By Chinh Vo Moviemakers Sue Tens of Thousands of BitTorrent Users A coalition of independent filmmakers has sued more than 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders for copyright infringement in federal court in Washington D.C., the Hollywood Reporter, Esq. blog reports. The series of lawsuits marks the first major move in the U.S. by the movie industry to target individual torrent downloaders, rather than the torrent sites themselves, and is preceded by similar actions in Germany and the U.K. According to ... Read More...

By Kassity Liu Third Circuit Dismisses “Sexting” Charges Against Minor On March 18, the WSJ Law Blog reported that the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit dismissed charges against a teenage girl for distributing sexually explicit images of herself. The court had originally stated that they would address whether the First Amendment protects minors from sending these types of images of themselves through their cells phones, but the court refused to consider this issue in the case. Instead, the ... Read More...

California Superior Court Enters Judgement in Anti-SLAPP Suit By Debbie Rosenbaum – Edited by Steven Primeaux MagicJack, LP v. Happy Mutants LLC, Case No. CIV 091108 (Sup. Ct. Cal. Marin County, Jan. 5, 2010) Opinion (hosted by Boing Boing) On January 5, 2010, the Superior Court of California for the County of Marin entered judgment against plaintiff MagicJack, reiterating its May 2009 holding that MagicJack had not established a probability of prevailing on its claims against Boing Boing and ruling ... Read More...

D.C. Appeals Court Sets New Standard for Unmasking Anonymous Online Speakers By Anthony Kammer – Edited by Evelyn Breithaupt Solers, Inc. v. Doe, No. 07-CV-159 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 13, 2009) Opinion On August 13, 2009, the D.C. Court of Appeals remanded Solers, Inc.’s case against an anonymous speaker and provided the lower court with a new standard for determining when an anonymous speaker’s identity may be revealed. The Volokh Conspiracy notes that although the court limits its decision to defamation ... Read More...

By Sharona Hakimi Amazon Threatened with Class Action for Remotely Deleting Orwell E-books on Kindles On July 20, MediaPost News reported that the law firm KamberEdelson is readying a class action lawsuit on behalf of consumers against Amazon for removing George Orwell books on owners’ Kindles. Amazon remotely deleted the e-books from users after discovering that the company that added them to the online catalog did not have rights to the books. Amazon did issue refunds to the owners, but ... Read More...