Google Beats Online Publishers' AI Overviews Antitrust Suit

By Craig Clough

A D.C. federal judge on Wednesday dismissed antitrust suits from Chegg Inc. and Penske Media Corp. against Google, finding that their central claims that the search engine giant coerces publishers into supplying free content for its artificial intelligence products "fail to get out of the starting gate." 

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Trump Says Copyright Chief Can't Stay In Office Amid Appeal

By Adam Lidgett

The Trump administration is urging the D.C. Circuit to let it remove U.S. Copyright Office leader Shira Perlmutter, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision protecting Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook for now does not entitle Perlmutter to remain in office while her firing challenge proceeds.

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Judge Should Penalize Meta $40B In Latest Trial, NM Argues

By Cara Salvatore

The state of New Mexico asked a judge Thursday to penalize Meta $35 billion to $40 billion for statements that a jury found grossly misrepresented the social media giant's actual data privacy practices, while Meta argued no harm was proven and the damages should be in the $345 million to $3.45 billion range.

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Apple Says YouTube's Bad Protections Doom AI Scraping Suit

By Bonnie Eslinger

Apple urged a California federal judge Thursday to toss a proposed class action brought by YouTube creators alleging it violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions by scraping copyrighted videos to train its AI tools, arguing there was no circumvention and any access controls fell outside the DMCA because they were "ineffective."

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Pentagon Calls Stars And Stripes Its Own Government Speech

By Jared Foretek

Military newspaper Stars and Stripes qualifies as government speech and can therefore be controlled without violating the First Amendment, according to the new brief from the U.S. Department of Defense and top Pentagon brass in their bid for a summary judgment win over members of the paper's board.

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Bill Withers' Estate Sues Capitol, UMG Over Olivia Dean Song

By Gina Kim

Capitol Records, Universal Music Group, Sony and others were sued Thursday in California federal court by the late R&B and soul singer Bill Withers' music publisher, which accused them of infringing the melody of his song "Just the Two of Us" for Olivia Dean's song "I've Seen It."

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Brief

Customers Ask 9th Circ. To Halt Paramount-Warner Bros. Deal

By Nadia Dreid

Streaming service customers are asking the Ninth Circuit to step in and stop Paramount Skydance's planned $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery until a court can decide if their antitrust suit challenging the merger will be dismissed.

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Bipartisan Legislation Floated To Fight Foreign-Website Piracy

By Elliot Weld

The two chambers of Congress have introduced related legislation that would allow U.S. courts to direct internet service providers to block foreign criminal and piracy sites within the U.S.

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Judge Tosses Infringement Claims Against Baseball Critic

By Tom Lotshaw

A New York federal judge dismissed some trademark and copyright infringement claims that Cooperstown Dreams Park had lodged against a YouTuber who mocked its youth baseball facility as a place where youngsters' big league ambitions "go to die."

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Mich. Court Tosses Copyright Suit Against NBA's Pelicans

By Ganesh Setty

An artist who has accused the NBA's New Orleans Pelicans of copyright infringement for imitating his works' "signature style" in social media posts failed to establish how the team's conduct was connected to Michigan, a Michigan federal court ruled, granting dismissal. 

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Calif. Gov. Pushes For More In Signing Bill Limiting CIPA Suits

By Allison Grande

California's governor approved legislation Wednesday to block private litigants from bringing lawsuits under one provision of the California Invasion of Privacy Act, while urging the Legislature to keep working on efforts to expand this ban to include additional website tracking claims under the decades-old wiretap statute.  

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MLB Can't Bat Ticket Theft Suit To Arbitration, Judge Says

By Bonnie Eslinger

A New York federal judge denied a Major League Baseball unit's bid to compel arbitration in a proposed class action over digital security breaches that allegedly led to the disappearance of game tickets from the MLB app, finding it failed to show plaintiffs agreed to terms containing the arbitration clause.

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Monthly Merger Review Snapshot

By Matthew Perlman

State enforcers settled their case challenging Paramount Skydance's planned $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, while the U.S. Department of Justice probes Fox's planned $22 billion deal for Roku and regulators review massive deals in the energy and railroad sectors.

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Google Ad Tech MDL Teed Up For Trial Largely Intact

By Bryan Koenig

Gannett, the Daily Mail and a certified class of website publishers scored a major win with a New York federal court ruling largely refusing to let Google scrap antitrust allegations targeting its advertising placement technology business in sprawling multidistrict litigation.

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Google Shakes Suit Over Search Engine Default Agreements

By Bonnie Eslinger

A proposed consumer class action accusing Google of monopolizing the online search market has been tossed by a California federal judge who said the plaintiffs didn't provide evidence showing that "better" options could have been available if Google hadn't struck default search engine deals with Apple and other companies.

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SEC Fines Ex-NFL Player, Influencers Over 'White-Label' Firms

By Sarah Jarvis

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has levied industry bars and a total of nearly $600,000 in fines on seven people, including a former professional football player, for allegedly acting as unregistered brokers by operating and marketing white-label platforms purchased from a third party for trading in so-called contracts for differences.

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Uranium Finance Jury Sees 'I Did A Crypto Heist' Chat

By Stewart Bishop

A federal jury in Manhattan was shown chat threads Thursday that purport to show a cybersecurity consultant saying "I did a crypto heist," in a computer fraud and money laundering trial over what prosecutors say was a short-lived hacking campaign that drained $53 million from crypto exchange Uranium Finance.

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FCC Officially Ditches Race, Ethnicity, Gender Reporting Reqs

By Nadia Dreid

The Federal Communications Commission has officially done away with a rule that required TV and radio broadcasters to disclose data about their employment diversity to the agency after the Fifth Circuit struck the rule down last year.

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7th Circ. Asks When Int'l Arbitration Pacts Are 'Null And Void'

By Celeste Bott

The Seventh Circuit for the first time is grappling with the grounds under which courts may determine if an international arbitration clause is null and void, with one judge questioning Thursday whether consumers should be forced to arbitrate their claims against online casino operators in Canada if Ontario law could ultimately invalidate any resulting award.

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Kirkland Tapped To Replace HSF Kramer In Power Plant Ch. 11

By Clara Geoghegan

West Virginia coal plant Omnis Pleasants LLC has hired Kirkland & Ellis LLP in its contentious Delaware Chapter 11 after Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer LLP's previous work for key creditors disqualified it as debtors counsel.

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NY Art Ruling Creates Fault Line In Cultural Property Cases

A recent New York state appellate decision, blocking a Holocaust victim’s heirs from using a criminal turnover order to reclaim a work the Art Institute of Chicago says it acquired legally, makes establishing ownership a newly central question in cultural property disputes, says Duncan Levin at Levin & Associates.

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Testing AI's Promise For Large-Scale Document Review

Our document-review comparison of attorneys' responsiveness and issue coding decisions versus predictions generated by artificial intelligence across 1,600 documents suggests that these tools can offer a reasonable and reliable basis for improved discovery workflows, provided lawyers understand where guardrails are needed, say attorneys at Redgrave.

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UCLA Law Is Latest DOJ Target Over Race Bias In Admissions

By Dorothy Atkins

The U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division accused the UCLA School of Law of discriminating against white and Asian students in its admissions process in a letter sent to the school's counsel Thursday, following multiple other similar letters that the DOJ sent to other higher-education institutions.

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DOJ Outlines New Corporate Fraud Enforcement Priorities

By Phillip Bantz

Federal prosecutors "must place great weight" on a new list of factors when considering potential charges in corporate fraud cases, including whether the matters involve government programs, threats to national security or immigration offenses, according to a memo released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Justice.

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Trump Announces Judicial Noms For 5th Circ., NC

By Courtney Bublé

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he's nominating Todd Butler, a managing partner at Phelps Dunbar LLP, to serve as a judge on the Fifth Circuit. 

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Blackburn Holds Up White House's Tenn. Judge Pick

By Courtney Bublé

The White House is standing by its nominee for a federal judgeship in the Eastern District of Tennessee amid a holdup from Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., a White House official confirmed to Law360 on Thursday.

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Richards Layton Atty Confirmed To Join Del. Chancery Bench

By Rose Krebs

Delaware's Senate on Thursday confirmed a Richards Layton & Finger PA director to a 12-year term as a vice chancellor on the Chancery Court.

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FBT Gibbons Beats DQ Bid In Suit Over Cigna Payments

By George Woolston

A New Jersey state court judge has rejected a plastic surgery practice's bid to disqualify FBT Gibbons LLP from representing Cigna and a group of employer-sponsored health plans in its suit over the insurer's alleged underpayments, finding the bid appears more of an effort to gain an advantage rather than one to protect the interests of any client.

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Roundup

The Top In-House Hires Of September

By Michele Gorman

Legal department hires during the past month included high-profile appointments at MSG Sports, Nestle and the Associated Press. Here, Law360 Pulse looks at some of the top in-house announcements from September.

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Judge Reinstates Rogoff As Seattle US Atty After Trump Firing

By Rachel Riley

A Washington federal judge issued an order from the bench on Thursday reinstating Roger Rogoff as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, finding that President Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he fired him in July.

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