Lawyer Ex Machina #13: A Very Lucky Number
Over the weekend, Gov. Newsom signed the State Bar association funding bill, one provision of which restricts the State Bar from spending funds on efforts to set up paraprofessional practice or regulatory sandbox programs without approval from the Legislature for two years. [Bloomberg Law ($)]
Are state AGs and agencies more effectively regulating crypto companies than the Feds? [Washington Post ($)]
"Thousands of international travelers' electronic data is quietly stored in a US Customs and Border Protection database, viewable by thousands of its workers, for up to 15 years ..." [Business Insider | Washington Post ($)]
Meta continues to face fallout over its Pixel tracking of users on hospital websites, possibly transmitting data about medical appointments, conditions and prescriptions.
There is growing concern about the images that are being scraped from the web and used to train AI illustration apps - with evidence of illegal and non-consensual content within a major training dataset.
Looking for analysis and commentary on the Fifth Circuit's recent decision in NetChoice v. Paxton? [Opinion]You have a range of options of varying depths:
Lawfare: "The Fifth Circuit’s Social Media Decision: A Dangerous Example of First Amendment Absolutism"
Vox: "Two Republican judges just let Texas seize control of Twitter and Facebook"
New York Times: "A federal court clears the way for a Texas social media law"
Eugene Volokh, via Reason: "Fifth Circuit Rejects First Amendment Challenge to Texas Social Media Common Carrier Law"
Public Knowledge: "Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Decision Upholding Texas Social Media Law Jeopardizes Free Expression"
Protocol: "Texas’ social media law lives. Here are Big Tech’s options."
TechDirt: "5th Circuit Rewrites A Century Of 1st Amendment Law To Argue Internet Companies Have No Right To Moderate"
Eric Goldman: "The 5th Circuit Puts the 1st Amendment in a Blender & Whips Up a Terrible #MAGA Kool-Aid–NetChoice v. Paxton"
From the subhead of a Decrypt.co article: "In a civil complaint against a crypto influencer, the SEC suggested that it believes the U.S. government has jurisdiction over all Ethereum transactions."
And just because:
The winners of this year's Ig Nobel Prize in Literature are the authors of this paper: "Poor Writing, Not Specialized Concepts, Drives Processing Difficulty in Legal Language"