Joshua Champion and the Credit Pros International voluntarily dismissed with prejudice all Telephone Consumer Protection Act claims brought by Champion, said their joint stipulation of dismissal Friday (docket 2:21-cv-10814) in U.S. District Court for New Jersey in Newark. Each side will bear its own costs and fees, said the stipulation. None of the rights of any putative class members other than Champion “have been released or are otherwise affected by this dismissal,” it said: “This dismissal resolves the entire action.” Champion's class action alleged that Credit Pros, a credit repair company, sent 56 text message solicitations between October 2020 and January 2021 to a number he had listed on the national do not call registry since July 2019 (see 2305170028).
Lead-generation businesses Lightfoot Media and Power House Marketing deny Kyle Roseboro's class-action allegations that they “routinely violate” the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by delivering telemarketing text messages to residential numbers listed on the national do not call registry without the recipients' prior express invitation or permission (see 2311160001), said their answer Friday (docket 1:23-cv-15983) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago. At all times, the defendants “acted in good faith and had reasonable grounds for believing their actions were in compliance with the TCPA,” including by implementing procedures to prevent violations and maintaining an internal do not call list, said their answer. Without assuming the burden of proof, Roseboro and members of the purported class or collective action aren’t “similarly situated,” it said. The purported class members' potential claims “reflect variability,” and “individual issues predominate” between the plaintiff and his purported class members, it said. The plaintiff’s claims are barred because he provided prior express written permission to receive the communications at issue in the complaint, it said. Roseboro and his class members also didn’t follow “proper procedures or channels to revoke their consent,” so their revocation of consent wasn’t “properly executed,” it said.
OpenAI and Microsoft have built a business valued into the tens of billions of dollars “by taking the combined works of humanity without permission,” said 29 authors, plus the Authors Guild, in a class action Friday (docket 1:23-cv-08292) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York. The action combines the two previously separate complaints brought by fiction and nonfiction authors (see 2309210022). Rather than pay for intellectual property, such as when a person buys a book, “they choose to operate as if the laws protecting copyright do not exist,” the complaint said. The plaintiffs seek redress for the defendants’ “flagrant and harmful infringements” of their registered copyrights, it said. OpenAI and Microsoft copied their works and then fed them into their large language models (LLMs), algorithms designed “to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries,” it said. Those algorithms are at the heart of the defendants’ “massive commercial enterprise,” it said. At the heart of these algorithms “is systematic theft on a mass scale,” it said. In training their LLMs, OpenAI and Microsoft “reproduced copyrighted texts to exploit precisely what the Copyright Act was designed to protect: the elements of protectible expression within them, like the choice and order of words and sentences, syntax, flow, themes, and paragraph and story structure,” it said. OpenAI and Microsoft “copied and data-mined” the works of writers, without permission or compensation, to build a machine that’s capable, or soon will be capable, “of performing the same type of work for which these writers would be paid,” it said. Without the “wide corpus” of copyrighted material on which to feed, there would be no ChatGPT, it said. The defendants’ commercial success “was possible only because they copied and digested the protected, copyrightable expression contained in billions of pages of actual text, across millions of copyrighted works -- all without paying a penny to the authors of those works,” it said.
Of the 23 negligence class actions against Comcast arising from the October Citrix data breach, only the plaintiffs in Diamond v. Comcast Cable Communications, LLC d/b/a Xfinity plaintiffs oppose transfer to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for coordinated pretrial proceedings in the data security breach litigation, said movant Kenneth Hasson in a Friday reply (docket 3099). The filing was in support of a motion for transfer and centralization (see 2401120011) before the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML).
Great Western Insurance “engages in unsolicited marketing, harming thousands of consumers in the process,” alleged Micheal Welch’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action Thursday (docket 6:24-cv-00234) in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Orlando. The Ormond Beach, Florida, resident seeks injunctive relief to halt Great Western’s “illegal conduct,” which has resulted “in the invasion of privacy, harassment, aggravation, and disruption of the daily life of thousands of individuals,” said his complaint. He also seeks statutory damages on behalf of himself and members of the class, plus “any other available legal or equitable remedies,” it said. All of Great Western’s violations “were knowing, willful, and intentional,” and it didn’t maintain procedures “reasonably adapted to avoid any such violation,” it said. Welch’s number has been listed on the national do not call registry since May 2017, yet he received multiple unwanted calls from Great Western that began June 6, promoting its final expense life insurance policies, said the complaint. Welch told the caller he wasn’t interested and demanded that the company not call him again, it said. The calls nevertheless persisted, it said. At no point in time did Welch give Great Western his express written consent to be contacted, it said. Great Western’s unsolicited calls caused Welch “actual harm, including invasion of his privacy, aggravation, annoyance, intrusion on seclusion, trespass, and conversion,” said his complaint.
Jeweler Blue Nile is “shielded” from Telephone Consumer Protection Act liability “because it has established and implemented, with due care, reasonable practices and procedures to effectively prevent violations” of the statute, said its answer Thursday (docket 1:23-cv-15444) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago to George Moore’s Sept. 30 TCPA class action (see 2310310002). Moore’s cellphone number was listed on the national do not call registry for years before he began receiving Blue Nile’s text-message solicitations May 24, said his complaint. He alleges that the solicitations began after he visited a Blue Nile store and engaged with a salesperson. He denies ever giving the jeweler his consent to receive the texts. But Blue Nile asserts that “proper consent was obtained to place the alleged text messages” to Moore and his putative class members, said the jeweler’s answer. It also asserts that Blue Nile had an established business relationship with Moore and his putative class members “as that term is defined” under the TCPA, it said. Moore's conduct and that of his class members “puts them outside the zone of interest” for which the TCPA was enacted, “and they are therefore barred" from recovering any damages, it said. Blue Nile admits that Moore texted “stop” to try putting an ends to the text messages, but that doing so was “insufficient” to terminate his established business relationship Blue Nile, “given that the shared basket text messages were not sent on an automated system,” it said. Blue Nile has acted in “a good faith belief” that it is and was complying with all “applicable provisions” of the TCPA, said its answer. Blue Nile had no intention to violate any provision of the TCPA, and so it didn’t “willfully violate” the statute, it said. To the extent that Moore and any putative class members seek to hold Blue Nile liable for any violations of TCPA regulations promulgated by the FCC, Blue Nile asserts that the FCC “exceeded its authority in promulgating such regulations,” said its answer. Blue Nile further asserts that the FCC’s orders relating to the placement of calls or text messages to phone numbers listed on the DNC registry “are interpretive, rather than legislative, rules,” it said.
Plaintiff Logan Aldridge’s data breach class action against Norton Healthcare was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Greg Stivers for Kentucky in Louisville after Judge Benjamin Beaton recused himself, a reassignment order Thursday said (docket 3:24-cv-00025). Aldridge alleges that the seven months Norton waited between learning of a May 9 data breach in its servers and when it notified patients Dec. 8 deprived him and class members of promptly mitigating "potential adverse consequences” resulting from that delay (see 2401160032).
Fidelity National Financial (FNF) and its LoanCare subsidiary failed to comply with industry standards to protect its customers’ “highly valuable, protected, personally identifiable information” (PII) in a November data breach that the company referred to as a “catastrophe,” alleged a class action Thursday (docket 3:24-cv-00115) in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Jacksonville.
Johnson & Wales University (JWU) denies “each and every allegation” in plaintiff Lawrence Wright’s Nov. 22 Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action that it, or someone acting on its behalf, makes recorded telemarketing calls to promote its degree programs, and does so without prior express written consent (see 2311270009), said JWU’s answer Wednesday (docket 3:23-cv-01941) in U.S. District Court for Middle Pennsylvania in Scranton. The university contends that Wright lacks Article III standing because he suffered no injury or that he suffered a “de minimis injury insufficient to satisfy Article III,” said its answer. If Wright did suffer an injury, as he alleges, any such injury “was the result of superseding intervening causes,” including his own conduct, for which the school “is in no way legally responsible,” it said.
Joseph Davis filed suit against Clear Health to halt the health insurer’s "campaign" to generate new customers through the use of telemarketing, “despite not having the requisite consent to contact those individuals” who, like him, listed their residential cellphone numbers on the national do not call registry, said his Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action Wednesday (docket 1:24-cv-00187) in U.S. District Court for Northern Ohio in Cleveland. Because telemarketing campaigns use technology capable of generating thousands of similar calls per day, Davis “sues on behalf of proposed nationwide classes of other persons who received similar calls,” said the complaint. The Ohio resident estimates receiving at least 10 telemarketing calls from Clear Health between Dec. 13 and Jan. 5, including three calls Dec. 29 and four Jan. 5, despite having listed his number on the national DNC registry since Oct. 23, said his complaint. Davis and the other call recipients “were harmed by these calls,” it said. “They were temporarily deprived of legitimate use of their phones because their phone lines were tied up during the telemarketing calls and their privacy was improperly invaded,” it said. The calls also injured Davis and the other call recipients “because they were frustrating, obnoxious, annoying, were a nuisance and disturbed the solitude of plaintiff and the class,” it said.