In an unusual twist for a Telephone Consumer Protection Act case, a TCPA class-action defendant sought Wednesday in U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to hold its telemarketing vendor accountable for all damages and court costs should the plaintiff and his putative class members win the case.

Optimum and Altice failed to compensate cable layer employees completely for their labor and calculated earned wages based on feet of cable installed instead of the number of hours worked in a work week, in violation of labor laws, alleged Luka Kvinikadze of Vermont in a Wednesday class action (docket 1:23-cv-02922) in U.S. District Court for Eastern New York in Brooklyn.

Plaintiffs fail to “meet their burden” of establishing that applying California law would thwart any fundamental policy of either New York or Minnesota, said Google Wednesday in a reply (docket 4:22-cv-05652) in support of its motion to dismiss a privacy lawsuit related to YouTube and Google Play video rental policies (see 2303300063).

PBS denies any and all allegations in plaintiff Jazmine Harris’ class actions that it violated the Video Privacy Protection Act by disclosing its digital subscribers’ identities and viewing activity to Facebook without the proper consent, said PBS’ answer Monday (docket 1:22-cv-02456) in U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia in Atlanta.

The government “should not be able to mask its censorship behind the guise of private action,” said the Alliance Defending Freedom Tuesday in an amicus brief (docket 3:22-cv-01213) filed in support of Republican attorneys general in a First Amendment case against Biden administration officials in U.S. District Court for Western Louisiana in Monroe.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson for Northern California in Oakland sided with the plaintiffs in the multidistrict litigation against the major social media companies, when he decided during a remote discovery hearing Wednesday (see 2304180048) to limit the scope of the court's Rule 502(d) order that will govern discovery as the MDL moves forward.

Plaintiff Shlomy Halawani, a “serial litigant,” alleges Charter Communications called his phone a single time using a prerecorded voice message to market Spectrum services, in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection and the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act (see 2303100055), but Charter said the “jurisdictional evidence” shows it never called him. The company filed a motion Monday (docket 0:23-cv-60453) in U.S. District Court for Southern Florida in Fort Lauderdale to dismiss Halawani’s putative class action for lack of personal jurisdiction.

Having compromised the highly personal sensitive information of millions of individuals, T-Mobile now wrongfully seeks to delay “the prosecution of claims related to their misconduct” by “piggybacking” on a transfer motion filed with the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Ligation to completely and indefinitely stay all proceedings against them, pending the JPML’s decision. So said the plaintiffs’ opposition brief Monday (docket 3:23-cv-00427) in Shoemaker v. T-Mobile in U.S. District Court for Southern California in San Diego.

PHILADELPHIA -- Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) challenged state enforcers Tuesday to collaboratively address privacy and social media issues, speaking at a National Association of Attorneys General meeting. North Carolina AG Josh Stein (D) asked an algorithms panel later for suggestions on what states can do amid a rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

Standard General received only 15 to 20 minutes' notice from the FCC that the agency was about to issue a hearing designation order, and Standard doesn’t plan to go away if the Tegna deal falls apart, Managing Partner Soohyung Kim said in an interview Monday. “I don’t think a regulator should dislike the industry it regulates,” he told former FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly during an onstage Q&A at the NAB Show Tuesday.