Late last week, the Illinois state senate considered an amendment tacked onto to an unrelated bill that would have revised the Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, a law that has been the subject of much debate and litigation in the past year. This amendment had the potential to drastically affect
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California Court Refuses to Dismiss Biometric Privacy Suit against Facebook
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
The District Court for the Northern District of California recently issued what could be a very significant decision on a number of important digital law issues. These include: the enforceability of “clickwrap” as compared to “web wrap” website terms of use, the enforceability of a choice-of-law provision in such terms…
Self-Publishing Platforms Deemed Distributors, Not Publishers in Privacy Suit over Unauthorized Book Cover
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
We live in a world that has rapidly redefined and blurred the roles of the “creator” of content, as compared to the roles of the “publisher” and “distributor” of such content. A recent case touches on some of the important legal issues associated with such change. Among other things, the…
Google Is the Latest Online Provider to Face Class Action over Collection of Faceprints
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
As we have previously written about, there are several ongoing biometric privacy-related lawsuits alleging that facial recognition-based systems of photo tagging violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Add one more to the list. A Chicago resident brought a putative class action against Google for allegedly collecting, storing…
Website HTML Is Copyrightable, Even If Look and Feel Is Not
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
In a notable ruling last month, a California district court ruled that the HTML underlying a custom search results page of an online advertising creation platform is copyrightable.
In Media.net Advertising FZ-LLC v. Netseer Inc., No. 14-3883, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 3784 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 12, 2016), the plaintiff,…
FTC Releases Big Data Report Outlining Risks, Benefits and Legal Hurdles
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
The big data revolution is quietly chugging along: devices, sensors, websites and networks are collecting and producing significant amounts of data, the cost of data storage continues to plummet, public and private sector interest in data mining is growing, data computational and statistical methods have advanced, and more and more…
FTC Issues Enforcement Policy Statement on Native Advertising in New Media
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
Digital media marketers are aggressively increasing the use of so-called sponsored content, or native advertising to reach new customers. Particularly with the growing use of ad blockers on web and mobile browsers, marketers have sought to present advertising in a new form that can circumvent automated blocking and somehow capture…
Photo Storage Service’s Collection of Faceprints May Violate Illinois Biometric Privacy Statute
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
As we have previously noted, there are several ongoing privacy-related lawsuits alleging that facial recognition-based systems of photo tagging violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The photo storage service Shutterfly and the social network Facebook are both defending putative class action suits that, among other things, allege…
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: More Lessons to Be Learned
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
Courts continue to struggle with the application of CDA immunity to shield service provider defendants from liability in extreme cases. In this case, the Washington Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, affirmed the lower court’s decision to allow a suit to proceed against classified service Backpage.com surrounding the sexual assault…
Upcoming Summer Blockbuster: Impending Shortage of IPv4 IP Addresses
By Jeffrey Neuburger on
There is an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the impending shortage of IPv4 IP addresses (forcing tech companies and cloud providers to scramble to secure the remaining stock for U.S. users) and the IPv6 solution.
Hate to say “I told you so” but…see our prior coverage here…