How Section 230 might not help Amazon in the Parler lawsuit

Parler sued Amazon [PDF of complaint] yesterday alleging three things: antitrust violations, breach of contract and tortious interference. Each of these claims relates to Amazon’s decision to kick Parler off of AWS servers. To use Section 230’s language, Amazon took action to “restrict access to or availability of material.” That language comes from Section 230(c)(2), which reads more fully as: No provider . . . of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of . . . any acti...
Tags: Amazon, Law, Chicago, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Ninth Circuit, Said, CFAA, Evan Brown, Section 230, Parler, Malwarebytes Inc, Computer Crime, Enigma Software Group USA LLC

Justice Thomas Writes a Misguided Anti-Section 230 Statement “Without the Benefit of Briefing”–Enigma v. Malwarebytes

Last year, the Ninth Circuit ruled that a plaintiff could plead around Section 230(c)(2)(B), the safe harbor for providing filtering instructions, by claiming that the filtering was motivated by anticompetitive animus. Last week, the Supreme Court denied certiorari. This isn’t surprising–the Supreme Court takes a low percentage of cases–but it’s too bad the Ninth Circuit ruling won’t be corrected. Alongside the cert denial, Justice Thomas added a statement railing against Section 230 (starting...
Tags: Google, Twitter, Fcc, Supreme Court, Yahoo, Law, Congress, Youtube, New York Times, Vimeo, Enigma, DOE, Malwarebytes, Wilson, Thomas, Lewis

Petitions of the week

This week we highlight petitions pending before the Supreme Court that ask the court to decide, among other things, whether evidence of how other departments of corrections have obtained and successfully administered an alternative execution method is relevant to showing the method is feasible and available under Glossip v. Gross, whether the Sixth and 14th Amendments guarantee a criminal defendant the right to discover potentially exculpatory mental health records held by a private party and wh...
Tags: Supreme Court, Law, Gross, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Jordan, Nevada, Summers, Perez, Walden, Georgia Department of Corrections, Glossip, Phipps, Cases in the Pipeline, Malwarebytes Inc

Internet Law at the Supreme Court

Although I love teaching patent law, my favorite class to teach is often Internet Law. This next year I’ll be teaching it both to law students and as a sophomore-level undergraduate class. One thing that is great about the class is that all of the students already have a set of preconceived notions about how internet society should work, but without much information about the legal background. Here are three cases Supreme Court petitions that I’ve been following that are closely related to civil...
Tags: Facebook, Supreme Court, Law, Obama, Linkedin, University, Republican Party, Patent, Trump, Hunt, 9th Circuit, Board of Regents, University of New Mexico, UNM, CDA, Twitter Google

Malware detection software provider gets important victory allowing it to flag unwanted driver installer

Despite a recent Ninth Circuit decision denying immunity to malware detection software for targeting competitor’s software, court holds that Section 230 protected Malwarebytes from liability for designating software driver program as potentially unwanted program. Plaintiff provided software that works in real time in the background of the operating system to optimize processing and locate and install missing and outdated software drivers. Defendant provided malware detection software de...
Tags: Law, Goldman, Malwarebytes, Ninth Circuit, Section 230, Malwarebytes Inc, Tortious Interference, Enigma Software Group USA LLC, Though Enigma, Asurvio LP

Terrible Ninth Circuit 230(c)(2) Ruling Will Make the Internet More Dangerous–Enigma v. Malwarebytes

This ruling caused this PUP to have a bad day. Photo by Anik Shrestha The Ninth Circuit has issued a Section 230(c)(2) opinion that creates significant problems for anti-spyware/spam/virus vendors (I’ll call them “anti-threat vendors”). The ruling will paralyze their decision-making, expose them to greater legal threats, and reduce their ability to protect consumers from unwanted software. This ruling makes the Internet less safe. I hope the Ninth Circuit will fix it via further proceedings. Ba...
Tags: Google, Law, Congress, Court, US, Rebecca, Margaret Thatcher, Kaspersky, Enigma, Malwarebytes, Privacy/security, Carter, 9th Circuit, Fisher, Congressional, Ninth Circuit