Court Enforces Arbitration Clause in Online Terms of Service Accepted by a Minor

By Jeffrey Neuburger

February 14, 2020

Epic Games, Inc. (“Epic”) is the publisher of the popular online multiplayer videogame Fortnite, released in 2017. In recent years, Fortnight has gained worldwide popularity with gamers and esports followers (culminating in July 2019 when a sixteen-year-old player won the $3 million prize for winning the Fortnite World Cup). Players, in one version of the game, are dropped onto a virtual landscape and compete in a battle royale to survive. In the real world,…

New Media and Technology Law Blog

Blog Authors

FTC Paid Endorser Settlement Sets Framework for Advertiser Best Practices

Supreme Court Rules That States Cannot be Sued for Copyright Infringement, For Now…

Online Platforms Sidestep Claims over User Content Decisions and Social App Functions

LinkedIn Files Petition to the Supreme Court in hiQ Web Scraping Case

Protecting against Cybersecurity Threats when Working from Home

Coronavirus and the “100% Work-From-Home” Scenario: Review Agreements with Vendors of Remote Access Technology

Facebook Brings Suit against Mobile Marketing Firm for Siphoning User Data without Authorization

The Coronavirus and Force Majeure Clauses

EU Releases “A European Strategy for Data”

Court Enforces Arbitration Clause in Online Terms of Service Accepted by a Minor

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