Pasadena, Texas, seeks the reversal of the 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court affirmation of the district court’s judgment that Section 253 of the Telecommunications Act preempts the spacing and undergrounding requirements in the city’s design manual for the installation of small cells and support poles in its public rights of way, said the city’s U.S. Supreme Court cert petition (docket 23-698). The petition was filed Dec. 26 and docketed Thursday, said a clerk's notice Friday.

Though the court is “sympathetic” to Jillane Pope’s “plight” as a victim of text-phishing scammers, “the law is not on her side to recover her losses” from Wells Fargo Bank and JPMorgan Chase, said a report Wednesday (docket 2:23-cv-00086) from U.S. Magistrate Judge Dustin Pead for Utah in Salt Lake City in which he recommends granting the banks’ motions to dismiss Pope’s complaint.

Private research universities like Stanford and their researchers aren’t “state actors” subject to constitutional constraints “just because they speak to the government about their research,” said Stanford’s Dec. 26 amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the petitioners in Murthy v. Missouri (docket 23-411) who seek to vacate the 5th Circuit’s injunction against government involvement in social media content moderation.

The Environmental Defense Fund used its U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief Dec. 22 in Relentless v. Commerce Department (docket 22-1219) in support of the government respondents who want to preserve Chevron doctrine and attack “the outright insubstantiality” of the Relentless petitioners’ main legal arguments for overturning it.

The U.S. District Court for Eastern Wisconsin in Milwaukee should deny Verizon’s motion for “the extraordinary remedy” of an immediate injunction ordering the city to permit Verizon to install three poles to host small wireless facilities on leased property, said the city’s opposition brief Tuesday (docket 2:23-cv-01581). Deer District LLC (see 2312050022), an entity affiliated with the Milwaukee Bucks, controls the property.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court’s Oct. 3 ruling that affirmed the district court’s injunction barring federal officials from conversing with social media companies about moderating their content (see [Ref:2310040001) “threatens to imperil independent research in the digital technology area,” said the Coalition for Independent Technology Research in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief Tuesday (docket 23-411) in Murthy v. Missouri in support of the government petitioners’ efforts to defeat the injunction.

It’s a “national security imperative” for government officials to “engage with social media platforms about foreign malign influence targeting their users,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said Tuesday in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief (docket 23-411). His brief supports government petitioners in Murthy v. Missouri who seek to vacate the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ social media injunction against officials from the White House and four federal agencies.

The Democratic attorneys general of 22 states and the District of Columbia urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ Oct. 3 decision and vacate the “sweeping” injunction that bars officials from the White House and four federal agencies from conversing with social media platforms executives about content moderation (see 2310040001), said their amicus brief Tuesday (docket 23-411). The injunction is stayed, pending completion of a SCOTUS review.

Microsoft and OpenAI generative AI (GenAI) tools rely on large-language models (LLMs) “that were built by copying and using” millions of the New York Times’ copyrighted news articles, in violation of the Copyright Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other statutes, alleged the New York Times Co.’s' complaint Wednesday (docket 1:23-cv-11195) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment against plaintiff-appellants Regie Salgado and Melinda Zambrano, two former employees of TruConnect Communications who alleged that the cellphone network operator fired them in retaliation for raising claims that the company engaged in schemes to defraud the FCC’s Lifeline program, said the 9th Circuit’s memorandum Friday (docket 22-55721).