Justices confront internet privacy with Blockbuster-era law

Filed 53m ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Fig Leaf Rag

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Andrzej Otrębski · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, passed after a reporter published Robert Bork's rental history, covers modern data sharing for targeted ads. Michael Salazar sued Paramount for allegedly sharing his data with Facebook after he signed up for 247Sports' newsletter while logged into Facebook, arguing newsletter subscribers count as video service consumers under the statute's plain language.

Paramount counters the law was never meant to reach non-video transactions like a free newsletter, warning that Salazar's reading has already spawned class actions against companies like La-Z-Boy and Chick-fil-A over unrelated promotional video clips. The Motion Picture Association and News/Media Alliance filed briefs warning that an expansive reading could turn nearly every internet user into a covered consumer and push news sites to paywall or strip out video content that funds free journalism.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A law meant to stop your neighbor from finding out what you rented one weekend in 1988 is now being stretched to cover a newsletter sign-up with a video attached, and nobody in Congress saw that coming because nobody in 1988 could picture the internet doing this to itself. Both sides have a point, which is usually what happens when old rules get dragged forward decades past their design life. Courts end up deciding these things not because the law was written for it, but because nobody has written a better one since.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Fig Leaf Rag · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0