The four causes of action plaintiff George Schwarz seeks to assert against Nissan North America arising from his loss of connected vehicle services through obsolete telematics equipment in his Nissan vehicles should be resolved through individual arbitration, said the automaker. Nissan filed a motion Monday (docket 3:22-cv-00933) in U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee in Nashville to dismiss Schwarz's complaint, or in the alternative, to stay the proceedings and compel the dispute to arbitration.
The FCC’s September 2018 small-cells declaratory ruling preempting aspects of local and municipal cell tower permit reviews (see 2210070046) is a “substantive rule” that shouldn’t be applied retroactively to the 2017 Roswell, Georgia, decision denying T-Mobile’s application to build a tower in a residential neighborhood, said U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg for Northern Georgia in Atlanta in a signed opinion and order Friday (docket 1:10-cv-01464).
U.S. District Judge Michael Brown for Northern Georgia in Atlanta denied the PBS motion to dismiss plaintiff Jazmine Harris’ class action for failure to state a Video Privacy Protection Act claim, said his signed order Monday (docket 1:22-cv-02456). Harris alleges PBS disclosed her PBS.org personal viewing information to Facebook without her consent, in violation of the VPPA. Her proposed class includes all PBS.org subscribers who had their personal viewing information disclosed to Facebook.
Meta seeks the dismissal of a Jan. 27 complaint alleging it’s engaging in “viewpoint discrimination” against two private Facebook groups, called Wise Guys I and Wise Guys II, in violation of the First Amendment and the Texas social media law HB 20 (see 2301300023), said Meta’s motion Monday (docket 3:23-cv-00217) in U.S. District Court for Northern Texas in Dallas.
Rochester opposes Verizon’s motion, joined by plaintiffs Crown Castle and Extenet in the related cases, to exclude from evidence the spreadsheet created by Louie Tobias, the city’s director-telecommunications and special projects, on grounds it contains inadmissable hearsay, said the city’s memorandum of law Friday in U.S. District Court for Western New York in support of that opposition. The spreadsheet “is admissible as a public record,” and the motion should be denied, it said.
Verizon’s appeal of the July 1 district court decision denying its motion to compel the dispute of 27 California consumers to arbitration “is about an arbitration agreement that goes too far,” said the consumers’ answering brief Friday (docket 22-16020) in the 9th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court. The case originated from a November 2021 class action challenging Verizon’s “bait-and-switch scheme” in which it allegedly padded consumers’ monthly wireless bills with a secretive “administrative charge” that kept climbing higher and higher above the flat monthly rates it was advertising.
There’s little relevance to plaintiff Jazmine Harris’ Video Privacy Protection Act claims against PBS in the recent decision in Goldstein v. Fandango Media denying a motion to dismiss a complaint asserting VPPA violations, said PBS Thursday (docket 1:22-cv-02456) in U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia in Atlanta. PBS seeks leave to respond to Harris’ notice of supplemental authority in which she said Goldstein involved “similar claims and factual allegations” to those she’s asserting against PBS (see 2303140019).
The Jan. 19-disclosed “criminal cyberattack,” of which T-Mobile was the “victim,” affected only “non-sensitive information” of T-Mobile customers, said the carrier’s opposition Thursday at the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to the Feb. 8 petition to transfer the 16 resulting class actions for pretrial consolidation under a single judge. That’s important because all the customers whose personal information was breached “are contractually obligated to resolve their claims against T-Mobile through individual arbitration, not class action litigation,” it said.
Motorola Solutions filed for leave to intervene as of right in support of the FCC in Hikvision USA’s petition to review the commission’s Nov. 25 order barring the authorization of network equipment considered a threat to U.S. national security, said its motion Wednesday (docket 23-1032) in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Hikvision has no objections to the motion, the FCC consents to it and DOJ takes no position, said Motorola.
Court rules include “no prohibition” against the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri filing their 350-page supplemental fact memo in support of their motion for a preliminary injunction to block what they allege is the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech to censor right-leaning social media content in violation of the First Amendment (see 2303100002). So said a memorandum order (docket 3:22-cv-01213) signed Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty for Western Louisiana in Monroe, denying DOJ’s motion to strike the fact memo for the undue burden DOJ said it would put on the government to respond.