by Paul Alan Levy The spring, an unusual coalition of forces made a serious run at gutting the Texas Citizens’ Participation Act, the Texas version of state anti-SLAPP suits that protects consumers and citizen activists from baseless lawsuits intended to stop them from voicing criticisms of businesses and powerful political figure in their communities. A […]
Author Archives: Paul Levy
Over the past few years, the law firm Higbee and Associates (based in Los Angeles, although it pretentiously labels itself a "National Law Firm") has become identified with a pattern of making aggressive and, in many cases, unsupportable demands for the payment of significant sums of money by individuals and nonprofits whose web sites feature […]
The Yes Men perpetrated (or perhaps only collaborated on) a parody of the Washington Post today, distributing tens of thousands of hard copy editions date-lined May 1, 2019 (making the parody too obvious), but also transmitting email from “send85-proxymailing@washingtonpost.com” domain, which in turn links to a fairly extensive parody web site located at my-washingtonpost.com. A […]
by Paul Alan Levy A new Virginia case presents one of the less-frequently-litigated issues in the realm of the First Amendment right to speak anonymously — when the identity of an anonymous blogger (or other Internet speaker) can be demanded not so that she can be served with a summons in a lawsuit alleging that […]
by Paul Alan Levy A recent trial court decision from New York addresses a question about which I have long held a tentative opinion, albeit without having known of any direct precedent to back up my view: When speaker states facts in an online publication that are not subject to defamation liability when made (because […]
by Paul Alan Levy A few months ago, I blogged about an important Sixth Circuit ruling on the issue of online anonymity. Signature Management Team v. Doe, 876 F.3d 831 (2017), came close to endorsing the Dendrite approach to deciding whether a defendant who has been sued for allegedly inappropriate behavior should be denied the […]
by Paul Alan Levy An article in the Washington City Paper discusses a new feature on Yelp’s web site, which captures health department inspection records and boils them down to a score (in most jurisdictions, the scale runs from zero and 100). Some restaurateurs who are unhappy about having received low health scores sounded off […]
by Paul Alan Levy In Hassell v. Bird, the California Supreme Court held this morning, by a narrow margin of four votes to three, that section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects Yelp against an injunction compelling it to comply with an injunction that had previously been issued against a Yelp user who had […]
by Paul Alan Levy Last year, oral argument was held in the Ninth Circuit on the appeal filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, purportedly representing a monkey suing to assert its copyright in a photo that it supposedly deliberately took of itself by causing the operation of a camera. The trial court […]
by Paul Alan Levy Despite the passage of the Consumer Review Fairness Act in December 2016, businesses continue to use non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses in form contracts to suppress criticism of their products and services. This blog post summarizes several situations in which we have been involved recently. Premier Pools and Spas in Dallas The […]