Communications Litigation Today is tracking the below lawsuits involving appeals of FCC actions. Cases marked with an * were terminated since the last update. Cases in bold are new since the last update.
Nineteen-year-old Michael Antonetti spends about 12 hours a day playing seven Call of Duty games, plus Fortnite, Minecraft and others, said his videogame addiction complaint Friday (docket 1:24-cv-02019) against more than a dozen videogame hardware and software companies in U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia in Atlanta.
La Cima Grill Sports Bar in San Jose and its owner, Karen Julieth Castellanos Fierro, pirated the closed-circuit broadcast of the Oct. 17 Ecuador vs. Colombia soccer match without authorization from rights holder Integrated Sports Media, alleged Integrated’s Communications Act complaint Wednesday (docket 5:24-cv-02756) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose. Fierro unlawfully intercepted and displayed the program to her paying customers, resulting in increased profits for her tavern, which sold food and beverages to its patrons as they watched the unlawful feed, said the complaint. Integrated entered into sublicensing agreements with various commercial entities throughout North America, granting the rights to publicly exhibit the soccer match within their establishments, it said. As a commercial distributor and licensor of sporting events, Integrated spent “substantial” sums marketing, advertising, promoting, administering and transmitting the soccer match to its commercial customers, it said. The match originated via satellite uplink and was subsequently retransmitted to cable systems and satellite companies via satellite signal to Integrated’s lawful sublicensees, said the complaint. The complaint alleges Fierro and her establishment committed willful violations of the Communications Act and the Cable and Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act, and did so “for purposes of direct and/or indirect commercial advantage and/or private financial gain,” it said. The four-count complaint seeks $170,000 in statutory damages on the first and second counts, compensatory, exemplary and punitive damages on the third count and restitution from Fierro and her establishment on the fourth count for their “ill-gotten gains,” it said.
The FCC’s digital discrimination broadband order “is illegal on at least three grounds,” the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Washington Legal Foundation said in an 8th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court amicus brief Tuesday (docket 24-1179). The brief supports the 20 industry petitioners that seek to vacate the order as unlawful (see 2404230032). When Congress grants lawmaking authority to a federal agency, it must lay down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the agency can conform, according to the brief. Section 60506 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directs the FCC to adopt rules that facilitate equal access to broadband, including by preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion or national origin, it said. The industry petitioners “persuasively explain” that Section 60506's language doesn’t permit the FCC to implement disparate impact liability, it said. But if it did, then that language violates the nondelegation doctrine by failing to provide an intelligible principle governing such liability, it said. “Virtually any action that a regulated entity can take will have a disparate impact along one or more dimensions of income level, race, ethnicity, color, or religion,” said the brief. That’s especially true because of the inclusion of income level, “which means that any decision by a covered entity lowering or raising prices will have a disparate impact based on income and thus come within the FCC’s enforcement authority,” it said. The authority to promulgate disparate impact rules “is a major question to which Congress is required to speak clearly,” it said. Because Congress didn’t speak “clearly to this particular question” in the statute, the FCC’s order is “invalid,” it said. The order also requires covered entities to “treat people differently based on race, in violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection,” it said.
Amazon and Epson sued two dozen entities and 10 John Does for selling counterfeit Epson products on Amazon from January 2023-February 2024, said a trademark infringement lawsuit Monday (docket 2:24-cv-00616) in U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Seattle.
Apple’s “gatekeeping” of its App Store and “arbitrary decisions” hurt “honest developers,” alleged a Monday antitrust complaint (docket 5:24-cv-02698) against the iPhone maker in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose.
Communications Litigation Today is tracking the below lawsuits involving appeals of FCC actions. Cases marked with an * were terminated since the last update. Cases in bold are new since the last update.
The American Civil Rights Project supports the 20 industry petitioners arguing that the 8th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court should vacate the FCC’s digital discrimination broadband rule since it runs afoul of the law and isn’t based on clear congressional intent (see 2404230032), according to the nonprofit’s amicus brief. It was filed Wednesday in docket 24-1179.
U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark for Eastern Missouri in St. Louis signed an order Wednesday (docket 4:23-cv-00042) referring to alternative dispute resolution (ADR) the Telephone Consumer Protection Act claims against home entertainment retailer Vintage Stock. The order gives Vintage and plaintiffs Sheila and Dennis Thompson until July 15 to conclude their ADR conferences. The parties may conduct the ADR conferences “at any location to which the parties, counsel, and the assigned neutral agree,” it said. The order designates the Thompsons’ attorney, Robert Schultz of Schultz Law Group, as lead counsel, with the responsibility of “working with the parties and the neutral to coordinate an agreeable date, time, and, if necessary, location for the initial ADR conference,” it said. The judge said in an April 16 memorandum and order that the Thompsons were correct to ask him to remand, rather than dismiss, count 2 of their first amended TCPA complaint against Vintage Stock to St. Louis County Circuit Court where it originated before the home entertainment retailer removed it in January 2023 (see 2404170002).
The Foundation for Moral Law, a religious liberties nonprofit, thinks that the federal government’s handling of COVID-19 information “has led to unprecedented infringements on our fundamental freedoms,” said its U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief Monday (docket 23-1062) in Changizi v. Department of Health and Human Services.