by Paul Alan Levy With the signature of Governor Terry McAuliffe having been added last week, Virginia has adopted a modest improvement to its very narrow anti-SLAPP statute. The new law, SB 1413, is not nearly as strong as in the anti-SLAPP laws in California and other model states, but it has something that we […]
Author Archives: Paul Levy
by Paul Alan Levy The Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue, a coalition of nearly 100 consumer organizations on both sides of the Atlantic, will be holding its annual meeting in DC from March 19 to March 21, including a public forum on March 21 addressed to "A consumer agenda for transatlantic markets.” The program includes features officials […]
by Paul Alan Levy i-Geniuses is a Houston company that repairs Apple products; it especially touts its ability to repair computers suffering from liquid damage on a fast turnaround schedule. A number of former customers have expressed concerns about the success of the repairs, about longer-than-advertised repair times, and especially about their believe that the […]
by Paul Alan Levy Shiva Ayyadurai is a computer scientist who insists that it was he who, as a child prodigy, invented email. Although his claim has been widely derided by many of the major figures who were party to the technological advances that created the Internet as well as systems of direct communication such as […]
by Paul Alan Levy During the 2016 election cycle, the slogan “Keep America Great” emerged as a counterweight to the Make America Great Again slogan on which candidate Donald Trump was campaigning. A fellow named Andreas Mueller tried to capitalize on that development by reserving the slogan as his own trademark. The Trademark Office, properly […]
Responding to widespread complaints from its consuming public, including some articles on this blog as well as a consumer gripe site, DC United has withdrawn a demand that its season ticket holders sign away the right to talk about the team or post photos of video clips. Its newly revised proposed contact for season ticketholders […]
by Paul Alan Levy Could Donald Trump, who is notorious for his intolerance of public criticism, and who has promised to "open up the libel laws," evade the First Amendment and section 230 stricture on defamation claims by repackaging them under the rubric of the right of publicity? That is the question presented by an […]
by Paul Alan Levy An announcement from the White House today listed the Consumer Review Fairness Act as one of several bills that President Obama signed into law yesterday. Here is my public statement on the development. And today I learned of a significant development: DC United is breaking with the forces at the headquarters […]
by Paul Alan Levy The Michigan Court of Appeals issued a decision today on the standards for deciding whether a plaintiff claiming to have been wronged by anonymous (or pseudonymous) online speech may compel the host of that speech to provide information that could aid the plaintiff in identifying the speaker so that process could […]
by Paul Alan Levy Now that both houses of Congress have passed the Consumer Review Fairness Act, which invalidates the inclusion of clauses barring consumer reviews in form contracts, and sent the bill to the President for his signature (this happened last Friday), we will be looking for situations in which to apply it. There […]