Today’s Supreme Court decision in Jack Daniel’s v. VIP Products reverses the appellate decision below in a way that minimizes the possible damage to free speech interests that impelled Public Citizen and others to file amicus briefs in the case. It confines the decision to the narrow issue on which certiorari was granted, rather than […]
An op-ed by Sierra Club’s Jessica Tritsch’s starts: “A reasonable person would think that reducing strain on our energy infrastructure, bringing down consumer utility bills and protecting the health of kids would be issues that had bipartisan support, yet Congress is considering a pair of bills that would ensure the opposite. The so-called Save Our Gas […]
The Center for Justice and Democracy has issued a report titled “Nuclear Fizzle: How Jury Grievance Reports Whitewash Corporate Misconduct and Dehumanize Victims.” Here is the brief summary: “Corporate lobby groups are issuing reports criticizing juries when their large corporate members lose cases (which we call “jury grievance reports”). Their focus is on what they […]
The Federal Trade Commission reported this week on the refunds returned to harmed consumers in 2022 from its cases against bad actors that cheated, deceived, defrauded people out of their money. The agency’s press release also contained a sober message: refunds to consumers are dropping due to AMG Capital Management, LLC v. FTC, a 2021 […]
Kate Berry has the story here (behind paywall but available on Lexis). Excerpt: * * * The consumer watchdog has filed just five enforcement actions so far this year compared with 20 last year, which marked the second-lowest number on record; just 10 enforcement actions were brought in 2018 during the Trump administration. By comparison, […]
A number of my first few tilts against the abusive copyright enforcement practices pursued by Mathew Higbee and Associates involved, in part, the issue whether the posting of an inline deep-link to a copyrighted photograph constitutes copyright infringement. Higbee insisted that the Ninth Circuit’s invocation of the “server test” to hold that such displays are […]
Dark Patterns (I prefer calling them Opaque Patterns) have been drawing a lot of attention from consumer protection regulators in recent years. For those who are unclear on what they are, the FTC has defined them as “practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may […]
The FTC has announced the filing and resolution of an action against Amazon, arising out of claims that the company wrongfully retained voice recordings and geolocation information of Alexa users, allowed Amazon employees to access voice information, failed to delete children’s information at the request of parents, and retained children’s personal information longer than necessary. […]
The latest episode of Ballard Spahr’s Consumer Finance Monitor Podcast explores mass arbitration and includes as a guest arbitration champion Andrew Pincus, who argued the industry’s–and winning–position in Concepcion. As I listened to the podcast, which I recommend to those interested in consumer law, it became clear that one of Mr. Pincus’s chief complaints about […]
The phrase “dark patterns” was invented by Harry Brignull and has been defined by the FTC as ““practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm.” Examples include web sites that makes it easy to purchase an ongoing service but that make it harder […]