A legal battle is in the forecast for two local television stations. Gray Media Group, the parent company of KMOV, filed suit last week against competitor Tegna’s KSDK, arguing it had violated a trademark by debuting a new weather brand featuring the phrase “Weather First Alert” just two months after KMOV began using “First Alert Weather” in its coverage of severe weather.
Less than a week after Paula Abdul accused Nigel Lythgoe of sexually assaulting her twice over the past 20 years, the So You Think You Can Dance co-creator has been hit with another suit from two other women. However, unlike the action by the former American Idol judge, this latest blow against Lythgoe may not pack much legal punch.
The lawsuit filed Friday in Los Angeles also accuses Lythgoe of sexually assaulting Abdul after she left American Idol and became a judge on Lythgoe’s other competition show So You Think You Can Dance.
Meta Platforms on Wednesday pressed its argument that the Federal Trade Commission’s structure, including the way it conducts in-house enforcement actions, is unconstitutional. “The commission’s dual role as prosecutor and judge … is flatly inconsistent with fundamental principles of due process,” Meta argues in papers filed with U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss in Washington. The company is seeking an injunction to halt an in-house proceeding that could result in an FTC order banning Meta from monetizing minors’ data.
In what will be a closely watched legal salvo, the publisher claims the generative artificial intelligence giant was using its writing “without permission to develop their models and tools.”
Disney said in a lawsuit filed Friday that the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, often referred to as CFTOD, has been so slow in fulfilling its public records duties that it has failed to respond completely to a request the company made seven months ago when it paid more than $2,400 to get emails and text messages belonging to the five district board members appointed by Gov Ron DeSantis.
Exclusives
A federal judge on Friday gave the go-ahead to a lawsuit against the social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, in which workers claim that the company promised but never paid millions of dollars in bonuses. (Noah Berger/AP)
Attorney General Letitia James’ office said an investigation into complaints from customers found that SiriusXM forced subscribers to wait in an automated system before often lengthy interactions with agents who were trained in ways to avoid accepting a request to cancel service. “Having to endure a lengthy and frustrating process to cancel a subscription is a stressful burden no one looks forward to, and when companies make it hard to cancel subscriptions, it’s illegal,” the attorney general said in a statement.
The tech industry organization NetChoice on Monday sued to block a Utah law that requires social media companies to verify users’ ages, prohibits those companies from allowing minors under 18 to have accounts without parental permission, and bans the companies from serving ads to minors. (Henry Wang/Pixabay)
In April author Demetrious Polychron published a book called The Fellowship of the King that he claimed was a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He planned for the book to be the first in a seven-part series. The author then filed suit against both Amazon and the Tolkien estate, claiming the streaming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power had borrowed from his sequel and infringed his copyright. It can now be reported for the first time that a California judge summarily dismissed Polychron’s lawsuit with prejudice in August.
The case could reshape the rules of how other businesses can make money on the Android operating system.
On Monday, a federal judge advanced a lawsuit from investors who say they suffered losses when they sold their shares in Twitter, now known as X, because of posts from Musk claiming the platform has a major issue with fake accounts and that he could wiggle out of the deal because of it. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer found that several of Musk’s statements were false or misleading, in part, because he waived due diligence.
The network argued that Jason Donner had not shown he faced illegal discrimination. The nation’s capital bans discrimination based on political party membership or endorsement, but Donner hasn’t shown he joined a political party, nor that his bosses knew and fired him for it, Fox lawyers said.
Former Fox News staffer Andrew Delancey is suing the producer, Justin Wells — who was fired last spring along with the host — over the alleged assault and the network over alleged sexual harassment and negligence.
Rupert was deposed this week and his son Lachlan will sit for a grilling as well, as the 2020-related case moves along.
Meta Platforms on Wednesday escalated its battle with the Federal Trade Commission by claiming in a new lawsuit that the agency’s structure, including its ability to conduct in-house hearings, is unconstitutional. The lawsuit — which comes as Meta and the FTC are battling over teens’ data — includes a request to prevent the agency from moving forward with a hearing that could result in an order prohibiting Meta from using teens’ data for ad targeting or algorithms.
X, formerly known as Twitter, is in a pair of legal battles with Adeia, an entity spun out of Xperi that holds a trove of patents, including property with ties to TiVo.
Rupert Murdoch is set to be questioned under oath on Tuesday and Wednesday as part of voting technology company Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox Corp. over coverage of debunked vote-rigging claims involving the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a person familiar with the matter said. Murdoch will be deposed in Los Angeles, according to that person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The deposition does not appear on the public docket for the case.
Investors claim that WWE board members favored a merger with Endeavor’s UFC to allow Vince McMahon to stay on as executive chairman of TKO Group.
Meta “routinely documented” children under 13 on Instagram and collected their data, according to a newly unsealed complaint.
A federal magistrate judge on Tuesday recommended that Meta Platforms be awarded a $36 million default judgment against four residents of Hanoi, Vietnam, who hijacked the accounts of advertising and marketing agency employees in order to perpetrate an ad fraud scheme.
Donald Trump is still very angry over the erroneous reporting about the financial losses at his Twitter clone, Truth Social, and in a new lawsuit filed Monday, the ex-president claimed that the reports were actually a vast media conspiracy involving “no less than 20 major media outlets.”
X filed a lawsuit against the liberal advocacy group on Monday, saying it manufactured a report to show advertisers’ posts alongside neo-Nazi and white nationalist posts in order to “drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”
The judge pointed to evidence that consumers could distinguish that Paramount+ was the exclusive home of two South Park movies per year while Max housed the series’ back catalog. WBD still has claims for breach of contract, tortuous interference and unjust enrichment.
In a lawsuit moved to federal court Monday, producer Jason Donner said he was part of a “purge” of employees who refused to report only information that would “appease” former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
Catherine Herridge is on the brink of being held in contempt of court. In a late-September deposition, the CBS News senior investigative correspondent declined to reveal her source(s) for a series of 2017 stories she reported on during her time at Fox News, according to a court filing made public Tuesday. Her refusal to disclose the source(s) was in direct defiance of an alarming court order issued earlier this year, by which Herridge’s camp will surely appeal, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Apple has asked a U.S. judge to reject a subpoena that could require the company to reveal corporate secrets tied to its failed effort to carry the National Football League’s “Sunday Ticket” programming, now on Google’s YouTube TV. In a filing in California federal court, Apple’s attorneys on Monday opposed a subpoena from residential and commercial Sunday Ticket subscribers who accused the NFL and its teams in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit of violating U.S. antitrust law in the distribution of Sunday Ticket.
Meta was sued by more than three dozen states on Tuesday for knowingly using features on Instagram and Facebook to hook children to its platforms, even as the company said its social media sites were safe for young people. Colorado and Tennessee led a joint lawsuit filed by 33 states in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District Court of California.
Eight separate companies have been on the receiving end of patent lawsuits filed in federal court by pay TV provider Dish. The lawsuits were all filed within the past two months and share a common allegation: Dish believes the services are violating its patents that are connected to adaptive bitrate technology, which improves or decreases the video quality of an online stream based on a user’s connection speed and other factors.
Disney attorneys want to question a previous administrator of the governing district that provides municipal services to Walt Disney World as part of its defense against a state lawsuit brought by a board made up of appointees of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
ABC News has resolved a legal fight with former Good Morning America producer Kirstyn Crawford, who had accused the network’s news division of turning a blind eye to allegations of misconduct and harassment by Michael Corn, a former senior news executive. ABC filed a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice on Friday in New York state court of Crawford’s suit against ABC News and Corn, a former GMA executive producer, who Crawford accused of improper sexual contact during a 2015 business trip to Los Angeles. Crawford’s team also signed the filing. The lawsuit has been dismissed for both ABC News and Corn.
Two advertisers who sued Google for allegedly inflating video ad metrics abruptly dropped their class-action complaint on Thursday. The withdrawal was without prejudice, which leaves the advertisers free to bring their claims again in the future, or in another court. Attorneys for the advertisers and Google haven’t yet responded to requests for comment about the move.
The chair of the Federal Trade Commission wants to disrupt Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, built a trillion-dollar firm by disrupting retail.
The Federal Trade Commission and a bipartisan coalition of 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon over violations of anticompetitive behavior on Tuesday, building on the government’s crackdown on the market power of powerful tech companies. The lawsuit targeting Amazon is twofold — alleging the e-commerce giant’s practices are anticompetitive in how it serves shoppers as well as third-party sellers on the site, according to an FTC announcement.
John Grisham (left), Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin (right) are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission. (AP photo)
Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Newsmax over the right-wing cable network’s airing of 2020 election lies is scheduled to go to trial in late September 2024, a Delaware judge decided.
The funds accuse the Fox Corp. board of neglecting its responsibility to shareholders by leaving the company open to defamation lawsuits.
