Jeffrey Neuburger
Partner
Jeffrey Neuburger is a partner, co-head of the Technology, Media & Telecommunications Group, a member of the Privacy & Cybersecurity Group and editor of the firm’s New Media and Technology Law blog.
Jeff’s practice focuses on technology, media and advertising-related business transactions and counseling, including the utilization of emerging technology and distribution methods in business. For example, Jeff represents clients in online strategies associated with advertising, products, services and content commercialized on the Internet through broadband channels, mobile platforms, broadcast and cable television distribution and print publishing. He also represents many organizations in large infrastructure-related projects, such as outsourcing, technology acquisitions, cloud computing initiatives and related services agreements.
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In a closely-followed dispute, the California Supreme Court vacated a lower court order, based upon a default judgment in a defamation action, which had directed Yelp, Inc. (“Yelp”), a non-party to the original suit, to take down certain consumer reviews posted on its site. (Hassell v. Bird, No. S235968, 2018 WL 3213933 (Cal. July 2, … Continue Reading
An Illinois district court remanded to state court for lack of standing a biometric privacy suit brought by employees over the collection and storage of individuals’ fingerprints allegedly in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 ILCS 14/1 (“BIPA”). (Aguilar v. Rexnord, LLC, No. 17 CV 9019 (N.D. Ill. July 3, 2018)). This … Continue Reading
This past week, an Illinois district court dismissed, with leave to amend, claims relating to a competitor’s alleged scraping of sales listings from a company’s website for use on its own site. (Alan Ross Machinery Corp. v. Machinio Corp., No. 17-3569 (N.D. Ill. July 9, 2018)). The court dismissed a federal Computer Fraud and Abuse … Continue Reading
Last December, an Illinois appellate court, in the Rosenbach v. Six Flags decision (2017 IL App (2d) 170317 (Dec. 21, 2017)), dismissed biometric privacy claims lodged against theme park operators for collecting fingerprints to authenticate season-pass holders allegedly in violation of the notice and consent provisions of Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which regulates … Continue Reading
This past week, a Texas district court denied a bid from a web service for a temporary restraining order (TRO) to enjoin a competitor that allegedly scraped a large amount of proprietary data from its closed site via several user accounts. (BidPrime, LLC v. SmartProcure, Inc., No. 18-478 (W.D. Tex. June 18, 2018)). While tempting … Continue Reading
Courts are increasingly taking a magnifying glass to electronic contracting processes, particularly how the presentation of the terms of service and call to action are displayed. As such, companies might take a second look at their own user registration and e-commerce purchase processes to ensure they offer reasonably conspicuous notice of the existence of contract … Continue Reading
As discussed in past posts about the long-running Facebook biometric privacy class action, users are challenging Facebook’s “Tag Suggestions” program, which scans for and identifies people in uploaded photographs for photo tagging. The class alleges that Facebook collected and stored their biometric data without prior notice or consent in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information … Continue Reading
There has been a lot of attention in the media lately with respect to the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica issue and its fall-out (including today’s coverage of the announcement that Facebook suspended almost 200 apps pending a more complete investigation in whether any user data was misused). As part of that discussion, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has … Continue Reading
Such Scraping “Plausibly Falls within the Ambit of the First Amendment” The Ninth Circuit is currently considering the appeal of the landmark hiQ decision, where a lower court had granted an injunction that limited the applicability of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to the blocking of an entity engaging in commercial data … Continue Reading
We have written before about the issues presented by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 Ill. Comp Stat. 14/1 (“BIPA”). BIPA is still the only state biometric privacy statute with a private right of action. It has garnered national attention and become the epicenter of biometrics-based litigation, with dozens of cases pending alleging violations … Continue Reading
Today, the President signed H.R. 1865, the “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017” (commonly known as “FOSTA”). The law is intended to limit the immunity provided under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA Section 230”) for online services that knowingly host third-party content that promotes or facilitates … Continue Reading
This week, the District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the Gullen putative class action asserting Illinois biometric privacy claims brought by “non-users” based on evidence that the social media site did not use its facial recognition technology on business or organizational accounts (as opposed to personal social media pages). (Gullen v. Facebook, Inc., … Continue Reading
In this long-running dispute that has been previously dubbed “The World Series of IP cases” by the presiding judge, Oracle America Inc. (“Oracle”) accuses Google Inc. (“Google”) of unauthorized use of some of its Java-related copyrights in Google’s Android software platform. Specifically, Oracle alleges that Google infringed the declaring code of certain Java API packages … Continue Reading
In the flurry of deal-making that resulted in a 2,232-page funding bill released Wednesday, lawmakers negotiated the inclusion of “The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act” (often referred to as the “CLOUD Act”) (see page 2,201 of the bill text). The CLOUD Act provides a procedural structure for law enforcement to pursue the preservation … Continue Reading
UPDATE: On March 19, 2018, the district court granted the defendant’s motion for certification of the court’s February 15th partial summary judgment decision for interlocutory appeal to the Second Circuit. In allowing immediate appeal, the court agreed that its prior order “has created tremendous uncertainty for online publishers” and “given the frequency with which embedded … Continue Reading
UPDATE: On March 2, 2018, in a related biometric privacy litigation surrounding Tag Suggestions brought by non-users of Facebook, a California district court in a brief order declined to dismiss the action for lack of standing, citing its reasoning in the Patel opinion. (Gullen v. Facebook, Inc., No. 16-00937 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 2, 2018)). While … Continue Reading
UPDATE: On February 22, 2018, the district court granted 3taps’s motion to relate its action to the ongoing hiQ v. LinkedIn litigation. This motion was based upon a local Northern District of California rule that holds that cases should be related when the actions concern substantially the same parties, transaction or event, and there would … Continue Reading
A California district court issued an important opinion in a dispute between a ticket sales platform and a ticket broker that employed automated bots to purchase tickets in bulk. (Ticketmaster L.L.C. v. Prestige Entertainment, Inc., No. 17-07232 (C.D. Cal. Jan. 31, 2018)). For those of us who have been following the evolution of the law … Continue Reading
Facebook recently announced that it would make changes to its news feed to prioritize content that users share and discuss and material from “reputable publishers.” These changes are part of what Mark Zuckerberg says is a refocusing of Facebook from “helping [users] find relevant content to helping [users] have more meaningful social interactions.” This refocus … Continue Reading
Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit issued a noteworthy ruling in a dispute between an enterprise software licensor and a third-party support provider. The case is particularly important as it addresses the common practice of using automated means to download information (in this case, software) from websites in contravention of website terms and conditions. Also, … Continue Reading
A Canadian appellate court ruled that a lower court had jurisdictional authority to issue a production order to craigslist based upon its virtual (but not physical) presence in British Columbia. The production order requested that Craigslist produce to Canadian officials documents relating to a user post in connection with a criminal investigation. (British Columbia (Attorney … Continue Reading
In a blog post last month, Google announced that it would extend certain commitments it made to the FTC in 2012 that were set to expire relating to, among other things, the scraping of third-party content for use on certain Google “vertical search” properties such as Google Shopping. The announcement came days before the commitments … Continue Reading
We have been closely following the legal and legislative developments relating to biometric privacy, and in particular, the flow of litigation under the Illinois biometrics privacy law. It was interesting to see how the Illinois law (as well as a similar Texas law) influenced Google’s offering of a new facial recognition feature on the Google … Continue Reading
As 2017 drew to an end, we noted the continuing flood of Illinois biometric privacy suits filed over the past year. There are literally dozens of cases pending, most in Illinois state courts, alleging violation of Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which regulates the collection, retention, and disclosure of personal biometric identifiers and biometric … Continue Reading
In a Divided Opinion, California Supreme Court Squashes End Run around CDA Immunity That Sought to Compel a Non-Party Online Platform to Remove Defamatory Content
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Defamation, Internet, Online Content, Social Media
Illinois Biometric Privacy Suit over Employee Fingerprinting Remanded for Lack of Standing
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Biometrics, Privacy
CFAA and Breach of Contract Claims Dismissed in Website Data Scraping Suit
Illinois Biometric Privacy Suit Survives Dismissal Based on Harm from Alleged Disclosure of Data to Outside Vendor
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Biometrics, Privacy
Court Denies TRO against Data Scraper That Accessed Private Database via Registered Accounts
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Screen Scraping
New York State Court Declines to Compel Arbitration, Cites Purported Ambiguities in Mobile Contracting Process
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Contracts, Mobile
A Busy Month in the Facebook Photo Tagging Biometric Privacy Dispute
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Biometrics, Privacy, Social Media
Unanticipated Mobile Data Leaks Remain an Ongoing Issue
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Mobile, Privacy
Researchers May Challenge the Constitutionality of the CFAA “Access” Provision as Applied to Web Scraping
Illinois Considering Amendments to Biometric Privacy Law (BIPA) That Would Create Major Exemptions to Its Scope
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Biometrics, Legislation, Privacy
FOSTA Signed into Law, Amends CDA Section 230 to Allow Enforcement against Online Providers for Knowingly Facilitating Sex Trafficking
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Internet, Legislation, Online Content, Social Media
Facebook Granted Dismissal of Biometric Privacy Claims Brought by “Non-Users”
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Biometrics, Privacy
Federal Circuit Again Reverses California Court in Oracle-Google Copyright Dispute over Java APIs – Releases a Major Ruling on Fair Use in the Software Context
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Copyright, Mobile, Open Source, Software
Federal Omnibus Spending Bill Includes CLOUD Act – Outlines Obligations of Providers to Turn over Electronic Communications Stored Overseas and Procedures to Quash for Comity Purposes
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Legislation, Privacy
New York Court Rebuffs Ninth Circuit’s Copyright “Server Test,” Finds Embedded Tweet Displaying Copyrighted Image to Be Infringement
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Internet, Online Content, Social Media
California Court Declines to Dismiss Illinois Facial Recognition/Biometric Privacy Suit against Facebook on Standing Grounds
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Biometrics, Privacy, Social Media
Data Aggregator Seeks Ruling Allowing It to Scrape Public LinkedIn Data
CFAA “Unauthorized Access” Web Scraping Claim against Ticket Broker Dismissed Because Revocation of Access Not Expressed in Cease and Desist Letter
Will Facebook’s Recent Announcement of Changes to News Feed Affect Legal Immunities for User Content?
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Online Content, Social Media
Ninth Circuit Issues Important Decision on Software Licensing Practices and Web Scraping
Canadian Court Asserts Jurisdiction over Craigslist Based on Cloud-Based Virtual Presence in Canada
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Internet, Online Commerce
Google Extends Commitments with the FTC over Crawling of Third-Party Content for Use in Own “Vertical” Sites
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Internet, Online Commerce, Online Content, Screen Scraping
Google App Disables Art-Selfie Biometric Comparison Tool in Illinois and Texas
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Biometrics, Mobile, Privacy
Litigants Alleging Procedural Violations of Illinois Biometric Privacy Statute (BIPA) Are Not “Aggrieved” Parties That May Seek Legal Remedies
By Jeffrey Neuburger on Posted in Biometrics, Privacy
