Communications Litigation Today is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case you missed them. Each can be found by searching on its title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

Amazon seeks a writ of mandamus from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit directing U.S. District Judge Alan Albright for the Western District of Texas in Waco to vacate his May 31 order denying Amazon’s transfer of a patent infringement action to the U.S. District Court for Northern California and his Oct. 18 order denying reconsideration and transfer, said Amazon’s petition Thursday (docket 23-104).

Defendants Kevin David Hulse and David Arnett, operating under an entity called DK Automation, agreed to pay $2.6 million within seven days to settle FTC allegations they lured consumers into buying business opportunities that promised them windfall profits as Amazon merchants (see 2211170071), said a stipulated order signed Thursday by Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Huck for Southern Florida in Miami and posted Friday in docket 1:22-cv-23760. Hulse and Arnett “neither admit nor deny any of the allegations,” said the order.

Verizon’s debt collection agency, CBE Customer Solutions, is countersuing the carrier, alleging any negligence that mushroomed into a Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action and settlement was of Verizon’s doing, not CBE’s.

Parler fired back with a three-pronged attack Thursday in U.S. District Court for Southern Florida in Miami (docket 0:22-cv-61805) against the first of two complaints in just over a month that accused the right-leaning social media platform of Telephone Consumer Protection Act violations. It filed separate and simultaneous motions to dismiss the suit and to compel arbitration of the dispute. It also filed a third motion to transfer the case to U.S. District Court for Nevada in Las Vegas.

Lane County, Oregon, “denies every allegation” in AT&T’s Oct. 25 complaint that it violated the Telecommunications Act by refusing AT&T’s application to build a 150-foot-tall cell tower to improve local wireless services (see 2210260009), said the municipality in its answer Wednesday (docket 6:22-cv-01635) in U.S. District Court for Oregon in Eugene. U.S. Magistrate Judge Mustafa Kasubhai set a Rule 16 telephone conference in the case for Dec. 13 at 10 a.m. PST, said a text-only scheduling order Thursday.

Defendants Kevin David Hulse and David Arnett, operating under an entity called DK Automation, have lured consumers into purchasing business opportunities since at least February 2020, promising to build purchasers a 100% “turnkey Amazon empire” that generates “passive income on autopilot,” alleged an FTC complaint Wednesday (docket 1:22-cv-23760) in U.S. District Court for Southern Florida in Miami.

The Nov. 7 ruling by U.S. District Judge James Selna for Central California in Santa Ana that former Masimo engineer Marcelo Lamego misappropriated the company’s pulse oximetry trade secrets “will give comfort to companies that invest in innovation,” said Masimo’s General Counsel Tom McClenahan in a statement Thursday. The "finding of facts" ruling (docket 8:18-cv-02001) confirmed “that California’s trade secrets laws will help protect their investments from employees who seek to unlawfully use those innovations for their own benefit,” he said.

The device buyback website SellLocked.com, its affiliate Guru Holdings and their owner Jakob Zahara are perpetrators of an unlawful scheme to enrich themselves by stealing Xfinity Mobile phones and the financial incentives that are intended to benefit legitimate consumers who use XM’s network, alleged XM and its parent Comcast in an unfair competition, tortious interference and trademark infringement complaint Wednesday (docket 2:22cv1950) in U.S. District Court for Arizona in Phoenix. The complaint seeks injunctive relief, plus compensatory, consequential, statutory and special damages.

A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on automatic dialing systems in Borden v. Efinancial (docket 21-35746) has likely narrowed the range of possible TCPA cases in that circuit, and an 8th Circuit panel upheld a lower court ruling narrowly defining what sort of fax constitutes an unsolicited advertisement in BPP v. Caremark CVS (docket 21-3791), in opinions issued this week. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act’s prohibition against the use of automatic dialing systems applies only to automated systems that generate telephone numbers, not to other systems that use random or sequential number generation to select from a list of numbers to call, said the 9th Circuit.