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Committee Prepares to Grill Tech CEOS, but It Is the First Amendment That Could Get Torched

Ben Sperry — 24 March 2021

In what has become regularly scheduled programming on Capitol Hill, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be subject to yet another round of congressional grilling—this time, about the platforms’ content-moderation policies—during a March 25 joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The stated purpose of this latest bit of political theatre is to explore, as made explicit in the hearing’s title, “social media’s role in promoting extremism and misinformation.” Specific topics are expected to include proposed changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, heightened scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission, and misinformation about COVID-19—the subject of new legislation introduced by Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii).

But while many in the Democratic majority argue that social media companies have not done enough to moderate misinformation or hate speech, it is a problem with no realistic legal fix. Any attempt to mandate removal of speech on grounds that it is misinformation or hate speech, either directly or indirectly, would run afoul of the First Amendment.

Misinformation Is Usually Legal

Much of the recent focus has been on misinformation spread on social media about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. The memorandum for the March 25 hearing sums it up:

Facebook, Google, and Twitter have long come under fire for their role in the dissemination and amplification of misinformation and extremist content. For instance, since the beginning of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, all three platforms have spread substantial amounts of misinformation about COVID-19. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, disinformation regarding the severity of the virus and the effectiveness of alleged cures for COVID-19 was widespread. More recently, COVID-19 disinformation has misrepresented the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter have also been distributors for years of election disinformation that appeared to be intended either to improperly influence or undermine the outcomes of free and fair elections. During the November 2016 election, social media platforms were used by foreign governments to disseminate information to manipulate public opinion. This trend continued during and after the November 2020 election, often fomented by domestic actors, with rampant disinformation about voter fraud, defective voting machines, and premature declarations of victory.

It is true that, despite social media companies’ efforts to label and remove false content and bar some of the biggest purveyors, there remains a considerable volume of false information on social media. But U.S. Supreme Court precedent consistently has limited government regulation of false speech to distinct categories like defamation, perjury, and fraud.

The Case of Stolen Valor

The court’s 2011 decision in United States v. Alvarez struck down as unconstitutional the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made it a federal crime to falsely claim to have earned a military medal. A four-justice plurality opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, along with a two-justice concurrence, both agreed that a statement being false did not, by itself, exclude it from First Amendment protection.

Kennedy’s opinion noted that while the government may impose penalties for false speech connected with the legal process (perjury or impersonating a government official); with receiving a benefit (fraud); or with harming someone’s reputation (defamation); the First Amendment does not sanction penalties for false speech, in and of itself. The plurality exhibited particular skepticism toward the notion that government actors could be entrusted as a “Ministry of Truth,” empowered to determine what categories of false speech should be made illegal:

Permitting the government to decree this speech to be a criminal offense, whether shouted from the rooftops or made in a barely audible whisper, would endorse government authority to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are punishable. That governmental power has no clear limiting principle. Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth… Were this law to be sustained, there could be an endless list of subjects the National Government or the States could single out… Were the Court to hold that the interest in truthful discourse alone is sufficient to sustain a ban on speech, absent any evidence that the speech was used to gain a material advantage, it would give government a broad censorial power unprecedented in this Court’s cases or in our constitutional tradition. The mere potential for the exercise of that power casts a chill, a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are to remain a foundation of our freedom. [EMPHASIS ADDED]

As noted in the opinion, declaring false speech illegal constitutes a content-based restriction subject to “exacting scrutiny.” Applying that standard, the court found “the link between the Government’s interest in protecting the integrity of the military honors system and the Act’s restriction on the false claims of liars like respondent has not been shown.”

While finding that the government “has not shown, and cannot show, why counterspeech would not suffice to achieve its interest,” the plurality suggested a more narrowly tailored solution could be simply to publish Medal of Honor recipients in an online database. In other words, the government could overcome the problem of false speech by promoting true speech.

In 2012, President Barack Obama signed an updated version of the Stolen Valor Act that limited its penalties to situations where a misrepresentation is shown to result in receipt of some kind of benefit. That places the false speech in the category of fraud, consistent with the Alvarez opinion.

Applying the Alvarez standard to social media, the government could (and already does) promote its interest in public health or election integrity by publishing true speech through official channels. But there is little reason to believe the government at any level could regulate access to misinformation. Anything approaching an outright ban on accessing speech deemed false by the government not only would not be the most narrowly tailored way to deal with such speech, but it is bound to have chilling effects even on true speech.

The analysis doesn’t change if the government instead places Big Tech itself in the position of Ministry of Truth. Some propose making changes to Section 230, which currently immunizes social media companies from liability for user speech (with limited exceptions), regardless what moderation policies the platform adopts. A hypothetical change might condition Section 230’s liability shield on platforms agreeing to moderate certain categories of misinformation. But that would still place the government in the position of coercing platforms to take down speech.

Even the “fix” of making social media companies liable for user speech they amplify through promotions on the platform, as proposed by Sen. Mark Warner’s (D-Va.) SAFE TECH Act, runs into First Amendment concerns. The aim of the bill is to regard sponsored content as constituting speech made by the platform, thus opening the platform to liability for the underlying misinformation. But any such liability also would be limited to categories of speech that fall outside First Amendment protection, like fraud or defamation. This would not appear to include most of the types of misinformation on COVID-19 or election security that animate the current legislative push.

There is no way for the government to regulate misinformation, in and of itself, consistent with the First Amendment. Big Tech companies are free to develop their own policies against misinformation, but the government may not force them to do so.

Extremely Limited Room to Regulate Extremism

The Big Tech CEOs are also almost certain to be grilled about the use of social media to spread “hate speech” or “extremist content.” The memorandum for the March 25 hearing sums it up like this:

Facebook executives were repeatedly warned that extremist content was thriving on their platform, and that Facebook’s own algorithms and recommendation tools were responsible for the appeal of extremist groups and divisive content. Similarly, since 2015, videos from extremists have proliferated on YouTube; and YouTube’s algorithm often guides users from more innocuous or alternative content to more fringe channels and videos. Twitter has been criticized for being slow to stop white nationalists from organizing, fundraising, recruiting and spreading propaganda on Twitter.

Social media has often played host to racist, sexist, and other types of vile speech. While social media companies have community standards and other policies that restrict “hate speech” in some circumstances, there is demand from some public officials that they do more. But under a First Amendment analysis, regulating hate speech on social media would fare no better than the regulation of misinformation.

The First Amendment doesn’t allow for the regulation of “hate speech” as its own distinct category. Hate speech is, in fact, as protected as any other type of speech. There are some limited exceptions, as the First Amendment does not protect incitement, true threats of violence, or “fighting words.” Some of these flatly do not apply in the online context. “Fighting words,” for instance, applies only in face-to-face situations to “those personally abusive epithets which, when addressed to the ordinary citizen, are, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke violent reaction.”

One relevant precedent is the court’s 1992 decision in R.A.V. v. St. Paul, which considered a local ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota, prohibiting public expressions that served to cause “outrage, alarm, or anger with respect to racial, gender or religious intolerance.” A juvenile was charged with violating the ordinance when he created a makeshift cross and lit it on fire in front of a black family’s home. The court unanimously struck down the ordinance as a violation of the First Amendment, finding it an impermissible content-based restraint that was not limited to incitement or true threats.

By contrast, in 2003’s Virginia v. Black, the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law outlawing cross burnings done with the intent to intimidate. The court’s opinion distinguished R.A.V. on grounds that the Virginia statute didn’t single out speech regarding disfavored topics. Instead, it was aimed at speech that had the intent to intimidate regardless of the victim’s race, gender, religion, or other characteristic. But the court was careful to limit government regulation of hate speech to instances that involve true threats or incitement.

When it comes to incitement, the legal standard was set by the court’s landmark Brandenberg v. Ohio decision in 1969, which laid out that:

the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. [EMPHASIS ADDED]

In other words, while “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment, specific types of speech that convey true threats or fit under the related doctrine of incitement are not. The government may regulate those types of speech. And they do. In fact, social media users can be, and often are, charged with crimes for threats made online. But the government can’t issue a per se ban on hate speech or “extremist content.”

Just as with misinformation, the government also can’t condition Section 230 immunity on platforms removing hate speech. Insofar as speech is protected under the First Amendment, the government can’t specifically condition a government benefit on its removal. Even the SAFE TECH Act’s model for holding platforms accountable for amplifying hate speech or extremist content would have to be limited to speech that amounts to true threats or incitement. This is a far narrower category of hateful speech than the examples that concern legislators.

Social media companies do remain free under the law to moderate hateful content as they see fit under their terms of service. Section 230 immunity is not dependent on whether companies do or don’t moderate such content, or on how they define hate speech. But government efforts to step in and define hate speech would likely run into First Amendment problems unless they stay focused on unprotected threats and incitement.

What Can the Government Do?

One may fairly ask what it is that governments can do to combat misinformation and hate speech online. The answer may be a law that requires takedowns by court order of speech after it is declared illegal, as proposed by the PACT Act, sponsored in the last session by Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and John Thune (R-S.D.). Such speech may, in some circumstances, include misinformation or hate speech.

But as outlined above, the misinformation that the government can regulate is limited to situations like fraud or defamation, while the hate speech it can regulate is limited to true threats and incitement. A narrowly tailored law that looked to address those specific categories may or may not be a good idea, but it would likely survive First Amendment scrutiny, and may even prove a productive line of discussion with the tech CEOs.

Pai Dedicated His Tenure to Improving US Broadband

Brent Skorup — 18 January 2021

[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the legal and regulatory issues that arose during Ajit Pai’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The entire series of posts is available here.

Brent Skorup is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.]

Ajit Pai came into the Federal Communications Commission chairmanship with a single priority: to improve the coverage, cost, and competitiveness of U.S. broadband for the benefit of consumers. The 5G Fast Plan, the formation of the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, the large spectrum auctions, and other broadband infrastructure initiatives over the past four years have resulted in accelerated buildouts and higher-quality services. Millions more Americans have gotten connected because of agency action and industry investment.

That brings us to Chairman Pai’s most important action: restoring the deregulatory stance of the FCC toward broadband services and repealing the Title II “net neutrality” rules in 2018. Had he not done this, his and future FCCs would have been bogged down in inscrutable, never-ending net neutrality debates, reminiscent of the Fairness Doctrine disputes that consumed the agency 50 years ago. By doing that, he cleared the decks for the pro-deployment policies that followed and redirected the agency away from its roots in mass-media policy toward a future where the agency’s primary responsibilities are encouraging broadband deployment and adoption.

It took tremendous courage from Chairman Pai and Commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Brendan Carr to vote to repeal the 2015 Title II regulations, though they probably weren’t prepared for the public reaction to a seemingly arcane dispute over regulatory classification. The hysteria ginned up by net-neutrality advocates, members of Congress, celebrities, and too-credulous journalists was unlike anything I’ve seen in political advocacy. Advocates, of course, don’t intend to provoke disturbed individuals but the irresponsible predictions of “the end of the internet as we know it” and widespread internet service provider (ISP) content blocking drove one man to call in a bomb threat to the FCC, clearing the building in a desperate attempt to delay or derail the FCC’s Title II repeal. At least two other men pleaded guilty to federal charges after issuing vicious death threats to Chairman Pai, a New York congressman, and their families in the run-up to the regulation’s repeal. No public official should have to face anything resembling that over a policy dispute.

For all the furor, net-neutrality advocates promised a neutral internet that never was and never will be. ”Happy little bunny rabbit dreams” is how David Clark of MIT, an early chief protocol architect of the internet, derided the idea of treating all online traffic the same. Relatedly, the no-blocking rule—the sine na qua of net neutrality—was always a legally dubious requirement. Legal scholars for years had called into doubt the constitutionality of imposing must-carry requirements on ISPs. Unsurprisingly, a federal appellate judge pressed this point in oral arguments defending the net neutrality rules in 2016. The Obama FCC attorney conceded without a fight; even after the net neutrality order, ISPs were “absolutely” free to curate the internet.

Chairman Pai recognized that the fight wasn’t about website blocking and it wasn’t, strictly speaking, about net neutrality. This was the latest front in the long battle over whether the FCC should strictly regulate mass-media distribution. There is a long tradition of progressive distrust of new (unregulated) media. The media access movement that pushed for broadcast TV and radio and cable regulations from the 1960s to 1980s never went away, but the terminology has changed: disinformation, net neutrality, hate speech, gatekeeper.

The decline in power of regulated media—broadcast radio and TV—and the rising power of unregulated internet-based media—social media, Netflix, and podcasts—meant that the FCC and Congress had few ways to shape American news and media consumption. In the words of Tim Wu, the law professor who coined the term “net neutrality,” the internet rules are about giving the agency the continuing ability to shape “media policy, social policy, oversight of the political process, [and] issues of free speech.”

Title II was the only tool available to bring this powerful new media—broadband access—under intense regulatory scrutiny by regulators and the political class. As net-neutrality advocate and Public Knowledge CEO Gene Kimmelman has said, the 2015 Order was about threatening the industry with vague but severe rules: “Legal risk and some ambiguity around what practices will be deemed ‘unreasonably discriminatory’ have been effective tools to instill fear for the last 20 years” for the telecom industry. Internet regulation advocates, he said at the time, “have to have fight after fight over every claim of discrimination, of new service or not.”

Chairman Pai and the Republican commissioners recognized the threat that Title II posed, not only to free speech, but to the FCC’s goals of expanding telecommunications services and competition. Net neutrality would draw the agency into contentious mass-media regulation once again, distracting it from universal service efforts, spectrum access and auctions, and cleaning up the regulatory detritus that had slowly accumulated since the passage of the agency’s guiding statutes: the 1934 Communications Act and the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

There are probably items that Chairman Pai wish he’d finished or had done slightly differently. He’s left a proud legacy, however, and his politically risky decision to repeal the Title II rules redirected agency energies away from no-win net-neutrality battles and toward broadband deployment and infrastructure. Great progress was made and one hopes the Biden FCC chairperson will continue that trajectory that Pai set.

The Dishonesty of Conservative Attacks on Section 230

Ben Sperry — 17 November 2020

President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for repeal of Section 230. But while Trump and fellow conservatives decry Big Tech companies for their alleged anti-conservative bias, including at yet more recent hearings, their issue is not actually with Section 230. It’s with the First Amendment.

Conservatives can’t actually do anything directly about how social media platforms moderate content because it is the First Amendment that grants those platforms a right to editorial discretion. Even FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who strongly opposes “Big Tech censorship,” recognizes this.

By the same token, even if one were to grant that conservatives are right about the bias of moderators at these large social media platforms, it does not follow that removal of Section 230 immunity would alter that bias. In fact, in a world without Section 230 immunity, there still would be no legal cause of action for political bias.

The truth is that conservatives use Section 230 immunity for leverage over social media platforms. The hope is that, because social media platforms desire the protections of civil immunity for third-party content, they will follow whatever conditions the government puts on their editorial discretion. But the attempt to end-run the First Amendment’s protections is also unconstitutional.

There is no cause of action for political bias by online platforms if we repeal Section 230

Consider the counterfactual: if there were no Section 230 to immunize them from liability, under what law would platforms face a viable cause of action for political bias? Conservative critics never answer this question. Instead, they focus on the irrelevant distinction between publishers and platforms. Or they talk about how Section 230 is a giveaway to Big Tech. But none consider the actual relationship between Section 230 immunity and alleged political bias.

But let’s imagine we’ve done what President Trump has called for and repealed Section 230. Where does that leave conservatives?

Unfortunately, it leaves them without any cause of action. There is no law passed by Congress or any state legislature, no regulation promulgated by the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission, no common law tort action that can be asserted against online platforms to force them to carry speech they don’t wish to carry.

The difficulties of pursuing a contract claim for political bias

The best argument for conservatives is that, without Section 230 immunity, online platforms could be more easily held to any contractual restraints in their terms of service. If a platform promises, for instance, that it will moderate speech in a politically neutral way, a user could make the case that the platform violated its terms of service if it acted with political bias in her particular case.

For the vast majority of users, it is unclear whether there are damages from having a post fact-checked or removed. But for users who share in advertising revenue, the concrete injury from a moderation decision is more obvious. PragerU, for example, has (unsuccessfully) sued Google for being put in Restricted Mode on YouTube, which reduces its reach and advertising revenue.

Even where there is a concrete injury that gets a case into court, that doesn’t necessarily mean there is a valid contract claim. In PragerU’s case against Google, a California court dismissed contract claims because the YouTube terms of service contract was written to allow the platform to retain discretion over what is published. Specifically, the court found that there can be no implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing where “YouTube reserves the right to remove Content without prior notice” and to “discontinue any aspect of the Service at any time.”

Breach-of-contract claims for moderation practices are highly dependent on what is actually promised in the terms of service. For instance, under Facebook’s TOS the company retains the right “to remove or restrict access to content that is in violation” of its community standards. Facebook does provide a process for users to request further review, but retains the right to remove content. The community standards also give Facebook broad discretion to determine, among other things, what counts as hate speech or false news. It is exceedingly unlikely that a court would ever have a basis to find a contract violation by Facebook if the company can reasonably point to a user’s violation of its terms of service.

For example, in Ebeid v. Facebook, the U.S. Northern District of California dismissed fraud and breach of contract claims, finding the plaintiff failed to allege what contractual provision Facebook breached, that Facebook retained discretion over what ads would be posted, and that the plaintiff suffered no damages because no money was taken to be spent on the ads. The court also dismissed an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing claim because Facebook retained the right to “remove or disapprove any post or ad at Facebook’s sole discretion.”

While the conservative critique has been that social media platforms do too much moderation—in the form of politically biased removals, fact-checking, and demonetization—others believe platforms do far too little to restrain bad conduct by users. But as long as social media platforms retain editorial discretion in their terms of service and make no other promises that can be relied upon by their users, there is little basis for a contract claim.

With no reasonable cause of action for political bias under the law, conservatives dangle the threat of making changes to Section 230 immunity that could prove costly to the social media platforms in order to extract concessions from the platforms to alter their practices.

This is why there are no serious efforts to actually repeal Section 230, as President Trump has asked for repeatedly. Instead, several bills propose to amend Section 230, while a rulemaking by the FCC seeks to clarify its meaning.

But none of these proposed bills would directly affect platforms’ ability to make “biased” moderation decisions. Put simply: the First Amendment protects social media platforms’ editorial discretion. They may set rules to use their platforms, just as any private person may set rules for their own property. If I kick someone off my property for saying racist things, the First Amendment (as well as regular property law) protects my right to do so. Only under extremely limited circumstances can the government change this baseline rule and survive constitutional scrutiny.

Social media platforms’ right to editorial discretion is the same as that enjoyed by newspapers. In Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, the Supreme Court found:

The choice of material to go into a newspaper, and the decisions made as to limitations on the size and content of the paper, and treatment of public issues and public officials—whether fair or unfair—constitute the exercise of editorial control and judgment. It has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press as they have evolved to this time.

Social media platforms, just like any other property owner, have the right to determine what they want displayed on their property. In other words, Facebook, Google, and Twitter have the right to moderate content on news feeds, search results, and timelines. The attempted constitutional end-run—threatening to remove immunity for third-party content unrelated to political bias, like defamation and other tortious acts, unless social media platforms give up their right to editorial discretion over political speech—is just as unconstitutional as directly imposing “fairness” requirements on social media platforms.

The Supreme Court has held that Congress may not leverage a government benefit to regulate a speech interest outside of the benefit’s scope. This is called the unconstitutional conditions doctrine. It basically delineates the level of regulation the government can undertake through subsidizing behavior. The government can’t condition a government benefit on giving up editorial discretion over political speech.

The point of Section 230 immunity is to remedy the moderator’s dilemma set up by Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, which held that if a platform chose to moderate third-party speech at all, they would be liable for what was not removed. Section 230 is not about compelling political neutrality on platforms, because it can’t be consistent with the First Amendment. Civil immunity for third-party speech online is an important benefit for social media platforms because it holds they are not liable for the acts of third-parties, with limited exceptions. Without it, platforms would restrict opportunities for third-parties to post out of fear of liability.

In sum, the government may not condition enjoyment of a government benefit upon giving up a constitutionally protected right. Section 230 immunity is a clear government benefit. The right to editorial discretion is clearly protected by the First Amendment. Because the entire point of conservative Section 230 reform efforts is to compel social media platforms to carry speech they otherwise desire to remove, it fails this basic test.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, the conservative push to reform Section 230 in response to the alleged anti-conservative bias of major social media platforms is not about policy. Really, it’s about waging a culture war against the perceived “liberal elites” from Silicon Valley, just as there is an ongoing culture war against perceived “liberal elites” in the mainstream media, Hollywood, and academia. But fighting this culture war is not worth giving up conservative principles of free speech, limited government, and free markets.

Senator Hawley’s Unconstitutional, Unconservative Attack on the Internet

Ben Sperry — 26 June 2020

Twitter’s decision to begin fact-checking the President’s tweets caused a long-simmering distrust between conservatives and online platforms to boil over late last month. This has led some conservatives to ask whether Section 230, the ‘safe harbour’ law that protects online platforms from certain liability stemming from content posted on their websites by users, is allowing online platforms to unfairly target conservative speech.

In response to Twitter’s decision, along with an Executive Order released by the President that attacked Section 230, Senator Josh Hawley (R – MO) offered a new bill targeting online platforms, the “Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act”. This would require online platforms to engage in “good faith” moderation according to clearly stated terms of service – in effect, restricting Section 230’s protections to online platforms deemed to have done enough to moderate content ‘fairly’.

While seemingly a sensible standard, if enacted, this approach would violate the First Amendment as an unconstitutional condition to a government benefit, thereby undermining long-standing conservative principles and the ability of conservatives to be treated fairly online.

There is established legal precedent that Congress may not grant benefits on conditions that violate Constitutionally-protected rights. In Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the Supreme Court stated that a law that withheld funds from universities that did not allow military recruiters on campus would be unconstitutional if it constrained those universities’ First Amendment rights to free speech. Since the First Amendment protects the right to editorial discretion, including the right of online platforms to make their own decisions on moderation, Congress may not condition Section 230 immunity on platforms taking a certain editorial stance it has dictated.

Aware of this precedent, the bill attempts to circumvent the obstacle by taking away Section 230 immunity for issues unrelated to anti-conservative bias in moderation. Specifically, Senator Hawley’s bill attempts to condition immunity for platforms on having terms of service for content moderation, and making them subject to lawsuits if they do not act in “good faith” in policing them.

It’s not even clear that the bill would do what Senator Hawley wants it to. The “good faith” standard only appears to apply to the enforcement of an online platform’s terms of service. It can’t, under the First Amendment, actually dictate what those terms of service say. So an online platform could, in theory, explicitly state in their terms of service that they believe some forms of conservative speech are “hate speech” they will not allow.

Mandating terms of service on content moderation is arguably akin to disclosures like labelling requirements, because it makes clear to platforms’ customers what they’re getting. There are, however, some limitations under the commercial speech doctrine as to what government can require. Under National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra, a requirement for terms of service outlining content moderation policies would be upheld unless “unjustified or unduly burdensome.” A disclosure mandate alone would not be unconstitutional.

But it is clear from the statutory definition of “good faith” that Senator Hawley is trying to overwhelm online platforms with lawsuits on the grounds that they have enforced these rules selectively and therefore not in “good faith”.

These “selective enforcement” lawsuits would make it practically impossible for platforms to moderate content at all, because they would open them up to being sued for any moderation, including moderation completely unrelated to any purported anti-conservative bias. Any time a YouTuber was aggrieved about a video being pulled down as too sexually explicit, for example, they could file suit and demand that Youtube release information on whether all other similarly situated users were treated the same way. Any time a post was flagged on Facebook, for example for engaging in online bullying or for spreading false information, it could similarly lead to the same situation.

This would end up requiring courts to act as the arbiter of decency and truth in order to even determine whether online platforms are “selectively enforcing” their terms of service.

Threatening liability for all third-party content is designed to force online platforms to give up moderating content on a perceived political basis. The result will be far less content moderation on a whole range of other areas. It is precisely this scenario that Section 230 was designed to prevent, in order to encourage platforms to moderate things like pornography that would otherwise proliferate on their sites, without exposing themselves to endless legal challenge.

It is likely that this would be unconstitutional as well. Forcing online platforms to choose between exercising their First Amendment rights to editorial discretion and retaining the benefits of Section 230 is exactly what the “unconstitutional conditions” jurisprudence is about.

This is why conservatives have long argued the government has no business compelling speech. They opposed the “fairness doctrine” which required that radio stations provide a “balanced discussion”, and in practice allowed courts or federal agencies to determine content until President Reagan overturned it. Later, President Bush appointee and then-FTC Chairman Tim Muris rejected a complaint against Fox News for its “Fair and Balanced” slogan, stating:

I am not aware of any instance in which the Federal Trade Commission has investigated the slogan of a news organization. There is no way to evaluate this petition without evaluating the content of the news at issue. That is a task the First Amendment leaves to the American people, not a government agency.

And recently conservatives were arguing businesses like Masterpiece Cakeshop should not be compelled to exercise their First Amendment rights against their will. All of these cases demonstrate once the state starts to try to stipulate what views can and cannot be broadcast by private organisations, conservatives will be the ones who suffer.

Senator Hawley’s bill fails to acknowledge this. Worse, it fails to live up to the Constitution, and would trample over the rights to freedom of speech that it gives. Conservatives should reject it.

In Constitutional Law, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, First Amendment, Platforms, Truth on the Market, Twitter Communications Decency Act. Section 230, First Amendment, Free Expression, free speech, internet, platforms, section 230, Twitter, unconstitutional, United States Constitution

The FTC Still Has a Long Way to Go on its “Common Law” of Data Security

Ben Sperry — 27 February 2020

Since the LabMD decision, in which the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals told the FTC that its orders were unconstitutionally vague, the FTC has been put on notice that it needs to reconsider how it develops and substantiates its claims in data security enforcement actions brought under Section 5.

Thus, on January 6, the FTC announced on its blog that it will have “New and improved FTC data security orders: Better guidance for companies, better protection for consumers.” However, the changes the Commission highlights only get to a small part of what we have previously criticized when it comes to their “common law” of data security (see here and here).

While the new orders do list more specific requirements to help explain what the FTC believes is a “comprehensive data security program”, there is still no legal analysis in either the orders or the complaints that would give companies fair notice of what the law requires. Furthermore, nothing about the underlying FTC process has changed, which means there is still enormous pressure for companies to settle rather than litigate the contours of what “reasonable” data security practices look like. Thus, despite the Commission’s optimism, the recent orders and complaints do little to nothing to remedy the problems that plague the Commission’s data security enforcement program.

The changes

In his blog post, the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC describes how new orders in data security enforcement actions are more specific, with one of the main goals being more guidance to businesses trying to follow the law.

Since the early 2000s, our data security orders had contained fairly standard language. For example, these orders typically required a company to implement a comprehensive information security program subject to a biennial outside assessment. As part of the FTC’s Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century, we held a hearing in December 2018 that specifically considered how we might improve our data security orders. We were also mindful of the 11th Circuit’s 2018 LabMD decision, which struck down an FTC data security order as unenforceably vague.
Based on this learning, in 2019 the FTC made significant improvements to its data security orders. These improvements are reflected in seven orders announced this year against an array of diverse companies: ClixSense (pay-to-click survey company), i-Dressup (online games for kids), DealerBuilt (car dealer software provider), D-Link (Internet-connected routers and cameras), Equifax (credit bureau), Retina-X (monitoring app), and Infotrax (service provider for multilevel marketers)…
[T]he orders are more specific. They continue to require that the company implement a comprehensive, process-based data security program, and they require the company to implement specific safeguards to address the problems alleged in the complaint. Examples have included yearly employee training, access controls, monitoring systems for data security incidents, patch management systems, and encryption. These requirements not only make the FTC’s expectations clearer to companies, but also improve order enforceability.

Why the FTC’s data security enforcement regime fails to provide fair notice or develop law (and is not like the common law)

While these changes are long overdue, it is just one step in the direction of a much-needed process reform at the FTC in how it prosecutes cases with its unfairness authority, particularly in the realm of data security. It’s helpful to understand exactly why the historical failures of the FTC process are problematic in order to understand why the changes it is undertaking are insufficient.

For instance, Geoffrey Manne and I previously highlighted the various ways the FTC’s data security consent order regime fails in comparison with the common law:

In Lord Mansfield’s characterization, “the common law ‘does not consist of particular cases, but of general principles, which are illustrated and explained by those cases.’” Further, the common law is evolutionary in nature, with the outcome of each particular case depending substantially on the precedent laid down in previous cases. The common law thus emerges through the accretion of marginal glosses on general rules, dictated by new circumstances.
The common law arguably leads to legal rules with at least two substantial benefits—efficiency and predictability or certainty. The repeated adjudication of inefficient or otherwise suboptimal rules results in a system that generally offers marginal improvements to the law. The incentives of parties bringing cases generally means “hard cases,” and thus judicial decisions that have to define both what facts and circumstances violate the law and what facts and circumstances don’t. Thus, a benefit of a “real” common law evolution is that it produces a body of law and analysis that actors can use to determine what conduct they can undertake without risk of liability and what they cannot.
In the abstract, of course, the FTC’s data security process is neither evolutionary in nature nor does it produce such well-defined rules. Rather, it is a succession of wholly independent cases, without any precedent, narrow in scope, and binding only on the parties to each particular case. Moreover it is generally devoid of analysis of the causal link between conduct and liability and entirely devoid of analysis of which facts do not lead to liability. Like all regulation it tends to be static; the FTC is, after all, an enforcement agency, charged with enforcing the strictures of specific and little-changing pieces of legislation and regulation. For better or worse, much of the FTC’s data security adjudication adheres unerringly to the terms of the regulations it enforces with vanishingly little in the way of gloss or evolution. As such (and, we believe, for worse), the FTC’s process in data security cases tends to reject the ever-evolving “local knowledge” of individual actors and substitutes instead the inherently limited legislative and regulatory pronouncements of the past.
By contrast, real common law, as a result of its case-by-case, bottom-up process, adapts to changing attributes of society over time, largely absent the knowledge and rent-seeking problems of legislatures or administrative agencies. The mechanism of constant litigation of inefficient rules allows the common law to retain a generally efficient character unmatched by legislation, regulation, or even administrative enforcement.
Because the common law process depends on the issues selected for litigation and the effects of the decisions resulting from that litigation, both the process by which disputes come to the decision-makers’ attention, as well as (to a lesser extent, because errors will be corrected over time) the incentives and ability of the decision-maker to render welfare-enhancing decisions, determine the value of the common law process. These are decidedly problematic at the FTC.

In our analysis, we found the FTC’s process to be wanting compared to the institution of the common law. The incentives of the administrative complaint process put a relatively larger pressure on companies to settle data security actions brought by the FTC compared to private litigants. This is because the FTC can use its investigatory powers as a public enforcer to bypass the normal discovery process to which private litigants are subject, and over which independent judges have authority.

In a private court action, plaintiffs can’t engage in discovery unless their complaint survives a motion to dismiss from the defendant. Discovery costs remain a major driver of settlements, so this important judicial review is necessary to make sure there is actually a harm present before putting those costs on defendants.

Furthermore, the FTC can also bring cases in a Part III adjudicatory process which starts in front of an administrative law judge (ALJ) but is then appealable to the FTC itself. Former Commissioner Joshua Wright noted in 2013 that “in the past nearly twenty years… after the administrative decision was appealed to the Commission, the Commission ruled in favor of FTC staff. In other words, in 100 percent of cases where the ALJ ruled in favor of the FTC, the Commission affirmed; and in 100 percent of the cases in which the ALJ ruled against the FTC, the Commission reversed.” In other words, the FTC nearly always rules in favor of itself on appeal if the ALJ finds there is no case, as it did in LabMD. The combination of investigation costs before any complaint at all and the high likelihood of losing through several stages of litigation makes the intelligent business decision to simply agree to a consent decree.

The results of this asymmetrical process show the FTC has not really been building a common law. In all but two cases (Wyndham and LabMD), the companies who have been targeted for investigation by the FTC on data security enforcement have settled. We also noted how the FTC’s data security orders tended to be nearly identical from case-to-case, reflecting the standards of the FTC’s Safeguards Rule. Since the orders were giving nearly identical—and as LabMD found, vague—remedies in each case, it cannot be said there was a common law developing over time.

What LabMD addressed and what it didn’t

In its decision, the Eleventh Circuit sidestepped fundamental substantive problems with the FTC’s data security practice (which we have made in both our scholarship and LabMD amicus brief) about notice or substantial injury. Instead, the court decided to assume the FTC had proven its case and focused exclusively on the remedy.

We will assume arguendo that the Commission is correct and that LabMD’s negligent failure to design and maintain a reasonable data-security program invaded consumers’ right of privacy and thus constituted an unfair act or practice.

What the Eleventh Circuit did address, though, was that the remedies the FTC had been routinely applying to businesses through its data enforcement actions lacked the necessary specificity in order to be enforceable through injunctions or cease and desist orders.

In the case at hand, the cease and desist order contains no prohibitions. It does not instruct LabMD to stop committing a specific act or practice. Rather, it commands LabMD to overhaul and replace its data-security program to meet an indeterminable standard of reasonableness. This command is unenforceable. Its unenforceability is made clear if we imagine what would take place if the Commission sought the order’s enforcement…
The Commission moves the district court for an order requiring LabMD to show cause why it should not be held in contempt for violating the following injunctive provision:
[T]he respondent shall … establish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, confidentiality, and integrity of personal information collected from or about consumers…. Such program… shall contain administrative, technical, and physical safeguards appropriate to respondent’s size and complexity, the nature and scope of respondent’s activities, and the sensitivity of the personal information collected from or about consumers….
The Commission’s motion alleges that LabMD’s program failed to implement “x” and is therefore not “reasonably designed.” The court concludes that the Commission’s alleged failure is within the provision’s language and orders LabMD to show cause why it should not be held in contempt.
At the show cause hearing, LabMD calls an expert who testifies that the data-security program LabMD implemented complies with the injunctive provision at issue. The expert testifies that “x” is not a necessary component of a reasonably designed data-security program. The Commission, in response, calls an expert who disagrees. At this point, the district court undertakes to determine which of the two equally qualified experts correctly read the injunctive provision. Nothing in the provision, however, indicates which expert is correct. The provision contains no mention of “x” and is devoid of any meaningful standard informing the court of what constitutes a “reasonably designed” data-security program. The court therefore has no choice but to conclude that the Commission has not proven — and indeed cannot prove — LabMD’s alleged violation by clear and convincing evidence.

In other words, the Eleventh Circuit found that an order requiring a reasonable data security program is not specific enough to make it enforceable. This leaves questions as to whether the FTC’s requirement of a “reasonable data security program” is specific enough to survive a motion to dismiss and/or a fair notice challenge going forward.

Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a plaintiff must provide “a short and plain statement . . . showing that the pleader is entitled to relief,” Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(a)(2), including “enough facts to state a claim . . . that is plausible on its face.” Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 570 (2007). “[T]hreadbare recitals of the elements of a cause of action, supported by mere conclusory statements” will not suffice. Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009). In FTC v. D-Link, for instance, the Northern District of California dismissed the unfairness claims because the FTC did not sufficiently plead injury.

[T]hey make out a mere possibility of injury at best. The FTC does not identify a single incident where a consumer’s financial, medical or other sensitive personal information has been accessed, exposed or misused in any way, or whose IP camera has been compromised by unauthorized parties, or who has suffered any harm or even simple annoyance and inconvenience from the alleged security flaws in the DLS devices. The absence of any concrete facts makes it just as possible that DLS’s devices are not likely to substantially harm consumers, and the FTC cannot rely on wholly conclusory allegations about potential injury to tilt the balance in its favor.

The fair notice question wasn’t reached in LabMD, though it was in FTC v. Wyndham. But the Third Circuit did not analyze the FTC’s data security regime under the “ascertainable certainty” standard applied to agency interpretation of a statute.

Wyndham’s position is unmistakable: the FTC has not yet declared that cybersecurity practices can be unfair; there is no relevant FTC rule, adjudication or document that merits deference; and the FTC is asking the federal courts to interpret § 45(a) in the first instance to decide whether it prohibits the alleged conduct here. The implication of this position is similarly clear: if the federal courts are to decide whether Wyndham’s conduct was unfair in the first instance under the statute without deferring to any FTC interpretation, then this case involves ordinary judicial interpretation of a civil statute, and the ascertainable certainty standard does not apply. The relevant question is not whether Wyndham had fair notice of the FTC’s interpretation of the statute, but whether Wyndham had fair notice of what the statute itself requires.

In other words, Wyndham boxed itself into a corner arguing that they did not have fair notice that the FTC could bring a data security enforcement action against the under Section 5 unfairness. LabMD, on the other hand, argued they did not have fair notice as to how the FTC would enforce its data security standards. Cf. ICLE-Techfreedom Amicus Brief at 19. The Third Circuit even suggested that under an “ascertainable certainty” standard, the FTC failed to provide fair notice: “we agree with Wyndham that the guidebook could not, on its own, provide ‘ascertainable certainty’ of the FTC’s interpretation of what specific cybersecurity practices fail § 45(n).” Wyndham, 799 F.3d at 256 n.21.

Most importantly, the Eleventh Circuit did not actually get to the issue of whether LabMD actually violated the law under the factual record developed in the case. This means there is still no caselaw (aside from the ALJ decision in this case) which would allow a company to learn what is and what is not reasonable data security, or what counts as a substantial injury for the purposes of Section 5 unfairness in data security cases.

How FTC’s changes fundamentally fail to address its failures of process

The FTC’s new approach to its orders is billed as directly responsive to what the Eleventh Circuit did reach in the LabMD decision, but it leaves so much of what makes the process insufficient in place.

First, it is notable that while the FTC highlights changes to its orders, there is still a lack of legal analysis in the orders that would allow a company to accurately predict whether its data security practices are enough under the law. A listing of what specific companies under consent orders are required to do is helpful. But these consent decrees do not require companies to admit liability or contain anything close to the reasoning that accompanies court opinions or normal agency guidance on complying with the law.

For instance, the general formulation in these 2019 orders is that the company must “establish, implement, and maintain a comprehensive information/software security program that is designed to protect the security, confidentiality, and integrity of such personal information. To satisfy this requirement, Respondent/Defendant must, at a minimum…” (emphasis added), followed by a list of pretty similar requirements with variation depending on the business. Even if a company does all of the listed requirements but a breach occurs, the FTC is not obligated to find the data security program was legally sufficient. There is no safe harbor or presumptive reasonableness that attaches even for the business subject to the order, nonetheless companies looking for guidance.

While the FTC does now require more specific things, like “yearly employee training, access controls, monitoring systems for data security incidents, patch management systems, and encryption,” there is still no analysis on how to meet the standard of reasonableness the FTC relies upon. In other words, it is not clear that this new approach to orders does anything to increase fair notice to companies as to what the FTC requires under Section 5 unfairness.

Second, nothing about the underlying process has really changed. The FTC can still investigate and prosecute cases through administrative law courts with itself as initial court of appeal. This makes the FTC the police, prosecutor, and judge in its own case. In the case of LabMD, who actually won after many appeals, this process ended in bankruptcy. It is no surprise that since the LabMD decision, each of the FTC’s data security enforcement cases have been settled with consent orders, just as they were before the Eleventh Circuit opinion.

Unfortunately, if the FTC really wants to evolve its data security process like the common law, it needs to engage in an actual common law process. Without caselaw on the facts necessary to establish substantial injury, “unreasonable” data security practices, and causation, there will continue to be more questions than answers about what the law requires. And without changes to the process, the FTC will continue to be able to strong-arm companies into consent decrees.

The Unconstitutionality of the FCC’s Leased Access Rules

Ben Sperry — 24 July 2019

Monday July 22, ICLE filed a regulatory comment arguing the leased access requirements enforced by the FCC are unconstitutional compelled speech that violate the First Amendment.

When the DC Circuit Court of Appeals last reviewed the constitutionality of leased access rules in Time Warner v. FCC, cable had so-called “bottleneck power” over the marketplace for video programming and, just a few years prior, the Supreme Court had subjected other programming regulations to intermediate scrutiny in Turner v. FCC.

Intermediate scrutiny is a lower standard than the strict scrutiny usually required for First Amendment claims. Strict scrutiny requires a regulation of speech to be narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest. Intermediate scrutiny only requires a regulation to further an important or substantial governmental interest unrelated to the suppression of free expression, and the incidental restriction speech must be no greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest.

But, since the decisions in Time Warner and Turner, there have been dramatic changes in the video marketplace (including the rise of the Internet!) and cable no longer has anything like “bottleneck power.” Independent programmers have many distribution options to get content to consumers. Since the justification for intermediate scrutiny is no longer an accurate depiction of the competitive marketplace, the leased rules should be subject to strict scrutiny.

And, if subject to strict scrutiny, the leased access rules would not survive judicial review. Even accepting that there is a compelling governmental interest, the rules are not narrowly tailored to that end. Not only are they essentially obsolete in the highly competitive video distribution marketplace, but antitrust law would be better suited to handle any anticompetitive abuses of market power by cable operators. There is no basis for compelling the cable operators to lease some of their channels to unaffiliated programmers.

Our full comments are here.

In Constitutional Law, First Amendment, Google, Platforms, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market antitrust law, competition, FCC, Federal Communications Commission, First Amendment, free speech, telecommunications, Telecommunications Act, unconstitutional

Ten Reasons Why the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) Is Going to Be a Dumpster Fire

Alec Stapp — 1 July 2019

Last year, real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart spent nearly $3.5 million to put a privacy law on the ballot in California’s November election. He then negotiated a deal with state lawmakers to withdraw the ballot initiative if they passed their own privacy bill. That law — the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) — was enacted after only seven days of drafting and amending. CCPA will go into effect six months from today.

According to Mactaggart, it all began when he spoke with a Google engineer and was shocked to learn how much personal data the company collected. This revelation motivated him to find out exactly how much of his data Google had. Perplexingly, instead of using Google’s freely available transparency tools, Mactaggart decided to spend millions to pressure the state legislature into passing new privacy regulation.

The law has six consumer rights, including the right to know; the right of data portability; the right to deletion; the right to opt-out of data sales; the right to not be discriminated against as a user; and a private right of action for data breaches.

So, what are the law’s prospects when it goes into effect next year? Here are ten reasons why CCPA is going to be a dumpster fire.

1. CCPA compliance costs will be astronomical

“TrustArc commissioned a survey of the readiness of 250 firms serving California from a range of industries and company size in February 2019. It reports that 71 percent of the respondents expect to spend at least six figures in CCPA-related privacy compliance expenses in 2019 — and 19 percent expect to spend over $1 million. Notably, if CCPA were in effect today, 86 percent of firms would not be ready. An estimated half a million firms are liable under the CCPA, most of which are small- to medium-sized businesses. If all eligible firms paid only $100,000, the upfront cost would already be $50 billion. This is in addition to lost advertising revenue, which could total as much as $60 billion annually.” (AEI / Roslyn Layton)

2. CCPA will be good for Facebook and Google (and bad for small ad networks)

“It’s as if the privacy activists labored to manufacture a fearsome cannon with which to subdue giants like Facebook and Google, loaded it with a scattershot set of legal restrictions, aimed it at the entire ads ecosystem, and fired it with much commotion. When the smoke cleared, the astonished activists found they’d hit only their small opponents, leaving the giants unharmed. Meanwhile, a grinning Facebook stared back at the activists and their mighty cannon, the weapon that they had slyly helped to design.” (Wired / Antonio García Martínez)

“Facebook and Google ultimately are not constrained as much by regulation as by users. The first-party relationship with users that allows these companies relative freedom under privacy laws comes with the burden of keeping those users engaged and returning to the app, despite privacy concerns.” (Wired / Antonio García Martínez)

3. CCPA will enable free-riding by users who opt out of data sharing

“[B]y restricting companies from limiting services or increasing prices for consumers who opt-out of sharing personal data, CCPA enables free riders—individuals that opt out but still expect the same services and price—and undercuts access to free content and services. Someone must pay for free services, and if individuals opt out of their end of the bargain—by allowing companies to use their data—they make others pay more, either directly or indirectly with lower quality services. CCPA tries to compensate for the drastic reduction in the effectiveness of online advertising, an important source of income for digital media companies, by forcing businesses to offer services even though they cannot effectively generate revenue from users.” (ITIF / Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn)

4. CCPA is potentially unconstitutional as-written

“[T]he law potentially applies to any business throughout the globe that has/gets personal information about California residents the moment the business takes the first dollar from a California resident. Furthermore, the law applies to some corporate affiliates (parent, subsidiary, or commonly owned companies) of California businesses, even if those affiliates have no other ties to California. The law’s purported application to businesses not physically located in California raises potentially significant dormant Commerce Clause and other Constitutional problems.” (Eric Goldman)

5. GDPR compliance programs cannot be recycled for CCPA

“[C]ompanies cannot just expand the coverage of their EU GDPR compliance measures to residents of California. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act:

Prescribes disclosures, communication channels (including toll-free phone numbers) and other concrete measures that are not required to comply with the EU GDPR.
Contains a broader definition of “personal data” and also covers information pertaining to households and devices.
Establishes broad rights for California residents to direct deletion of data, with differing exceptions than those available under GDPR.
Establishes broad rights to access personal data without certain exceptions available under GDPR (e.g., disclosures that would implicate the privacy interests of third parties).
Imposes more rigid restrictions on data sharing for commercial purposes.”

(IAPP / Lothar Determann)

6. CCPA will be a burden on small- and medium-sized businesses

“The law applies to businesses operating in California if they generate an annual gross revenue of $25 million or more, if they annually receive or share personal information of 50,000 California residents or more, or if they derive at least 50 percent of their annual revenue by “selling the personal information” of California residents. In effect, this means that businesses with websites that receive traffic from an average of 137 unique Californian IP addresses per day could be subject to the new rules.” (ITIF / Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn)

CCPA “will apply to more than 500,000 U.S. companies, the vast majority of which are small- to medium-sized enterprises.” (IAPP / Rita Heimes and Sam Pfeifle)

7. CCPA’s definition of “personal information” is extremely over-inclusive

“CCPA likely includes gender information in the “personal information” definition because it is “capable of being associated with” a particular consumer when combined with other datasets. We can extend this logic to pretty much every type or class of data, all of which become re-identifiable when combined with enough other datasets. Thus, all data related to individuals (consumers or employees) in a business’ possession probably qualifies as “personal information.” (Eric Goldman)

“The definition of “personal information” includes “household” information, which is particularly problematic. A “household” includes the consumer and other co-habitants, which means that a person’s “personal information” oxymoronically includes information about other people. These people’s interests may diverge, such as with separating spouses, multiple generations under the same roof, and roommates. Thus, giving a consumer rights to access, delete, or port “household” information affects other people’s information, which may violate their expectations and create major security and privacy risks.” (Eric Goldman)

8. CCPA penalties might become a source for revenue generation

“According to the new Cal. Civ. Code §1798.150, companies that become victims of data theft or other data security breaches can be ordered in civil class action lawsuits to pay statutory damages between $100 to $750 per California resident and incident, or actual damages, whichever is greater, and any other relief a court deems proper, subject to an option of the California Attorney General’s Office to prosecute the company instead of allowing civil suits to be brought against it.” (IAPP / Lothar Determann)

“According to the new Cal. Civ. Code §1798.155, companies can be ordered in a civil action brought by the California Attorney General’s Office to pay penalties of up to $7,500 per intentional violation of any provision of the California Consumer Privacy Act, or, for unintentional violations, if the company fails to cure the unintentional violation within 30 days of notice, $2,500 per violation under Section 17206 of the California Business and Professions Code. Twenty percent of such penalties collected by the State of California shall be allocated to a new “Consumer Privacy Fund” to fund enforcement.” (IAPP / Lothar Determann)

“[T]he Attorney General, through its support of SB 561, is seeking to remove this provision, known as a “30-day cure,” arguing that it would be able to secure more civil penalties and thus increase enforcement. Specifically, the Attorney General has said it needs to raise $57.5 million in civil penalties to cover the cost of CCPA enforcement.” (ITIF / Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn)

9. CCPA is inconsistent with existing privacy laws

“California has led the United States and often the world in codifying privacy protections, enacting the first laws requiring notification of data security breaches (2002) and website privacy policies (2004). In the operative section of the new law, however, the California Consumer Privacy Act’s drafters did not address any overlap or inconsistencies between the new law and any of California’s existing privacy laws, perhaps due to the rushed legislative process, perhaps due to limitations on the ability to negotiate with the proponents of the Initiative. Instead, the new Cal. Civ. Code §1798.175 prescribes that in case of any conflicts with California laws, the law that affords the greatest privacy protections shall control.” (IAPP / Lothar Determann)

10. CCPA will need to be amended, creating uncertainty for businesses

As of now, a dozen bills amending CCPA have passed the California Assembly and continue to wind their way through the legislative process. California lawmakers have until September 13th to make any final changes to the law before it goes into effect. In the meantime, businesses have to begin compliance preparations under a cloud of uncertainty about what the says today — or what it might even say in the future.

Telemarketing, Technology, and Why the Telephone Sucks (and how to fix it)

Gus Hurwitz — 18 October 2018

It is a truth universally acknowledged that unwanted telephone calls are among the most reviled annoyances known to man. But this does not mean that laws intended to prohibit these calls are themselves necessarily good. Indeed, in one sense we know intuitively that they are not good. These laws have proven wholly ineffective at curtailing the robocall menace — it is hard to call any law as ineffective as these “good”. And these laws can be bad in another sense: because they fail to curtail undesirable speech but may burden desirable speech, they raise potentially serious First Amendment concerns.

I presented my exploration of these concerns, coming out soon in the Brooklyn Law Review, last month at TPRC. The discussion, which I get into below, focuses on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), the main law that we have to fight against robocalls. It considers both narrow First Amendment concerns raised by the TCPA as well as broader concerns about the Act in the modern technological setting.

Telemarketing Sucks

It is hard to imagine that there is a need to explain how much of a pain telemarketing is. Indeed, it is rare that I give a talk on the subject without receiving a call during the talk. At the last FCC Open Meeting, after the Commission voted on a pair of enforcement actions taken against telemarketers, Commissioner Rosenworcel picked up her cell phone to share that she had received a robocall during the vote. Robocalls are the most complained of issue at both the FCC and FTC. Today, there are well over 4 billion robocalls made every month. It’s estimated that half of all phone calls made in 2019 will be scams (most of which start with a robocall). .

It’s worth noting that things were not always this way. Unsolicited and unwanted phone calls have been around for decades — but they have become something altogether different and more problematic in the past 10 years. The origin of telemarketing was the simple extension of traditional marketing to the medium of the telephone. This form of telemarketing was a huge annoyance — but fundamentally it was, or at least was intended to be, a mere extension of legitimate business practices. There was almost always a real business on the other end of the line, trying to advertise real business opportunities.

This changed in the 2000s with the creation of the Do Not Call (DNC) registry. The DNC registry effectively killed the “legitimate” telemarketing business. Companies faced significant penalties if they called individuals on the DNC registry, and most telemarketing firms tied the registry into their calling systems so that numbers on it could not be called. And, unsurprisingly, an overwhelming majority of Americans put their phone numbers on the registry. As a result the business proposition behind telemarketing quickly dried up. There simply weren’t enough individuals not on the DNC list to justify the risk of accidentally calling individuals who were on the list.

Of course, anyone with a telephone today knows that the creation of the DNC registry did not eliminate robocalls. But it did change the nature of the calls. The calls we receive today are, overwhelmingly, not coming from real businesses trying to market real services or products. Rather, they’re coming from hucksters, fraudsters, and scammers — from Rachels from Cardholder Services and others who are looking for opportunities to defraud. Sometimes they may use these calls to find unsophisticated consumers who can be conned out of credit card information. Other times they are engaged in any number of increasingly sophisticated scams designed to trick consumers into giving up valuable information.

There is, however, a more important, more basic difference between pre-DNC calls and the ones we receive today. Back in the age of legitimate businesses trying to use the telephone for marketing, the relationship mattered. Those businesses couldn’t engage in business anonymously. But today’s robocallers are scam artists. They need no identity to pull off their scams. Indeed, a lack of identity can be advantageous to them. And this means that legal tools such as the DNC list or the TCPA (which I turn to below), which are premised on the ability to take legal action against bad actors who can be identified and who have assets than can be attached through legal proceedings, are wholly ineffective against these newfangled robocallers.

The TCPA Sucks

The TCPA is the first law that was adopted to fight unwanted phone calls. Adopted in 1992, it made it illegal to call people using autodialers or prerecorded messages without prior express consent. (The details have more nuance than this, but that’s the gist.) It also created a private right of action with significant statutory damages of up to $1,500 per call.

Importantly, the justification for the TCPA wasn’t merely “telemarketing sucks.” Had it been, the TCPA would have had a serious problem: telemarketing, although exceptionally disliked, is speech, which means that it is protected by the First Amendment. Rather, the TCPA was enacted primarily upon two grounds. First, telemarketers were invading the privacy of individuals’ homes. The First Amendment is license to speak; it is not license to break into someone’s home and force them to listen. And second, telemarketing calls could impose significant real costs on the recipients of calls. At the time, receiving a telemarketing call could, for instance, cost cellular customers several dollars; and due to the primitive technologies used for autodialing, these calls would regularly tie up residential and commercial phone lines for extended periods of time, interfere with emergency calls, and fill up answering machine tapes.

It is no secret that the TCPA was not particularly successful. As the technologies for making robocalls improved throughout the 1990s and their costs went down, firms only increased their use of them. And we were still in a world of analog telephones, and Caller ID was still a new and not universally-available technology, which made it exceptionally difficult to bring suits under the TCPA. Perhaps more important, while robocalls were annoying, they were not the omnipresent fact of life that they are today: cell phones were still rare; most of these calls came to landline phones during dinner where they were simply ignored.

As discussed above, the first generation of robocallers and telemarketers quickly died off following adoption of the DNC registry.

And the TCPA is proving no more effective during this second generation of robocallers. This is unsurprising. Callers who are willing to blithely ignore the DNC registry are just as willing to blithely ignore the TCPA. Every couple of months the FCC or FTC announces a large fine — millions or tens of millions of dollars — against a telemarketing firm that was responsible for making millions or tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of calls over a multi-month period. At a time when there are over 4 billion of these calls made every month, such enforcement actions are a drop in the ocean.

Which brings us to the FIrst Amendment and the TCPA, presented in very cursory form here (see the paper for more detailed analysis). First, it must be acknowledged that the TCPA was challenged several times following its adoption and was consistently upheld by courts applying intermediate scrutiny to it, on the basis that it was regulation of commercial speech (which traditionally has been reviewed under that more permissive standard). However, recent Supreme Court opinions, most notably that in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, suggest that even the commercial speech at issue in the TCPA may need to be subject to the more probing review of strict scrutiny — a conclusion that several lower courts have reached.

But even putting the question of whether the TCPA should be reviewed subject to strict or intermediate scrutiny, a contemporary facial challenge to the TCPA on First Amendment grounds would likely succeed (no matter what standard of review was applied). Generally, courts are very reluctant to allow regulation of speech that is either under- or over-inclusive — and the TCPA is substantially both. We know that it is under-inclusive because robocalls have been a problem for a long time and the problem is only getting worse. And, at the same time, there are myriad stories of well-meaning companies getting caught up on the TCPA’s web of strict liability for trying to do things that clearly should not be deemed illegal: sports venues sending confirmation texts when spectators participate in text-based games on the jumbotron; community banks getting sued by their own members for trying to send out important customer information; pharmacies reminding patients to get flu shots. There is discussion to be had about how and whether calls like these should be permitted — but they are unquestionably different in kind from the sort of telemarketing robocalls animating the TCPA (and general public outrage).

In other words the TCPA prohibits some amount of desirable, Constitutionally-protected, speech in a vainglorious and wholly ineffective effort to curtail robocalls. That is a recipe for any law to be deemed an unconstitutional restriction on speech under the First Amendment.

Good News: Things Don’t Need to Suck!

But there is another, more interesting, reason that the TCPA would likely not survive a First Amendment challenge today: there are lots of alternative approaches to addressing the problem of robocalls. Interestingly, the FCC itself has the ability to direct implementation of some of these approaches. And, more important, the FCC itself is the greatest impediment to some of them being implemented. In the language of the First Amendment, restrictions on speech need to be narrowly tailored. It is hard to say that a law is narrowly tailored when the government itself controls the ability to implement more tailored approaches to addressing a speech-related problem. And it is untenable to say that the government can restrict speech to address a problem that is, in fact, the result of the government’s own design.

In particular, the FCC regulates a great deal of how the telephone network operates, including over the protocols that carriers use for interconnection and call completion. Large parts of the telephone network are built upon protocols first developed in the era of analog phones and telephone monopolies. And the FCC itself has long prohibited carriers from blocking known-scam calls (on the ground that, as common carriers, it is their principal duty to carry telephone traffic without regard to the content of the calls).

Fortunately, some of these rules are starting to change. The Commission is working to implement rules that will give carriers and their customers greater ability to block calls. And we are tantalizingly close to transitioning the telephone network away from its traditional unauthenticated architecture to one that uses a strong cyrptographic infrastructure to provide fully authenticated calls (in other words, Caller ID that actually works).

The irony of these efforts is that they demonstrate the unconstitutionality of the TCPA: today there are better, less burdensome, more effective ways to deal with the problems of uncouth telemarketers and robocalls. At the time the TCPA was adopted, these approaches were technologically infeasible, so the its burdens upon speech were more reasonable. But that cannot be said today. The goal of the FCC and legislators (both of whom are looking to update the TCPA and its implementation) should be less about improving the TCPA and more about improving our telecommunications architecture so that we have less need for cludgel-like laws in the mold of the TCPA.

In Constitutional Law, Credit Cards, Federal Communications Commission, Financial Regulation, First Amendment, Regulation, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market Advertising, common carrier, consumer protection, FCC, First Amendment, legal scholarship, robocalls, Telephone Consumer Protection Act, unconstitutional

Supreme Court Turns Again to Patent Cases, Against the Backdrop of a Decline in American Patent Protection that Threatens Future U.S. Innovation and International Competitiveness

Alden Abbott — 22 November 2017

On November 27, the U.S. Supreme Court will turn once again to patent law, hearing cases addressing the constitutionality of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) “inter partes” review (Oil States Energy v. Greene), and whether PTAB must issue a final written decision as to every claim challenged by the petitioner in an inter partes review (SAS Institute v. Matal).

As the Justices peruse the bench memos and amicus curiae briefs concerning these cases, their minds will, of course, be focused on legal questions of statutory and constitutional interpretation. Lurking in the background of these and other patent cases, however, is an overarching economic policy issue – have recent statutory changes and case law interpretations weakened U.S. patent protection in a manner that seriously threatens future American economic growth and innovation? In a recent Heritage Foundation Legal Memorandum, I responded in the affirmative to this question, and argued that significant statutory reforms are needed to restore the American patent system to a position of global leadership that is key to U.S. economic prosperity. (Among other things, I noted severe constitutional problems raised by PTAB’s actions, and urged that Congress consider passing legislation to reform PTAB, if the Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of inter partes review.)

A timely opinion article published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal emphasizes that the decline in American patent protection also has profound negative consequences for American international economic competitiveness. Journalist David Kline, author of the commentary (“Fear American Complacency, Not China”), succinctly contrasts unfortunate U.S. patent policy developments with the recent strengthening of the Chinese patent system (a matter of high priority to the Chinese Government):

China’s entrepreneurs have been fueled by reforms in recent years that strengthened intellectual property rights—ironic for a country long accused of stealing trade secrets and ignoring IP protections. Today Chinese companies are filing for more patents than American ones. The patent application and examination process has been streamlined, and China has established specialized intellectual property courts and tribunals to adjudicate lawsuits and issue injunctions against infringers. “IP infringers will pay a heavy price,” President Xi Jinping warned this summer. . . .

In the U.S., by contrast, a series of legislative actions and Supreme Court rulings have weakened patent rights, especially for startups. A new way of challenging patents called “inter partes review” results in at least one patent claim being thrown out in roughly 80% of cases, according to an analysis by Adam Mossoff, a law professor at George Mason University. Unsurprisingly, many of these cases were brought by defendants facing patent infringement lawsuits in federal court.

This does not bode well for America’s global competitiveness. The U.S. used to rank first among nations in the strength of its intellectual property rights. But the 2017 edition of the Global IP Index places the U.S. 10th—tied with Hungary.

The Supreme Court may not be able to take judicial notice of this policy reality (although strong purely legal arguments would support a holding that PTAB inter partes review is unconstitutional), but Congress certainly can take legislative notice of it. Let us hope that Congress acts decisively to strengthen the American patent system – in the interests of a strong, innovative, and internationally competitive American economy.

In China, Constitutional Law, Intellectual Property, Patent, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market patent reform, startups, technology, unconstitutional

The Allergan-Mohawk deal: An ingenious strategy to avoid an unbalanced IPR process

Joanna Shepherd — 14 September 2017

Last Friday, drug maker Allergan and the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe announced that they had reached an agreement under which Allergan assigned the patents on its top-selling drug Restasis to the tribe and, in return, Allergan was given the exclusive license on the Restasis patents so that it can continue producing and distributing the drug. Allergan agreed to pay $13.75 million to the tribe for the deal, and up to $15 million annually in royalties as long as the patents remain valid.

Why would a large drug maker assign the patents on a leading drug to a sovereign Indian nation? This unorthodox agreement may actually be a brilliant strategy that enables patent owners to avoid the unbalanced inter partes review (IPR) process. The validity of the Restasis patents is currently being challenged both in IPR proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and in federal district court in Texas. However, the Allergan-Mohawk deal may lead to the dismissal of the IPR proceedings as, under the terms of the deal, the Mohawks will file a motion to dismiss the IPR proceedings based on the tribe’s sovereign immunity. Earlier this year, in Covidien v. University of Florida Research Foundation, the PTAB determined that sovereign immunity shields state universities holding patents from IPR proceedings, and the same reasoning should certainly apply to sovereign Indian nations.

I’ve published a previous article explaining why pharmaceutical companies have legitimate reasons to avoid IPR proceedings–critical differences between district court litigation and IPR proceedings jeopardize the delicate balance Hatch-Waxman sought to achieve between patent owners and patent challengers. In addition to forcing patent owners into duplicative litigation in district courts and the PTAB, depriving them of the ability to achieve finality in one proceeding, the PTAB also applies a lower standard of proof for invalidity than do district courts in Hatch-Waxman litigation. It is also easier to meet the standard of proof in a PTAB trial because of a more lenient claim construction standard. Moreover, on appeal, PTAB decisions in IPR proceedings are given more deference than lower district court decisions. Finally, while patent challengers in district court must establish sufficient Article III standing, IPR proceedings do not have a standing requirement. This has led to the exploitation of the IPR process by entities that would never be granted standing in traditional patent litigation—hedge funds betting against a company by filing an IPR challenge in hopes of crashing the stock and profiting from the bet.

The differences between district court litigation and IPR proceedings have created a significant deviation in patent invalidation rates under the two pathways; compared to district court challenges, patents are twice as likely to be found invalid in IPR challenges. Although the U.S. Supreme Court in Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee concluded that the anti-patentee claim construction standard in IPR “increases the possibility that the examiner will find the claim too broad (and deny it)”, the Court concluded that only Congress could mandate a different standard. So far, Congress has done nothing to reduce the disparities between IPR proceedings and Hatch-Waxman litigation. But, while we wait, the high patent invalidation rate in IPR proceedings creates significant uncertainty for patent owners’ intellectual property rights. Uncertain patent rights, in turn, lead to less innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Put simply, drug companies will not spend the billions of dollars it typically costs to bring a new drug to market when they can’t be certain if the patents for that drug can withstand IPR proceedings that are clearly stacked against them (for an excellent discussion of how the PTAB threatens innovation, see Alden Abbot’s recent TOTM post). Thus, deals between brand companies and sovereigns, such as Indian nations, that insulate patents from IPR proceedings should improve the certainty around intellectual property rights and protect drug innovation.

Yet, the response to the Allergan-Mohawk deal among some scholars and generic drug companies has been one of panic and speculative doom. Critics have questioned the deal largely on the grounds that, in addition to insulating Restasis from IPR proceedings, tribal sovereignty might also shield the patents in standard Hatch-Waxman district court litigation. If this were true and brand companies began to routinely house their patents with sovereign Indian nations, then the venues in which generic companies could challenge patents would be restricted and generic companies would have less incentive to produce and market cheaper drugs.

However, it is far from clear that these deals could shield patents in standard Hatch-Waxman district court litigation. Hatch-Waxman litigation typically follows a familiar pattern: a generic company files a Paragraph IV ANDA alleging patent owner’s patents are invalid or will not be infringed, the patent owner then sues the generic for infringement, and then the generic company files a counterclaim for invalidity. Critics of the Allergan-Mohawk deal allege that tribal sovereignty could insulate patent owners from the counterclaim. However, courts have held that state universities waive sovereign immunity for counterclaims when they file the initial patent infringement suit. Although, in non-infringement contexts, tribes have been found to not waive sovereign immunity for counterclaims merely by filing an action as a plaintiff, this has never been tested in patent litigation. Moreover, even if sovereign immunity could be used to prevent the counterclaim, invalidity can still be raised as an affirmative defense in the patent owner’s infringement suit (although it has been asserted that requiring generics to assert invalidity as an affirmative defense instead of a counterclaim may still tilt the playing field toward patent owners). Finally, many patent owners that are sovereigns may choose to voluntarily waive sovereign immunity to head off any criticism or congressional meddling. Given the uncertainty of the effects of tribal sovereignty in Hatch-Waxman litigation, Allergan has concluded that their deal with the Mohawks won’t affect the pending district court litigation involving the validity of the Restasis patents. However, if tribes in future cases were to cloud the viability of Hatch-Waxman by asserting sovereign immunity in district court litigation, Congress could always respond by altering the Hatch-Waxman rules to preclude this.

For now, we should all take a deep breath and put the fearmongering on hold. Whether deals like the Allergan-Mohawk arrangement could affect Hatch-Waxman litigation is simply a matter of speculation, and there are many reasons to believe that they won’t. In the meantime, the deal between Allergan and the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe is an ingenious strategy to avoid the unbalanced IPR process. This move is the natural extension of the PTAB’s ruling on state university sovereign immunity, and state universities are likely incorporating the advantage into their own licensing and litigation strategies. The Supreme Court will soon hear a case questioning the constitutionality of the IPR process. Until the courts or Congress act to reduce the disparities between IPR proceedings and Hatch-Waxman litigation, we can hardly blame patent owners from taking clever legal steps to avoid the unbalanced IPR process.

How a Patent Office Agency Undermines Patent Rights and Cripples Innovation – and What Can Be Done About It

Alden Abbott — 14 August 2017

On August 14, the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project released a report detailing the harm imposed on innovation and property rights by the Patent Trial and Appeals Board, a Patent and Trademark Office patent review agency created by the infelicitously-named “America Invents Act” of 2011. As the report’s abstract explains:

Patents are property rights secured to inventors of new products or services, such as the software and other high-tech innovations in our laptops and smart phones, the life-saving medicines prescribed by our doctors, and the new mechanical designs that make batteries more efficient and airplane engines more powerful. Many Americans first learn in school about the great inventors who revolutionized our lives with their patented innovations, such as Thomas Edison (the light bulb and record player), Alexander Graham Bell (the telephone), Nikola Tesla (electrical systems), the Wright brothers (airplanes), Charles Goodyear (cured rubber), Enrico Fermi (nuclear power), and Samuel Morse (the telegraph). These inventors and tens of thousands of others had the fruits of their inventive labors secured to them by patents, and these vital property rights have driven America’s innovation economy for over 225 years. For this reason, the United States has long been viewed as having the “gold standard” patent system throughout the world.

In 2011, Congress passed a new law, called the America Invents Act (AIA), that made significant changes to the U.S. patent system. Among its many changes, the AIA created a new administrative tribunal for invalidating “bad patents” (patents mistakenly issued because the claimed inventions were not actually new or because they suffer from other defects that create problems for companies in the innovation economy). This administrative tribunal is called the Patent Trial & Appeal Board (PTAB). The PTAB is composed of “administrative patent judges” appointed by the Director of the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). The PTAB administrative judges are supposed to be experts in both technology and patent law. They hold administrative hearings in response to petitions that challenge patents as defective. If they agree with the challenger, they cancel the patent by declaring it “invalid.” Anyone in the world willing to pay a filing fee can file a petition to invalidate any patent.

As many people are aware, administrative agencies can become a source of costs and harms that far outweigh the harms they were created to address. This is exactly what has happened with the PTAB. This administrative tribunal has become a prime example of regulatory overreach

Congress created the PTAB in 2011 in response to concerns about the quality of patents being granted to inventors by the USPTO. Legitimate patents promote both inventive activity and the commercial development of inventions into real-world innovation used by regular people the world over. But “bad patents” clog the intricate gears of the innovation economy, deterring real innovators and creating unnecessary costs for companies by enabling needless and wasteful litigation. The creation of the PTAB was well intended: it was supposed to remove bad patents from the innovation economy. But the PTAB has ended up imposing tremendous and unnecessary costs and creating destructive uncertainty for the innovation economy.

In its procedures and its decisions, the PTAB has become an example of an administrative tribunal run amok. It does not provide basic legal procedures to patent owners that all other property owners receive in court. When called upon to redress these concerns, the courts have instead granted the PTAB the same broad deference they have given to other administrative agencies. Thus, these problems have gone uncorrected and unchecked. Without providing basic procedural protections to all patent owners, the PTAB has gone too far with its charge of eliminating bad patents. It is now invalidating patents in a willy-nilly fashion. One example among many is that, in early 2017, the PTAB invalidated a patent on a new MRI machine because it believed this new medical device was an “abstract idea” (and thus unpatentable).

The problems in the PTAB’s operations have become so serious that a former federal appellate chief judge has referred to PTAB administrative judges as “patent death squads.” This metaphor has proven apt, even if rhetorically exaggerated. Created to remove only bad patents clogging the innovation economy, the PTAB has itself begun to clog innovation — killing large numbers of patents and casting a pall of uncertainty over every patent that might become valuable and thus a target of a PTAB petition to invalidate it.

The U.S. innovation economy has thrived because inventors know they can devote years of productive labor and resources into developing their inventions for the marketplace, secure in the knowledge that their patents provide a solid foundation for commercialization. Pharmaceutical companies depend on their patents to recoup billions of dollars in research and development of new drugs. Venture capitalists invest in startups on the basis of these vital property rights in new products and services, as viewers of Shark Tank see every week.

The PTAB now looms over all of these inventive and commercial activities, threatening to cancel a valuable patent at any moment and without rhyme or reason. In addition to the lost investments in the invalidated patents themselves, this creates uncertainty for inventors and investors, undermining the foundations of the U.S. innovation economy.

This paper explains how the PTAB has become a prime example of regulatory overreach. The PTAB administrative tribunal is creating unnecessary costs for inventors and companies, and thus it is harming the innovation economy far beyond the harm of the bad patents it was created to remedy. First, we describe the U.S. patent system and how it secures property rights in technological innovation. Second, we describe Congress’s creation of the PTAB in 2011 and the six different administrative proceedings the PTAB uses for reviewing and canceling patents. Third, we detail the various ways that the PTAB is now causing real harm, through both its procedures and its substantive decisions, and thus threatening innovation.

The PTAB has created fundamental uncertainty about the status of all patent rights in inventions. The result is that the PTAB undermines the market value of patents and frustrates the role that these property rights serve in the investment in and commercial development of the new technological products and services that make many aspects of our modern lives seem like miracles.

In June 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the Oil States Energy case, raising the question of whether PTAB patent review “violates the Constitution by extinguishing private property rights through a non-Article III forum without a jury.” A Supreme Court finding of unconstitutionality would be ideal. But in the event the Court leaves PTAB patent review intact, legislation to curb the worst excesses of PTAB – such as the bipartisan “STRONGER Patent Act of 2017” – merits serious consideration. Stay tuned – I will have more to say in detail about potential patent law reforms, including the reining in of PTAB, in the near future.

In Constitutional Law, Health Care, Intellectual Property, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Truth on the Market America Invents Act, commercialization, patent reform, startups, unconstitutional

The Demise of Lanham Act Trademark Disparagement Limitations Promotes Sound Free Market Economic Principles

Alden Abbott — 19 June 2017

Background

On June 19, in Matal v. Tam, the U.S. Supreme Court (Justice Gorsuch did not participate in the case) affirmed the Federal Circuit’s ruling that the Lanham Act’s “disparagement clause” is unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s free speech clause. The Patent and Trademark Office denied the Slants’ (an Asian rock group) federal trademark registration, relying on the Lanham Act’s prohibition on trademarks that “which may disparage . . . persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” The Court held that trademarks are not government speech, pointing out that the government “does not dream up these marks.” With the exception of marks scrutinized under the disparagement clause, trademarks are not reviewed for compliance with government policies. Writing for the Court, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Stephen Breyer) found unpersuasive the government’s argument that trademarks are analogous to subsidized speech. The Alito opinion also determined that it is unnecessary to determine whether trademarks are commercial speech (subject to lesser scrutiny), because the disparagement clause cannot survive the Supreme Court’s test for such speech enunciated in Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company (1980). Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, concurred in the judgment. The Kennedy opinion agreed that the disparagement clause constitutes viewpoint discrimination because it reflects the government’s disapproval of certain speech, and that heightened scrutiny should apply, whether or not trademarks are commercial speech.

The Tam decision continues the trend of Supreme Court cases extending First Amendment protection for offensive speech. Perhaps less likely to be noted, however, is that this decision also promotes free market principles by enhancing the effectiveness of legal protection for a key intellectual property right. To understand this point, a brief primer on the law and economics of federal trademark protection is in order.

The Law and Economics of Federal Trademark Protection in a Nutshell

A trademark (called a service mark in the case of a service) is an intellectual property right that identifies the source of a particular producer’s goods or services. Trademarks reduce transactions costs by enabling consumers more easily to identify and patronize particular goods and services whose attributes they associate with a trademark. This enhances market efficiency, by lowering information costs in the market and by encouraging competing firms to develop unique attributes that they can signal to consumers.

By robustly protecting federally-registered trademarks, the federal Lanham Act (see here for Lanham Act trademark infringement remedies) creates strong incentives for each trademark holder to invest in (and promote through advertising and other means) the quality of the trademarked goods or services it produces. Strong trademark remedies are key because they promote the market-based interest in ensuring trademark holders that their individual property rights will be protected. As one scholar puts it, “[i]t is generally accepted that [federal trademark] infringement actions protect both the goodwill of mark owners and competition by preventing confusion.”

Shielded by firm legal protection, the trademark holder will tend not to allow the quality of its trademark-protected offerings to slip, knowing that consumers will quickly and easily associate the reduced quality with its mark and stop patronizing the trademarked product or service. Absent strong trademark protection, however, producers of competing products and services will be tempted to “free ride” by using a competing business’s registered trademark without authorization. This sharply reduces the original trademark owner’s incentive to invest in and continue to promote quality, because it knows that the free riders will seek to attract customers by using the trademark to sell less costly, lower quality fare. Quality overall suffers, to the detriment of consumers. Allowing free riding on distinctive trademarks also (and relatedly) sows confusion as to the identity of sellers and as to the attributes covered by a particular trademark, leading to a weakening of the trademark system’s role as a source identifier and as a spur to attribute-based competition.

In short, federal trademark law protection, embodied in the Lanham Act, enhances free market competitive processes by protecting a trademark’s role in identifying suppliers (reducing transaction costs); incentivizing investment in the enhancement and preservation of product quality; and spurring attribute-based competition.

The Demise of Lanham Act Disparagement Enhances Trademark Rights and Promotes Free Market Principles

The disparagement clause denied federal legal protection to a broad class of trademarks, based merely on the highly subjective determination by federal bureaucrats that the marks in question “disparaged” particular individuals or institutions. This denial undermined private parties’ incentives to invest in “disparaging” marks, and to compete vigorously by signaling to consumers the existence of novel products and services that they might find appealing.

By “constitutionally expunging” the disparagement clause, the Supreme Court in Tam has opened the gateway to more robust competition by spurring the vigorous investment in and promotion of a larger number of marks. Consumers in the marketplace, not bureaucrats, will decide whether the products or services identified by particular marks are “problematic” and therefore not worthy of patronage. In other words, by enhancing legal protection for a wider variety of trademarks, the Tam decision has paved the way for the expansion of mutually-beneficial marketplace transactions, to the benefit of consumers and producers alike.

To conclude, in promoting First Amendment free speech interests, the Tam Court also gave a shot in the arm to welfare-enhancing competition in markets for goods and services. It turns out that competition in the marketplace of ideas goes hand-in-hand with competition in the commercial marketplace.

In Constitutional Law, First Amendment, Intellectual Property, Patent, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market Advertising, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, unconstitutional

Archives For unconstitutional

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A Social Media Ministry of Truth

Extremely Limited Room to Regulate Extremism

What Can the Government Do?

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There is no cause of action for political bias by online platforms if we repeal Section 230

The difficulties of pursuing a contract claim for political bias

The First Amendment protects the moderation policies of social media platforms, and there is no way around this

Conclusion

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The changes

Why the FTC’s data security enforcement regime fails to provide fair notice or develop law (and is not like the common law)

What LabMD addressed and what it didn’t

How FTC’s changes fundamentally fail to address its failures of process

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1. CCPA compliance costs will be astronomical

2. CCPA will be good for Facebook and Google (and bad for small ad networks)

3. CCPA will enable free-riding by users who opt out of data sharing

4. CCPA is potentially unconstitutional as-written

5. GDPR compliance programs cannot be recycled for CCPA

6. CCPA will be a burden on small- and medium-sized businesses

7. CCPA’s definition of “personal information” is extremely over-inclusive

8. CCPA penalties might become a source for revenue generation

9. CCPA is inconsistent with existing privacy laws

10. CCPA will need to be amended, creating uncertainty for businesses

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