It’s a “national security imperative” for government officials to “engage with social media platforms about foreign malign influence targeting their users,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said Tuesday in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief (docket 23-411). His brief supports government petitioners in Murthy v. Missouri who seek to vacate the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ social media injunction against officials from the White House and four federal agencies.

The Environmental Defense Fund used its U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief Dec. 22 in Relentless v. Commerce Department (docket 22-1219) in support of the government respondents who want to preserve Chevron doctrine and attack “the outright insubstantiality” of the Relentless petitioners’ main legal arguments for overturning it.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court’s Oct. 3 ruling that affirmed the district court’s injunction barring federal officials from conversing with social media companies about moderating their content (see [Ref:2310040001) “threatens to imperil independent research in the digital technology area,” said the Coalition for Independent Technology Research in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief Tuesday (docket 23-411) in Murthy v. Missouri in support of the government petitioners’ efforts to defeat the injunction.

The U.S. District Court for Eastern Wisconsin in Milwaukee should deny Verizon’s motion for “the extraordinary remedy” of an immediate injunction ordering the city to permit Verizon to install three poles to host small wireless facilities on leased property, said the city’s opposition brief Tuesday (docket 2:23-cv-01581). Deer District LLC (see 2312050022), an entity affiliated with the Milwaukee Bucks, controls the property.

Here are Communications Litigation Today's top stories from last week, in case you missed them. Each can be found by searching on its title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

Microsoft and OpenAI generative AI (GenAI) tools rely on large-language models (LLMs) “that were built by copying and using” millions of the New York Times’ copyrighted news articles, in violation of the Copyright Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other statutes, alleged the New York Times Co.’s' complaint Wednesday (docket 1:23-cv-11195) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan.

By obtaining, collecting and storing plaintiff Thomas Neeley’s personally identifiable information (PII), software company Zeroed-In assumed “equitable and legal duties” to safeguard it and use the information only for business purposes, “and to only make authorized disclosures,” said a class action Tuesday (docket 2:23-cv-01219) in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Fort Myers.

A district court’s “merger of uses and failure to analyze each use individually harms libraries” and could impact libraries’ “longstanding, customarily permitted activities,” said an amicus brief Friday (docket 23-1260) from former and current law library directors, professors and academics in support of Internet Archive's appeal to the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

X's fraud case is not about defendants’ speech but their “audacious breaches" of legal obligations, said X's opposition Friday (docket 3:23-cv-03836) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco to the November motion of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its U.K. counterpart to dismiss X's July 31 complaint (see 2311200040).

The Democratic attorneys general of 22 states and the District of Columbia urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ Oct. 3 decision and vacate the “sweeping” injunction that bars officials from the White House and four federal agencies from conversing with social media platforms executives about content moderation (see 2310040001), said their amicus brief Tuesday (docket 23-411). The injunction is stayed, pending completion of a SCOTUS review.