Law

A defamation lawsuit by Keith Bass over SpyTalk writer Jeff Stein’s report that Bass had been “effectively fired” from his post leading the CIA’s Office of Medical Services in 2021 has been dismissed with prejudice.

Only 3,300 more lawsuits to go, all filed by minors claiming that TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat were designed to be addictive, resulting in harm to their mental health. The plaintiffs’ claims against Meta, Google, and Snap are still on track for a bellwether trial in October. The first case to reach trial resulted in a $4.2 million verdict against Meta and $1.8 million against Google.

The German licensing organization GEMA filed suit in January of 2025. The court found that Suno didn’t have the rights to train its models on artists represented by GEMA, and now it has to disclose any “illicit revenue” and pay unspecified damages. The company can still appeal the ruling.

Brandon Klayme was wrongly convicted for possession of child pornography after the investigation botched his Kik username, “fus_ro_dah,” in reference to Bethesda’s Skyrim videogame. The real suspect’s username — “fus__ro_dah” — included one additional underscore, a “subtle mistake that changed the course of my life,” Klayme said.

XAI has filed a lawsuit in response to a law taking effect on Saturday that bans apps and websites from generating non-consensual sexualized imagery. The Musk-led company responsible for the Grok chatbot said the law will impact free speech and visual expression “in a clumsy attempt to prohibit ‘nudification.’”

The OpenAI chatbot has started to push back on requests to copy the writing style of authors like Stephen King and Agatha Christie, saying it can spit out something with similar characteristics, but can’t closely imitate distinctive styles. Those disclaimers could be legally important as OpenAI faces down copyright lawsuits filed by authors.

A preliminary injunction has been granted to halt the Minnesota law that was due to go into effect on Saturday. Siding with a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration, Kalshi, and Polymarket, federal judge Katherine Menendez said the plaintiffs would be harmed by enforcement and that federal law supersedes the ban.

That 28-day pause could go a lot longer, now that US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved a deal saying that Paramount Skydance won’t close its transaction until June 1st, 2027, or at least until after legal claims of two lawsuits (one filed by a group of state AGs, and the other by the WGA) are resolved.

US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a decision Thursday extending her temporary restraining order to a total of 28 days, report The Wrap and Variety. The mega media merger is paused for now due to lawsuits by a group of state AGs and the Writers’ Guild of America, as the judge plans to “hear the two motions for preliminary injunction on the same schedule” and has scheduled a hearing for August 3rd.

In what is thought to be the largest copyright recovery case in history, a federal US judge granted final approval of Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion class-action settlement. In 2024, authors sued Anthropic over the training of its Claude AI chatbot using copyrighted works. Authors will be paid “as promptly as possible,” just as soon as lawyers take their $101 million cut.

San Francisco city attorney David Chiu demanded that Apple and Google remove 13 apps that could generate non-consensual nude images. Adam Dema, a spokesperson for Apple confirmed their removal in a statement to The Verge:

Block has reached a $45 million settlement with 46 US states over allegations of inadequate fraud protection for its mobile payment service. The platform was accused of misleading users about its safety, and for expanding marketing when fraud claims recently spiked instead of strengthening protections. It must now provide 24-hour customer support and cease deceptive marketing.

Meta says four US states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties, according to Reuters, in a filing published ahead of an upcoming August trial that accuses the company of purposefully designing Facebook and Instagram to addict young users. Meta’s market cap is $1.5 trillion and it’s already lost back-to-back trials on the matter and settled another.

Agents walked into a polling place on primary Election Day to demand that one of the workers, Paigelynne Gonyea, delete her post, claiming she “may be in violation of federal law.” The post contains the name of Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, who has been named by a number of media outlets, including The Verge.

Neil Vogel, CEO of the publisher formerly known as Dotdash Meredith, brought up his company’s AI licensing deals with Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft in an Axios interview this week. He noted that while it blocks other unlicensed AI crawlers, it can’t block Google’s since it’s the same one used for Google Search.

Over the weekend, the DoorDash X account posted repeatedly about the World Cup, but instead of tagging New Zealand soccer player Tim Payne, the account tagged musician T-Pain — who responded accordingly. The posts had no indication that they were an ad (as the Federal Trade Commission requires).

A major case surrounding lookalike products (“dupes”) came to a close this week, in which Deckers, the maker of UGG boots, sued direct-to-consumer brand Quince, alleging it had knocked off its shearling ankle boot. A jury found that Quince’s version was indeed substantially similar to the design patent for the UGG boots — but also that the patent itself was invalid in the first place.

A month after a jury dismissed Elon’s claims in the Musk v. Altman case, US District Judge Rita Lin dismissed an xAI lawsuit accusing OpenAI of stealing trade secrets and poaching employees. This time, it was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled, unlike when she dismissed the case in February.

The convicted FTX fraudster serving a 25-year prison sentence now has a formal filing for the presidential pardon he’s been openly seeking, plus a new jailhouse phone interview with Fox Business. He presumably hopes that was seen inside the White House, despite Donald Trump’s comments in January that he had no plan to pardon SBF.

Despite last year’s $167 million verdict against NSO Group for its Pegasus software hacking some 1,400 WhatsApp users, Meta says it has detected new spear phishing attacks on its platform from the spyware maker, in violation of the court’s permanent injunction:

Polymarket’s chief marketing officer Matthew Modabber used his personal PayPal account to send at least $350,000 to content creators who hyped the prediction market platform, Politico reports. Shirley and others who were paid promoted Polymarket on X with no paid content disclosures. Influencer content is a huge part of prediction markets’ media strategy — often hiding in plain sight.

In an 8-1 ruling, the justices found that the Federal Communications Commission’s in-house process to levy fines doesn’t violate companies’ right to a jury trial. The case involved AT&T and Verizon’s challenges to fines they faced during the Biden administration over allegations they illegally shared customers’ location without consent.