Balough
March 4, 2015
Google, Inc. won a preliminary injunction stopping the Mississippi Attorney General from enforcing a 79-page subpoena or bringing a civil or criminal charge against Google under Mississippi law for making accessible third-party content to Internet users. In a brief order, the trial court found that Google had a substantial likelihood of prevailing on the merits in […]
Balough
January 28, 2014
Yelp, Inc. must turn over the identity of anonymous posters who gave bad reviews asserting, apparently falsely, that they were former customers a carpet cleaning service. The Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed a trial court’s decision requiring the online reviewing service to comply with a subpoena to identify seven posters who gave negative reviews of […]
Balough
January 24, 2014
A blogger has the same First Amendment rights as a traditional journalist and to prove defamation for a post, a plaintiff must show some degree of negligence by the blogger, the Ninth Circuit found. The case involved one of several blog posts by Crystal Cox. That post accused the plaintiffs, who were trustees in a […]
Balough
December 23, 2013
Banning two middle-school students from wearing bracelets with the slogan “I ♥ boobies! (KEEP A BREAST)” in school violates the students’ right to free speech, a divided en banc panel of the Third Circuit found. The bracelets are part of a nationally recognized breast-cancer-awareness campaign sponsored by the Keep A Breast Foundation. The bracelets were […]
Balough
December 22, 2013
Google, Inc., is not required to identify anonymous bloggers who posted their opinions regarding a real estate developer on a blog hosted by Google. The company had been subpoenaed by the developer to disclose the names of the posters. The trial court quashed the subpoena. The New Jersey appellate court found that the bloggers comments […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A website that ranks attorneys is publishing only protected opinions, not facts, a Washington federal district court found. Two attorneys who were ranked by Avvo, Inc. claimed they were damaged by the website’s rating and that the ranking violated the Washington Consumer Protection Act. They also alleged that because of the ranking, clients may not […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
A cosmetology instructor’s distribution of pamphlets on the sinfulness of homosexuality is neither protected speech nor does the school’s prohibiting such distribution constitute prior restraint under the First Amendment. The instructor sued Carl Sandburg College when her part-time contract was not renewed after someone reported that she gave a gay student two religious pamphlets and […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
It is protected speech for players to criticize their high school basketball coach but the players’ refusal to play in the game is not. However, whether the school can permanently ban the students from the team depends upon if the ban is based upon the students’ exercise of their free speech rights or their refusal […]
