It was almost twenty years ago that Barbra Streisand filed a lawsuit that attempted to block access to a photograph of her oceanfront estate, bringing unwanted attention to the photo and leading to her being enshrined by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick in tech/legal terminology as the progenitor of “the Streisand Effect.” Now we have Cooley v. […]
Category Archives: Free Speech, Intellectual Property, & the Internet
The City of Seattle passed the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance, which prohibits landlords from (1) inquiring about the criminal history of current or potential tenants and (2) from taking adverse action based on that criminal history. In a split decision yesterday, the Ninth Circuit found the “inquiry” provision unconstitutional under the First Amendment, but upheld […]
An amicus curiae brief filed today on behalf of three former clients whose right to use trademarks for purposes of parody we defended on a number of occasions over the past two decades, urges the Supreme Court to uphold the Rogers v. Grimaldi standard as a screen to weed out weak trademark infringement claims brought […]
The New York Times reports that Louis Vuitton, perhaps the most notorious trademark bully of them all, used a Joan Mitchell painting in one of its advertisements after her foundation repeatedly refused permission because she had, and it has, a strict policy against commercial use of her work. The Joan Mitchell Foundation has sent a […]
AdLife Marketing and Communications, a company specializing in photographs of food for use in grocery story advertisements, has a sorry history of abusive copyright infringement claims. In 2021, it moved from Rhode Island to Florida, changed its name to Prepared Food Photos, and began to be represented by Florida lawyer Daniel DeSouza, through a firm […]
A disturbing decision from a Texas court of appeals held last year that an anonymous person, who allegedly called several of the advertisers in D Magazine and accused the magazine of being “racist,” and who has been sue for defamation, could not file a motion to dismiss under the Texas anti-SLAPP law contending that the […]
Late last week we filed an amicus brief in an Ohio court case in which the City of Beachwood is financing litigation, purportedly seeking to recover damages for the police chief based on an anonymous email and a handful of anonymous posts to the police department’s Facebook page that denigrated the police chief’s leadership. We […]
Meta is changing its ad distribution system, as required by a settlement with the US Department of Justice, to prevent discriminatory advertising in violation of the Fair Housing Act. The settlement, entered into last June, resolved a lawsuit filed in New York by DOJ last June, which alleged that Meta’s system allowed advertisers to exclude […]
Just two days after a federal judge in South Dakota rejected a bid by First Premier Bank for a gag order against the credit-card-comparison site CardHub.com, the subprime credit card issuer abandoned its controversial lawsuit in a one-sentence document filed late on Friday. First Premier’s surrender comes after a backlash of criticism over its litigation […]
by Deepak Gupta Back in June, I blogged about my firm's constitutional challenge to New York's credit-card surcharge law — a law that aims to protect credit card company profits by preventing merchants from communicating the true cost of credit to consumers. This morning, U.S District Judge Jed Rakoff issued a fantastic 35-page opinion agreeing […]