Three John Does defrauded plaintiff Phoebe Lee in a trading scheme linked to an online cryptocurrency website, Lee's fraud complaint alleged Friday (docket 2:23-cv-02008) in U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Seattle.

The district court’s decision in Hachette vs. Internet Archive, in favor of four publisher plaintiffs, “paints with far too broad a brush,” said a Dec. 22 corrected amicus brief (docket 23-1260) from HathiTrust, filed Thursday before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Appeals Court.

Thursday’s denial of a preliminary injunction that X, formerly Twitter, requested to block California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) from enforcing the state’s social media transparency law (AB-587) cleared Bonta to collect “terms of service” reports from social media companies. They are the first reports under the statute and came due when the law took effect Monday. Hereafter reports will be due each April 1 and Oct. 1, requiring platforms to describe how they're enforcing content moderation policies.

Pasadena, Texas, seeks the reversal of the 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court affirmation of the district court’s judgment that Section 253 of the Telecommunications Act preempts the spacing and undergrounding requirements in the city’s design manual for the installation of small cells and support poles in its public rights of way, said the city’s U.S. Supreme Court cert petition (docket 23-698). The petition was filed Dec. 26 and docketed Thursday, said a clerk's notice Friday.

Though the court is “sympathetic” to Jillane Pope’s “plight” as a victim of text-phishing scammers, “the law is not on her side to recover her losses” from Wells Fargo Bank and JPMorgan Chase, said a report Wednesday (docket 2:23-cv-00086) from U.S. Magistrate Judge Dustin Pead for Utah in Salt Lake City in which he recommends granting the banks’ motions to dismiss Pope’s complaint.

The district court’s decision in the copyright infringement case against Internet Archive “puts copyright law at odds with the Constitution,” said the Copia Institute’s Dec. 22 amicus brief (23-1260) in support of IA's appeal before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Appeals Court.

Two of three negligence class actions filed last week against Comcast over an October data breach also included software provider Citrix, which notified the internet service provider Oct. 10 of the vulnerability in one of its products Comcast uses. Comcast began notifying its customers of the breach Dec. 18 after conducting an investigation into the scope of the incident and determining there had been “unauthorized access” to some of its internal systems as a result of the breach, said the complaints.

RCN Telecom Services is “secondarily liable” for direct copyright infringement under sections 106 and 501 of the Copyright Act and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, alleged motion picture distribution company Screen Media Ventures (SMV) in a complaint Wednesday (docket 3:23-cv-23356) in U.S. District Court for New Jersey in Trenton.

Private research universities like Stanford and their researchers aren’t “state actors” subject to constitutional constraints “just because they speak to the government about their research,” said Stanford’s Dec. 26 amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the petitioners in Murthy v. Missouri (docket 23-411) who seek to vacate the 5th Circuit’s injunction against government involvement in social media content moderation.