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.
As the Oregon National Guard lawsuit proceeds, it’s become clear that right-wing content creators have a direct line to the federal government and are shaping national policy itself.
Patent and Trademark Office director John A. Squires has ordered the 12,403,397 patent — often oversimplified to “summoning characters and making them fight” — to be reexamined, citing two older Konami and Nintendo applications that raise “a substantial new question of patentability.” This isn’t one of the patents in Nintendo’s ongoing legal battle with Palworld-creator Pocketpair.
Sean Fitzpatrick promises his AI won’t get you in trouble with a judge.
Sam O’Hara protested the deployment of the National Guard into DC by following soldiers around playing the Star Wars Imperial March on a bluetooth speaker, posting the videos he recorded of himself to TikTok. One guardsman was not amused and called the cops on O’Hara, who was handcuffed and (briefly) detained; the ACLU of DC is now suing.
The lawsuit opens with this sentence:
In the Star Wars franchise, The Imperial March is the music that plays when Darth Vader or other dark forces enter a scene or succeed in their dastardly plans.
You can read the rest below.
[ACLU-DC]
Apparently, there’s more going on than just Jontay Porter. ESPN, ABC News, and NBC News report that Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups have been arrested by the FBI in separate cases, with a press conference planned for 10AM ET.
[Rozier and Jones are] among six people charged Thursday with turning professional basketball into a criminal gambling operation by using inside information to place unlawful wagers, law enforcement sources told ABC News.
Since a dupe is an unaffiliated similar product (or even unauthorized copy), this registration — first reported by The Fashion Law — is a real doozy. Is this a legal innovation in shutting down dupes of Lululemon’s products, or is it a recursive marketing stunt?
It’s a great time to reread Mia Sato on the wild world of dupes and the increasingly tangled intellectual property regime around them.
No reason was given for Strava’s voluntary dismissal, three weeks after it attempted to block sales of Garmin devices due to alleged patent infringement.
[DC Rainmaker]
Or would you? Smucker’s is accusing Trader Joe’s of ripping off its Uncrustables and creating “copycats” that infringe on the shape of the sandwiches and packaging. Trader Joe’s whole thing is that they make in-house versions of popular products — not just food but also things like skincare. But as I’ve written, the legal status of dupes is more complicated than it might seem.
Judge Jeannette A. Vargas dismissed Drake’s defamation claim against Kendrick Lamar for “Not Like Us,” a song that “contains lyrics explicitly accusing Drake of being a pedophile, set to a catchy beat and propulsive bassline,” she writes in her opinion. Not only does no one think of rap beefs as being strictly truth-telling, Drake explicitly asked Lamar to do it in “Taylor Made Freestyle,” Vargas notes. I recommend reading the whole thing — Vargas clearly had a good time writing it, especially that footnote about Millie Bobby Brown.
To support their suits against OPM and DOGE, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is selling a retro-looking ringer t-shirt, and honestly it’s kind of a banger. I think I am going to buy one, hem it into a crop top and wear it when I go rock climbing. At $25 it’s a steal.
California is banning streaming ads that are louder than the content around them, bringing streamers in line with broadcast TV. But as some ask whether Big Government has gone too far this time, we say: No, obviously not!
Hoto:
You can just do that? You can just ban things because they’re loud, purposeless and annoying??
Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.
How much should the law defer to an internet hallucination?
At a hearing in a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, a DOJ attorney defended the president’s federalization of 200 guardsmen. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton said that the president has met the conditions of 10 U.S.C. 12406, having made a proper determination that Portland has become so violent that “regular forces cannot execute the laws of the United States.”
Which determination would that be? “The most important determination is reflected in posts he made on Truth Social,” Hamilton told Judge Karin J. Immergut, specifying posts made on September 27 and October 1, where the president called Portland a “war zone” occupied by “domestic terrorists.”
Scott Kennedy, representing the state of Oregon, called the president’s posts “vague, incendiary hyperbole that lacks a good faith assessment of the facts,” saying they simply did not line up with the reality of what was happening on the ground.
As Mark Gurman noted in a tweet, the lawsuit claims the management of an Apple Store in Reston, VA, “failed to accommodate an employee’s Jewish faith and subsequently fired him because of his religion and in retaliation for complaining of religion-based discrimination.”
The only human-made element behind Xania Monet’s act appear to be the lyrics.
Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, aka PomPompurin, is linked to crimes including the 2021 breach that sent out fake cybersecurity warning emails from the FBI. After pleading guilty to one count of access device conspiracy, one count of access device solicitation, and one count of possession of child sexual abuse material, he was originally sentenced to 20 years of supervised release.
[Department of Justice]
Two terrorism-related charges against Mangione were dropped at a court hearing on Tuesday in the New York state case.
Last year, the Archive lost an appeal in its ebook lending case, and now it has settled the lawsuit over its Great 78 Project:
The Internet Archive’s blog simply says:
As noted in the recent court filings in UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive, both parties have advised the Court that the matter has been settled. The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.
The Wall Street Journal’s fuckup while covering Charlie Kirk’s killing needs more than an editor’s note.
