Various interested party responses and notices of related action and oral argument were filed late last week before the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) involving Progress Software Corp.’s (PSC) May MOVEit file transfer software data breach, court records show.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals “affirmed a sweeping and unprecedented injunction” when it sought to bar officials from the White House, surgeon general’s office, the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from applying what the court called “coercion” on social media companies to moderate their content, said Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar in a reply brief Thursday at the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday (docket 23A243) in support of the government’s application for a full stay of the injunction, pending SCOTUS review (see 2309140041).

Defendant Apollo Interactive seeks an order dismissing plaintiff Eric Moorman’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action in its entirety and to compel Moorman’s claims to arbitration, said its motion Thursday (docket 8:23-cv-01533) in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Tampa. The court alternatively should stay the case pending the outcome of the arbitration, and should also strike or dismiss Moorman’s class allegations, said the motion.

The AFL-CIO supports the government’s calls for the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve Chevron, rather than overturn it, said the union’s amicus brief Friday (docket 22-451) in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The AFL-CIO believes the doctrine “is both a constitutionally permissible and practically necessary part of a functional system of government,” it said.

Senior executive branch officials, including senior White House officials, “threaten, pressure, and coerce social-media platforms to silence the core political speech of millions of Americans,” responded the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri Wednesday (docket 23A243), urging U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to deny the government’s application for a full stay of the 5th Circuit’s injunction, pending resolution of its forthcoming cert petition (see 2309140041). Alito is circuit judge for the 5th Circuit.

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission properly decided that FirstEnergy charged unlawfully high pole-attachment rates to Verizon, a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court majority decided Thursday. The PUC also appropriately determined the length of retroactive relief, despite Verizon’s arguments that refunds should go further back.

Oral argument would help the 5th Circuit “in resolving the complex issues arising from a three-week trial in which a jury found Grande Communications Networks secondarily liable for infringing 1,403 copyrighted songs and awarded $46.7 million in statutory damages, on grounds that Grande provided internet service to the direct infringers,” said Grande’s opening brief Wednesday (docket 23-50162). Grande’s appeal seeks to reverse the district court’s May 11 denial of its renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law or remand the case for a new trial to get the jury award vacated (see 2306120002).

Four Democratic senators support keeping Chevron against the “decades-long effort by pro-corporate interests to eviscerate the federal government’s regulatory apparatus to the detriment of the American people,” said their U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief Thursday (docket 22-451) in support of the government respondents in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (see 2309170001). “The call here to overturn Chevron and dismantle agency powers is a special interest solution in search of a problem,” said Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Dianne Feinstein of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Hikvision, Dahua and the U.S. government made final arguments on whether the FCC wrongly barred gear from the Chinese companies from being authorized under the agency’s equipment authorization program and wrongly placed the companies on the FCC’s “covered list.” The pleadings were filed Wednesday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C Circuit (docket 23-1032). Oral argument hasn’t been scheduled in the case.

Without the copyrighted works of 17 plaintiff authors and a proposed class, OpenAI would have a “vastly different commercial product,” said Rachel Geman of Lieff Cabraser in a Wednesday news release announcing a copyright infringement suit (docket 1:23-cv-08292) brought by 17 authors and the Authors Guild against OpenAI in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan. OpenAI copied authors’ works to train their large language models (LLMs) without offering choice or compensation, which “threatens the role and livelihood of writers as a whole,” said Geman, the suit's co-counsel.