Crown Castle’s infrastructure fight with the city of Pasadena, Texas, is “undisputably a case in which Crown Castle was not providing any telecommunications services at all,” as defined by the Telecommunications Act, said city attorney William Helfand with Lewis Brisbois during oral argument Wednesday before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Pasadena is asking the 5th Circuit to reverse the district court’s Aug. 2 decision granting Crown Castle summary judgment.
Fitbit fitness trackers are “incapable” of rendering accurate blood oxygen (SpO2) readings for users with dark skin, yet Fitbit conceals that incapability from the buying public, alleged a putative fraud class action Friday (docket 3:23-cv-02753) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco.
The “explicit dispute resolution provisions” of the agreement between T-Mobile and plaintiff Bradford Clements require that any dispute be arbitrated through the American Arbitration Association, said T-Mobile’s memorandum Monday (docket 5:22-cv-07512) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose in support of its motion to dismiss Clements’ May 22 first amended complaint. Clements sued for relief from injuries he alleges he sustained from the eight T-Mobile data breaches he endured during the three years he was a T-Mobile customer before switching carriers.
The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation moved with apparent speed in the days before Friday’s release of its order (MDL No. 3073) transferring the 11 class actions arising from T-Mobile’s latest date breach, plus five cases treated as potential tag-alongs, for pretrial consolidation under U.S. District Judge Brian Wimes for Western Missouri in Kansas City.
T-Mobile and seven of its subsidiaries seek “redress” for a “nationwide criminal scheme” to defraud T-Mobile and the subsidiaries “out of an amount believed to be more than $10 million,” alleged a complaint Friday (docket 2:23-cv-04347) in U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles. The case involves educational broadband service (EBS) wireless spectrum in the 2.5-GHz band that the FCC historically has licensed to schools, and T-Mobile leased much of that spectrum from the schools that hold the licenses to build its nationwide cellular and data network.
Lane County in western Oregon seeks summary judgment against AT&T’s Oct. 25 complaint alleging the county violated the Telecommunications Act by denying its application to build a 150-foot-tall cell tower with accompanying communications electronics (see 2210260009), said the county’s memorandum of law in support of its motion Thursday (docket 6:22-cv-01635) in U.S. District Court for Oregon in Eugene. The parties “made a good faith effort through personal or telephone conferences to resolve the dispute and have been unable to do so,” it said.
The war of words continued Wednesday between Comcast and MaxLinear over MaxLinear’s decision to terminate the parties’ contracts to support millions of broadband gateways used to provide internet service to Comcast customers (see 2305300045).
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision of U.S. District Judge John Adams for Northern Ohio in Akron dismissing plaintiff Matthew Dickson’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act complaint for failure to demonstrate an injury in fact, in a Thursday opinion (docket 22-3394). It remanded the case to the lower court for further proceedings, but declined Dickson’s request for reassignment to a different judge on remand.
Amazon violated the FTC Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) rule by “misrepresenting” that it would delete voice transcripts and geolocation information of Alexa users on request and would limit employees’ access to Alexa users’ voice information, said a stipulated order Wednesday (docket 2:23-cv-00811) in U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Seattle. Amazon also failed to delete children’s personal information at their parents’ request, and it kept children’s personal information “longer than reasonably necessary to fulfill the purpose for which the information was collected,” it said.
Until late last year, Hulu and Disney+ offered video content to Texas residents over the public internet “without state or local government interference,” said the streaming services’ counterclaim Tuesday (docket DC-22-09128) in 14th Judicial District Court in Dallas against the 31 Texas cities seeking to force the services to pay franchise fees for the video programming they provide through wireline facilities in the public rights-of-way (see 2304120051). Netflix also is a defendant in the dispute with the Texas cities but wasn’t party to the Hulu-Disney+ counterclaim.