These days, some of tech’s most important decisions are being made inside courtrooms. Google and Facebook are fending off antitrust accusations, while patent suits determine how much control of their own products they can have. The slow fight over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act threatens platforms like Twitter and YouTube with untold liability suits for the content they host. Gig economy companies like Uber and Airbnb are fighting for their very existence as their workers push for the protections of full-time employees. In each case, judges and juries are setting the rules about exactly how far tech companies can push the envelope and exactly how much protection everyday people have. This is where we keep track of those legal fights and the broader principles behind them. When you move fast and break things, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise when you end up in court.
The US Fifth Circuit Appeals Court found that the Tesla CEO’s 2018 tweet questioning why workers attempting to unionize would “give up stock options for nothing” was protected free speech, reports Bloomberg.
The National Labor Relations Board had ordered Tesla to tell Musk to delete the tweet in 2021, months after a judge deemed it to be illegal.
Reuters reports Delta filed a lawsuit Friday over the July 19th crash, blaming CrowdStrike for having “forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash.”
Delta’s CEO already called out Microsoft and CrowdStrike during a CNBC interview (included below), saying, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?,” while Microsoft said Delta ignored offers to help recover faster.
One of the lawyers suing to block the immensely popular new Federal Trade Commission regulation happens to be the wife of one of the judges sitting on that appeals court. Don’t worry though:
Federal law mandates that judges recuse from cases in which their spouse represents a party, so even if [James] Ho, one of the Fifth Circuit’s thirstiest culture warriors, were assigned to the panel, her involvement is less a five-alarm legal ethics fire than a grim bit of trivia about just how tight-knit the conservative legal movement can be.
(Relatedly, last year, Ian Millhiser at Vox called James Ho “the edgelord of the federal judiciary,” describing him as “a Breitbart comments forum come to life.”)
The ruling was made by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) following a complaint filed in 2018 that said LinkedIn’s tracking ads business violated GDPR.
DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle commented:
“The lawfulness of processing is a fundamental aspect of data protection law and the processing of personal data without an appropriate legal basis is a clear and serious violation of a data subjects’ fundamental right to data protection.”
The attorneys for WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg make that very clear in a legal response to WP Engine’s lawsuit. The response also blames WP Engine for relying on WordPress.org, “a website owned and run by Defendant Matt Mullenweg individually:”
WP Engine, a private equity-backed company, made the unilateral decision, at its own risk, to build a multi-billion dollar business around Mr. Mullenweg’s website. In doing so, WP Engine gambled for the sake of profit that Mr. Mullenweg would continue to maintain open access to his website for free. That was their choice.
Arm has given 60-days notice that it’s canceling the architectural license that lets Qualcomm use Arm IP to design its chips. It’s an escalation of a feud dating back to 2022 after Qualcomm bought Nuvia and failed to negotiate a new license. Qualcomm contends it doesn’t have to.
Here’s Bloomberg:
Qualcomm sells hundreds of millions of processors annually — technology used in the majority of Android smartphones. If the cancellation takes effect, the company might have to stop selling products that account for much of its roughly $39 billion in revenue, or face claims for massive damages.
Oof! But this is a negotiation and the most likely outcome is Qualcomm and Arm reaching a deal — else both companies suffer.
While platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and the App Store deal with Digital Markets Act regulations put on powerful digital gatekeepers, the service formerly known as Twitter won’t have that problem:
Following a thorough assessment of all arguments, including input by relevant stakeholders, and after consulting the Digital Markets Advisory Committee, the Commission concluded that X does indeed not qualify as a gatekeeper in relation to its online social networking service, given that the investigation revealed that X is not an important gateway for business users to reach end users.
The company claimed that it’s not liable for failing to fully answer a notice asking how it handles child abuse imagery because Twitter “ceased to exist” after the notice was sent, as ArsTechnica writes.
The judge didn’t buy the argument, though, so X still must pay a $610,500 AUD (about $414,100 USD) fine Australia issued last year.
State Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that TikTok has violated the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act by not giving parents control of their kids’ privacy and account settings, writes Reuters. TikTok denied the allegations in a statement to The Texas Tribune.
TikTok A federal judge blocked part of the act requiring large social networks to stop harmful content from reaching minors just prior to the law taking effect on September 1st.
Automattic posted a response to the lawsuit from WordPress.com competitor WP Engine. The response includes a statement from Neal Katyal, who the company has retained as legal counsel:
I stayed up last night reading WP Engine’s Complaint, trying to find any merit anywhere to it. The whole thing is meritless, and we look forward to the federal court’s consideration of their lawsuit.
[Automattic]
Crypto businesses keep accidentally hiring IT workers from North Korea. This is a problem because it is, first of all, against US law but second, “CoinDesk encountered multiple examples of companies hiring DPRK IT workers and subsequently getting hacked.”
That’s according to Google’s head of Android security, David Kleidermacher, who is publicly pushing back on the claims made by Epic Games in its new lawsuit against Google and Samsung.
Earlier, Samsung said it plans to “vigorously contest Epic Game’s baseless claims.”
Governor Gavin Newsom signed an amendment to the California Consumer Privacy Act yesterday aimed at safeguarding “neural data,” reports The New York Times.
The bill extends the same level of protections to neural data that it does for other data already considered sensitive under the California Consumer Privacy Act, such as facial images, DNA and fingerprints, known as biometric information.
At Wired, Kate Knibbs visits the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters and speaks with its founder, Brewster Kahle, about the Archive’s past, present, and its uncertain future, as it faces copyright lawsuits from print and music publishers.
Go read this, and then listen to Mark Graham, director of the Archive’s Wayback Machine, on Decoder earlier this month.
