Author: Errica Jensen

NBA Top Shot seemed to be the way of the future for sports fans at one point in 2021. Digital video clips of LeBron James dunks and Stephen Curry three-pointers, each packaged as a distinct NFT on Dapper Labs’ proprietary Flow blockchain, were being purchased by collectors for real money, sometimes thousands of dollars. The business had secured venture capital worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Officially, the NBA supported it. The coverage by the media was breathless. The legal issues that would ultimately result in two federal settlements were also subtly developing somewhere in there. The two biggest class…

For the better part of fifty years, Howard Stern has spoken aloud about things that most people keep to themselves. Because he seemed to operate without the filters that controlled everyone else, he became one of the most recognizable voices in American media and built an empire on radical transparency, or at least on the performance of it. The news that a former assistant is now suing him for allegedly using a broad nondisclosure agreement to make sure she couldn’t say anything at all is somewhat ironic. The details of Leslie Kuhn’s lawsuit, which she filed in New York State…

Imagine this scene in the back office of a cabaret venue in Las Vegas sometime in 2015: Maren Wade, a performer, is filing federal trademark paperwork after writing a column for Las Vegas Weekly titled “Confessions of a Showgirl” for a year. Not because she expected to fight a worldwide celebrity. Because she wanted to safeguard what she had created—a live performance, a touring production, a book, and an audience. The trademark appears. She stores it in a file. No one questions it for ten years. Everything changes when Taylor Swift releases The Life of a Showgirl, her twelfth studio…

In a scene from the April 7, 2026, Netflix documentary “Untold: Chess Mates,” Hans Niemann looks straight into the camera and says something that has been making the rounds on social media and chess forums ever since. He posted, “I never received an apology,” on X the day the documentary was released. “Let that sink in.” It’s the kind of statement that only makes sense if you know what Niemann has been carrying for almost four years, as well as what he actually gained from the legal settlement that was supposed to put an end to everything. The Hans Niemann…

Imagine that at two in the morning, your Android phone is resting on your nightstand. The screen is dark. All apps were closed. Sharing locations is not enabled. You’ve fallen asleep. Additionally, data is silently moving off your phone, across your cellular network, and in the direction of Google’s servers somewhere in the background. That data is paid for by you. That transfer was not requested by you. Furthermore, a federal class action lawsuit that resulted in a $135 million settlement claims that Google was fully aware of what it was doing. In Taylor et al. v. Google LLC, a…

Some of the biggest consumer payout operations in the US are discreetly managed by a relatively small group of legal and technology experts in a building on A.B. Data Drive in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is somewhat surprisingly named after the company itself. The majority of people will never go there. The majority of people won’t even be aware of it. However, there’s a good chance that someone in that building has handled a claim on your behalf—or attempted to—if you’ve ever used an Android phone, banked with Wells Fargo, dined at Panda Express, or just had a credit card that…

The fact that millions of Americans are not receiving notification emails regarding a Google data privacy settlement because those emails end up in Gmail spam folders is eerily fitting. In other words, the message that Google owes you money is being discreetly erased by Google’s own email service. Depending on how sympathetic you are to the company this week, it may be algorithmic irony or something more pointed.The lawsuit at the heart of all of this is Taylor v. Google LLC, a federal class action claiming that Android devices continuously sent user data to Google without authorization, even when phones…

When you walk into any Costco on a Saturday afternoon, you’ll see the same scene everywhere: flatbed carts filled with forty-packs of paper towels and bulk olive oil, the smell of rotisserie chickens wafting from the back, and a certain type of customer who has made the conscious or unconscious decision that this is their store. Their wallet’s membership card serves as a kind of identity marker. Costco isn’t the only place people shop. They are a part of it. It turns out that this feeling of community is also a business model, and a man from California named Russell…

Looking up at the X9 1100 combine, a machine about the size of a small house, shining under conference lighting, while standing on the floor of the John Deere booth at CES in Las Vegas back in January, it was difficult not to consider what it truly means to own something like that. Don’t rent it. not sign up for it. Take full ownership of it and write a check for several hundred thousand dollars. After that, you will essentially be informed that if something breaks, you must contact a John Deere-approved person to have it fixed. This week saw…

When you discover that a tool your child uses on a daily basis—mandatory, school-issued, inevitable—may have been creating a thorough profile of them since kindergarten, a certain kind of uneasiness sets in. As a federal class action lawsuit against Curriculum Associates, the company that created the popular i-Ready platform, moves slowly through the legal system, many parents in the US are currently experiencing that. M.C. v. Curriculum Associates, Inc. is the formal name of the case that was filed on December 22, 2025. Fundamentally, the lawsuit claims that Curriculum Associates, a business whose i-Ready suite is used by over 14…