Google believes its policies and practices are fair but agreed to pay $118 million to settle a class-action, gender-equity lawsuit, the company said in a statement Monday. Plaintiffs announced the settlement Friday, saying a settlement monitor will supervise over the next three years to ensure women aren’t paid less than male counterparts. The settlement covers 15,500 female employees in 236 positions in California since September 2013, said law firms Lieff Cabraser and Altshuler Berzon. “While we strongly believe in the equity of our policies and practices, after nearly five years of litigation, both sides agreed that resolution of the matter, without any admission or findings, was in the best interest of everyone,” Google said. “We are absolutely committed to paying, hiring and leveling all employees fairly and equally and for the past nine years we have run a rigorous pay equity analysis to make sure salaries, bonuses and equity awards are fair.” Plaintiff Holly Pease said: “As a woman who's spent her entire career in the tech industry, I'm optimistic that the actions Google has agreed to take as part of this settlement will ensure more equity for women.”

HBO's attempt to compel arbitration in a Video Privacy Protection Act complaint (see 2205020055) misses that the contract at issue, with its lack of refund policy and notice of additional terms, is unenforceable, the docket 1:22-cv-01942 plaintiffs told the U.S. District Court in Manhattan in an opposition Friday. They said that when customers subscribed through Amazon Prime Channels and AT&T, the providers never required assent to HBO's terms of use or mentioned the TOU existed, and HBO never provided a refundable opt-out option when the subscribers were then presented with the TOU. HBO outside counsel didn't comment.

Disclosures in an April 19 earnings report that Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in Q1, sending the stock plunging more than 35% in a single day, sparked at least the second federal securities fraud complaint against the streaming company seeking class-action status (see 2205040004). The Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund, a Netflix shareholder, “suffered damages as a result of the federal securities law violations and false and misleading statements and material omissions” made by co-CEOs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, Chief Financial Officer Spencer Neumann and Chief Product Officer Greg Peters, alleged the complaint in U.S. District Court in San Jose that was filed Tuesday and transferred to Oakland Thursday after U.S. District Judge James Donato recused himself. In at least five quarterly earnings calls before April 19, the Netflix executives failed to disclose to investors that subscriber account-sharing and increased competition from other streaming services “were becoming significant headwinds” and that the company was “experiencing difficulties retaining customers,” the complaint said. Netflix didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Best Buy Health violates the Americans With Disabilities Act for its failure to design and operate a website that’s “fully accessible” to blind or visually impaired people who use screen-reading software, alleged a complaint Sunday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan that seeks class-action status. Legally blind Bronx resident Isabel Taveras tried in April to use Best Buy Health’s Lively.com website, which sells inexpensive cellphones and medical alert services to seniors, said her complaint, one of a dozen she filed simultaneously against a variety of merchants, all alleging the same ADA violations. She found the NonVisual Desktop Access screen reader she used was incapable of reading the links on the website’s promotional images or its item description links, said the complaint. “For screen-reading software to function, the information on a website must be capable of being rendered into text,” it said. If not, the blind or visually impaired user “is unable to access the same content available to sighted users,” it said. Taveras encountered “multiple access barriers” that denied her “full and equal access” to the goods and services offered on the website to “the general public,” it said. The deficiencies were still there through the date of the complaint's filing, it said.The complaint seeks preliminary and permanent injunctions ordering Best Buy “to take all the steps necessary to make its website fully comply" with the ADA's requirements, plus statutory and punitive money damages. It defines the potential class as including all blind and visually impaired people in the U.S. who have tried and failed to access the Lively.com goods and services that are available to the general public. Best Buy didn’t respond to requests for comment.

MindGeek and its streaming video services like Pornhub had no role in posting sexually explicit videos of a then-underage girl, and merely providing an online platform that can be used for unlawful purposes isn't illegal or actionable, MindGeek said Monday in a motion to dismiss (docket 2:21-cv-04920) filed with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Suing MindGeek and its executives is the woman who was subject of those videos as well as nearly three dozen Jane Doe plaintiffs alleging videos of their abuse or trafficking when they were juveniles were posted to MindGeek sites. MindGeek said the suit also is barred by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Counsel for the plaintiff didn't comment Tuesday.

U.S. District Court in Baltimore plans oral argument July 12 at 2 p.m. on remaining issues in U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others’ lawsuit against Maryland’s digital ad tax law, Judge Lydia Griggsby ordered Monday in case 1:21-cv-00410-DKC. After ruling in March that the Tax Injunction Act precluded federal courts from reviewing the tax itself, the district court is weighing the constitutionality of Maryland banning companies from passing the tax’s costs to consumers (see 2204290061).

First Amendment problems with Texas’ social media law are significant enough that the law should be blocked until judges can fully review the case, tech industry associations told the Supreme Court Thursday in 21A720 (see 2205190041). Arguments from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) can be debated when the full case is reviewed, the Computer & Communications Industry Association said in a joint filing with NetChoice. HB 20 is “plainly unconstitutional, and this Court is likely to review and reverse any decision to the contrary,” the filing said: The law discriminates based on speaker, content and viewpoint.

Google’s incognito mode misleads users into thinking their web search and activity history isn’t recorded, said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in an amended complaint Thursday at Texas District Court in Victory County (case 22-01-88230-D). Paxton added that claim to his original suit claiming Google violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act by tracking users’ locations even if they disabled location tracking (see 2201240028). “Google claims to give users control and to respect their choice but in reality, regardless of the settings users select, the Big Tech giant is still hard at work collecting and monetizing the location and other personal information that users seek to keep private,” said Paxton. The Texas AG's case is "based on inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings," said a Google spokesperson. "We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data. We strongly dispute these claims and will vigorously defend ourselves to set the record straight.”

Years of discovery turned up no evidence Bright House Networks' objective in providing internet service to subscribers allegedly involved in online piracy was to cause copyright infringement, the Charter Communications subsidiary told the U.S. District Court in Tampa Wednesday in a docket 8:19-cv-710 motion to dismiss. Numerous music labels are suing Bright House (see 2108120002). It said it's also entitled to summary judgment on many of the alleged infringements since close to half of the notices were mistakenly sent to email addresses it doesn't maintain. "Bright House could not have had knowledge of alleged infringements identified in notices it did not receive," the ISP said. Bright House "received millions of infringement notices from copyright owners, but literally threw away the vast majority without even looking at them," the labels said in a motion for partial summary judgment seeking a finding that they had established the knowledge and material contribution elements necessary to hold it liable for contributory infringement. That would leave for trial proving that Bright House's subscribers distributed or reproduced the infringing files, which will establish direct infringement, the plaintiffs said.

The Supreme Court shouldn’t allow Texas’ social media law to be enforced, former Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., wrote the high court Tuesday in case 21A720 (see 2205160030). The Supreme Court should preserve the status quo and vacate the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ order allowing the state’s social media law to be enforced, argued Cox, who co-wrote Communications Decency Act Section 230 with then-Rep. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. By requiring all viewpoints to be treated the same, Texas’ new law would “expose platforms to liability for moderating such loathsome content as racist diatribes, Nazi screeds, holocaust-denial misinformation, and foreign government propaganda,” Cox wrote in support of NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association. The associations filed an emergency application for immediate administrative relief with the high court.