Crown Castle seeks a pre-motion conference to devise an “expedited briefing schedule” for its anticipated motion for summary judgment in its nearly year-old Telecommunications Act (TCA) infrastructure complaint against the town of Oyster Bay, New York, the company wrote U.S. District Judge Joan Azrack for Eastern New York in Central Islip Monday (docket 2:21-cv-06305). Crown Castle sued the town in November 2021 alleging TCA statutory violations.
Paul Gluckman
Paul Gluckman, Executive Senior Editor, is a 30-year Warren Communications News veteran having joined the company in May 1989 to launch its Audio Week publication. In his long career, Paul has chronicled the rise and fall of physical entertainment media like the CD, DVD and Blu-ray and the advent of ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology from its rudimentary standardization roots to its anticipated 2020 commercial launch.
DirecTV named 10 defendants, plus 10 John Does and 10 “XYZ” companies, in a complaint Tuesday (docket 6:22-cv-00423) in U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas in Tyler that it said “seeks to terminate” an ongoing “imposter fraud scheme” uncovered after “a months-long investigation.”
About 100 Video Privacy Protection Act complaints have been filed in the past year, and the legal theories in the current wave of lawsuits involve a “novel refocusing” of the statute, partly to encompass technologies that weren't even envisioned when the law was enacted more than three decades ago, Wiley associate Tyler Bridegan told a Wiley webinar Thursday.
The “insistence” of Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward that the Supreme Court “take the highly unusual step of becoming involved now on an emergency basis” to block the House Jan. 6 select committee’s subpoena for her T-Mobile phone and text records “is deeply flawed,” said the committee in its response Friday to her emergency application for a stay or injunction. The rulings by the U.S. District Court for Arizona and the 9th Circuit U.S. Appeals Court denying Ward’s motions to quash the subpoena “are correct,” plus “there is no legal issue warranting” SCOTUS action, it said.
Though Kelli Ward chairs the Arizona GOP, and whose emergency application is before the Supreme Court to quash the House Jan. 6 Select Committee’s subpoena for her T-Mobile call and text records, “the decision that will be reached by this Court will have significant impact on many nonprofit organizations throughout the nation,” said five conservative nonprofits in a proposed amicus brief Friday (docket 22A350) in support of Ward’s application.
Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward argued in her emergency application Wednesday at the Supreme Court for a stay of the House Jan. 6 subpoena for her T-Mobile phone and text records that there was a “reasonable probability that four justices will consider the issue sufficiently meritorious to grant certiorari.” Justice Elena Kagan responded hours later with an order (docket 22A350) temporarily enjoining T-Mobile from releasing the records and ordered the committee to respond to Ward’s application by 5 p.m. Friday.
U.S. District Chief Judge John McConnell for Rhode Island granted summary judgment Wednesday (docket 1:21-cv-00240) for the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) against the allegations of pro se plaintiff Christopher Laccinole that the union violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the Rhode Island Right to Privacy Act. Rhode Island court dockets list Laccinole as the plaintiff in many dozens of TCPA complaints dating to 2014.
An apparent rift is developing in the dozen or more fraud class actions over Samsung’s summertime data breach, between plaintiffs who want the cases consolidated and transferred to the U.S. District Court for Northern California and those who want them centralized and moved to the U.S. District Court for New Jersey.
When the Supreme Court takes up two related Communications Decency Act Section 230 cases this term, “the questions will be difficult and the stakes enormous,” said Miller Nash partner Robert Cumbow in an analysis Monday. Many over the past quarter century have credited Section 230 “with enabling the internet to grow and flourish,” said Cumbow. But others say that “reconsideration of the reach of Section 230 is long overdue,” he said. Legal experts told us earlier this month that SCOTUS will almost undoubtedly recast or cut back the broad immunity that interactive online platforms enjoy via the Section 230 liability shield (see 2210110030). Cumbow said that waiting in the wings is the pending 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case of Hepp v. Facebook, in which a misappropriated photograph of Philadelphia news anchor Karen Hepp found its way into numerous ads that appeared on Facebook and other online platforms, promoting such products as dating services and sexual performance enhancement. Plaintiff Hepp claims Facebook “is liable for violating her publicity rights because Section 230 expressly excludes intellectual property claims,” he said. Many states, including Hepp’s home state of Pennsylvania, “regard publicity rights as intellectual property, leading the Fourth Circuit to hold that Facebook is not shielded from Hepp’s claims” via Section 230, he said. Hepp and the two related social media cases all maintain that under the current interpretation of Section 230 they “will have no redress for wrongs committed against them and perpetuated by the companies that control web platforms,” said Cumbow.
AT&T for more than a year has been trying to place a 150-foot-tall cell tower with accompanying communications electronics on a 40-by-40-foot fenced lease area on a five-acre parcel of land in Lane County in western Oregon to provide and improve local wireless services, but the county has violated the Telecommunications Act by denying approval of the proposed facility, alleged AT&T in a complaint Tuesday (docket 6:22-cv-01635) in U.S. District Court for Oregon in Eugene.