Rebecca Day

Two school districts in Kentucky filed public nuisance lawsuits against the top social media platforms Wednesday in U.S. District Court for Eastern Kentucky, and two Florida school districts filed a combined public nuisance and negligence suit in Superior Court of California in Los Angeles Tuesday.

Google monopolized, “or attempted to monopolize,” key technologies that make digital advertising possible, said DOJ and eight states, in a Monday opposition response (docket 1:23-cv-00108) to Google’s motion to dismiss their antitrust case in U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia in Alexandria. Its “anticompetitive conduct” thwarted competition and “stifled innovation” in digital display advertising technology for 15 years, it said.

“Downstream defendants” Amazon.com, Audible and Blackstone jointly moved (docket 1:23-cv-00507) the U.S. District Court for Eastern New York in Brooklyn to grant their motion to dismiss plaintiff Teri Woods Publishing’s complaint with prejudice, saying Friday the copyright lawsuit “should never have been brought.” They requested an oral argument before U.S. District Court Judge Dora Irizarry at a date and time to be determined by the court.

Dell is knowingly marketing and selling mobile devices with a defective hinge system, alleges a Friday breach of warranty class action (docket 1:23-cv-00937) in U.S. District Court for Maryland in Baltimore. Plaintiff Rachel Gunter, a Maryland citizen currently residing in Phoenix, bought a Dell Inspiron 7300-5395S 2-in-1 hybrid computer in September 2020, from a Best Buy store in Rockville, Maryland, said the complaint. Gunter bought the 2-in-1 computer for its hinge design, with 360-degree rotation, and touch-screen feature, said the complaint.

Convicted shooter Dylann Roof was shown so much white supremacist propaganda online he believed the mass shooting he committed at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., “was necessary to spark a race war and save the white race.” So alleged a product liability complaint Wednesday (docket 2:23-cv-01370) against Facebook, Google and Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia-based Concord Management and Consulting in U.S. District Court for South Carolina in Charleston.

Exploitation of children has become central to social media companies’ profitability, alleged Pittsburgh Public Schools in a redacted public nuisance lawsuit Thursday (docket 2:23-cv-577) in U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh against Meta, Snap, TikTok and Google.

Paris-based Nexway Sasu et al. worked with telemarketers making misrepresentations to consumers about the performance and security of their computers in a “technical support scam,” alleged the DOJ in a Monday fraud complaint (docket 1:23-cv-00900) in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Apple can't evade the law "that imposing new anticompetitive agreements and enforcing such agreements are each overt acts,” said SaurikIT, owner of third-party app store Cydia, in a reply brief Monday (docket 22-16527) in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. SaurikIT alleged in 2020 Apple was violating antitrust law in the app distribution and payment processing markets. Its Cydia third-party app store is available only on jailbroken Apple iOS devices.

Defendants in the social media censorship lawsuit Missouri v. Biden sought to “correct the record” on plaintiffs’ request for consolidation with the Missouri et al. v. Biden case against President Joe Biden and some 60 individuals and government agencies pending in the same court, said a Tuesday response (docket 3:22-cv-01213) in U.S. District Court of Western Louisiana in Monroe.

Meta, Snap, Google and TikTok could have avoided harming plaintiffs and their students, said a March 28 lawsuit (docket 23STCV06685) made publicly available this week in California Superior Court in Los Angeles by Baldwin, Montgomery, and Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, public schools and the state of Alabama .