Tesla is already facing the fallout from a report that it exaggerated EV ranges and tried to muffle complaints. Three owners in California have launched a proposed class action lawsuit accusing Tesla of false advertising. The trio claims their cars fell well short of their estimated ranges, and that they've had no success lodging complaints. The customers either wouldn't have bought their cars or would have paid considerably less for them, according to the suit.

The owners allege Tesla committed fraud, violated warranties and conducted unfair competition. If the lawsuit gets class action status, it would cover all people in California who bought a Tesla Model 3, Model S, Model X or Model Y. The plaintiffs are hoping for unspecified damages. Tesla has disbanded its communications team and isn't available for comment.

The lawsuit follows a Reuters report that Tesla began modifying EV ranges about a decade ago. Its cars would supposedly show inflated figures when fully charged, and would only start showing accurate numbers under a 50 percent charge. To head off complaints, the automaker is said to have created a "Diversion Team" that would persuade users to drop range-related support calls.

It's not certain that Tesla still uses these purported exaggerations. The Environmental Protection Agency did ask the company to trim its range estimates from the 2020 model year forward, and South Korea recently issued a $2.2 million fine over an alleged failure to adequately inform customers that EV ranges would drop in cold weather.

Tesla isn't alone in boasting EV range estimates that don't hold up in real conditions. An SAE International study found that electric cars tend to fall about 12.5 percent short of their advertised ranges. The report and lawsuit suggest Tesla's figures are less accurate than for other brands, however, and that the company may have tried to silence unhappy customers.

Elon Musk and X, the site formerly known as Twitter, are in more legal trouble. The Agence France-Presse (AFP) is suing X for not engaging in discussions about payment to the French publisher in exchange for its articles appearing on the platform. In 2019, France passed neighboring rights legislation, extending copyright law to content produced by news publishers, such as text and videos, for two years after release. The law requires any sites that share this work to negotiate with the publishers about remuneration instead of sharing it without compensation for its creators. 

In its press release, the AFP stated that it has "expressed its concerns over the clear refusal from Twitter (recently rebranded as 'X') to enter into discussions regarding the implementation of neighbouring rights for the press. These rights were established to enable news agencies and publishers to be remunerated by digital platforms which retain most of the monetary value generated by the distribution of news content."

X isn't the first tech company AFP has gone up against. In 2020, France's competition authority ordered Google to enter negotiations with publishers, and, while it reached an agreement in early 2021, the company was fined €500 million ($546 million) later that year for not reaching a fair agreement. In that case, part of the argument was that Google owns 90 percent of the search market, leaving them in a position where they could abuse their power if an equitable deal wasn't reached. Twitter's influence in this area of the internet isn't nearly as strong, so we'll have to wait and see if it will face the same fight. 

ByteDance is facing a class-action lawsuit over claims that its CapCut video-editing app is vacuuming up data from its more than 200 million active users without consent. Among other things, the lawsuit, which was filed in Illinois, claims that CapCut violates the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by collecting data like face scans and voiceprints without informing users or getting express permission.

The app also allegedly collects details about a user's location, date of birth and gender as well as their photos and videos. Much of this is said to be in service of delivering targeted ads. In addition, the suit claims that the app is capable of harvesting data from user devices, including the MAC address and SIM serial number.

The lawsuit, which The Record unearthed, asserts that CapCut's privacy policy was designed to make it hard for people to understand or to give the app “meaningful, express consent.” One plaintiff who started using the app while in the seventh grade was allegedly able to use CapCut without having to sign up for an account, reviewing a privacy policy or having parental consent.

Moreover, the suit points out that, since ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing, the company may be compelled to share CapCut data with the Chinese government. It claims that a former ByteDance official revealed publicly that the Chinese Communist Party can use a “backdoor channel code" to access data on users based outside of the country, including those in the US.

ByteDance, of course, owns TikTok, which has long been the subject of claims that the Chinese government can access US user data. The company has been trying to convince US regulators that TikTok doesn't pose a threat to national security. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew claimed at a congressional hearing earlier this year that "ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country."

Since last year, TikTok has been routing all US user data to Oracle servers based in the country. That initiative, called Project Texas, also included the goal of removing US users' private TikTok data from ByteDance's own data centers.

Nonetheless, Montana legislators have passed a bill to ban TikTok outright in the state. Many other jurisdictions, including the federal government, have prohibited the app on nearly all state-owned devices. The Justice Department is reportedly looking into claims that four ByteDance employees used TikTok to snoop on the locations of two US journalists.

The class-action suit asks a district court to block ByteDance from sending CapCut user data and content to China, and from collecting users' biometric information and other data without consent. The plaintiffs asked the court to compel ByteDance to delete any user data and content it unlawfully obtained through CapCut as well. In addition, the suit seeks unspecified damages.

Engadget has asked ByteDance for comment.

An investigation into Microsoft's potential antitrust practices is underway nearly three years after Slack first filed a complaint against the company. The European Commission has announced a probe into if Microsoft bundling Teams with its product suites violated EU competition rules. Slack filed its antitrust complaint in 2020, alleging that Microsoft's decision to include Teams with Microsoft 365 or Office 365 is illegal and that the company blocked some users from removing the software. 

In April, Microsoft agreed to remove Teams from its Office suite in an attempt to prevent a probe, but said it was unclear how it would do so. The effort wasn't enough to avoid concerns and make a deal. In its announcement opening the investigation, the European Commission said it "is concerned that Microsoft may grant Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers a choice on whether or not to include access to that product when they subscribe to their productivity suites and may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings." 

A Microsoft spokesperson responded to the news: "We respect the European Commission’s work on this case and take our own responsibilities very seriously. We will continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns." 

This isn't the first time Microsoft has found itself in hot water with the European Commission. In 2009, the company agreed to offer EU users different browser options instead of forcing them to use Internet Explorer in Windows. Four years later, the European Commission fined Microsoft €561 million ($625 million) after a "glitch" stopped the browser choice screen from consistently appearing. The current investigation has no decision deadline, so it might be some time before the European Commission announces Microsoft's fate. 

Elon Musk is taking his battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to the highest court in the country. Attorney Alex Spiro has confirmed that Musk will ask the Supreme Court to decide whether the SEC went too far with a consent decree determining what Musk can say about Tesla's financials on Twitter (now X). He's challenging a May 15th appeals court decision dismissing allegations the SEC abused the decree to harass him with investigations over Twitter usage.

The new appeal comes a day after a judicial panel denied Musk's request that judges reexamine the case. The entrepreneur previously claimed he was pushed into the decree, and had to give up his right to contest the constitutionality of the SEC's terms if he wanted to pursue the eventual settlement. The truce saw a total of $40 million in fines between Musk and Tesla, and required that Musk both step down as board chairman and seek legal approval when posting about company financials.

Musk drew the SEC's attention in August 2018, when he tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private and had "funding secured" with "investor support." The deal never went through, and shareholders pinned ensuing losses on Musk's posts. The Commission sued Musk over the tweets, arguing that they could be considered fraud.

During a shareholder trial, Musk contended that people didn't necessarily believe or respond to his tweets the way you'd expect. He pointed to one example where Tesla's stock price surged despite a tweet saying the value was too high. At the same time, he acknowledged that he has ignored requests to stop tweeting over delicate subjects, such as when he accused a Thai cave rescue diver of being a "pedo guy."

There's no certainty the Supreme Court will take the case or overturn the outcome. Either way, the court's response should have a significant impact on Musk's social media posting, either forcing him to honor the SEC's decisions or giving him more flexibility in what he says online.

A three-judge panel with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Meta-owned Instagram after a pair of photographers accused the social media giant of copyright infringement, as reported by Gizmodo. The basic gist of the case was that Instagram violated copyrights by letting outside websites and publications embed images without the explicit consent of content creators.

The case dates back to 2016, when Time embedded an Instagram image of Hillary Clinton taken by photographer Matthew Brauer without asking for permission. In 2020, Buzzfeed did the same thing with a photo taken by Alexis Hunley of a Black Lives Matter protest. The pair of photogs sued Instagram, alleging that the social media company never asked third parties to obtain a license to embed copyrighted photos or videos, opening them up to a charge of secondary infringement.

The suit was originally initiated in California back in 2021, but a judge dismissed it on the grounds that the news outlets in question didn’t store the original image or even display a copy of it. Rather, it was just displaying what was already available via Instagram as an embed. The pair appealed this decision, which has now failed in federal court. The reasoning follows the same line as California’s decision, with judges agreeing that when a photo or video is embedded, no copy is made of the underlying content.

It’s worth noting, however, that the federal panel of judges did say that Hunley and Brauer raised “serious and well-argued” policy concerns regarding copyright holders’ ability to actually control and ultimately profit from their work. Instagram has also addressed the issue in convening years, adding an option in 2021 that allows users to make images unembeddable. This change came after the platform was lobbied by the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA).

This may not be the end of the case, as Reuters reports that the photographers can petition for a rehearing with a panel of 11 randomly-selected judges, though Brauer and Hunley haven’t addressed this course of action.

There’s also the underlying meaning of this court decision. All by itself, the ruling indicates that third parties, such as media publications, can embed photos and videos at will without ever asking the original content creator for permission. However, related cases have been popping up with differing outcomes, setting the stage for a higher-court showdown at some point.

For instance, a New York judge handed down a somewhat contradictory ruling back in 2018 when a photographer sued various publications after they embedded tweets with an original image of NFL legend Tom Brady. The judge sided with the photographer here, stating in her decision that “the fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party does not shield them from this result,” adding “nowhere does the Copyright Act suggest that possession of an image is necessary in order to display it. Indeed, the purpose and language of the Act support the opposite view.”

Spain has fined Amazon and Apple a total of 194.1 million euros (over $218 million) for antitrust violations. According toReuters, the penalties relate to a deal the companies made in 2018 that made Amazon an authorized Apple dealer but also included alleged anti-competitive clauses. “The two companies restricted without justification the number of sellers of Apple products on the Amazon website in Spain,” Spain’s antitrust regulator, Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC), said today.

The CNMC fined Apple 143.6 million euros and Amazon 50.5 million euros for their role in the alleged price-fixing conspiracy, based on contracts signed on October 31st, 2018. The agency said over 90 percent of existing vendors selling Apple products on Amazon were blocked from the storefront after the deal. In addition, Amazon allegedly restricted non-Spanish retailers in the European Union from reaching Spanish customers. The online retailer also supposedly diminished the allowed advertising from Apple’s competitors in consumer search results for Apple devices.

According to the CNMC, the result was higher online prices for Apple devices listed and sold in Spain.

Amazon and Apple denied that the deal hurt consumers in separate statements to Reuters. “We reject the suggestion made by CNMC that Amazon benefits from excluding sellers from its market place, as our business model hinges precisely on the success of the companies selling through Amazon,” an Amazon representative told the news outlet today. Similarly, Apple said the deal was about limiting counterfeit sales, adding that it had previously spent lots of money on hundreds of thousands of take-down notices for fake products.

The companies have two months to appeal the antitrust watchdog’s decision. Spokespeople for both firms told Reuters they plan to do just that.

Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and other current and former members of Tesla's board of directors will return $735 million to settle claims that they massively overpaid themselves, Reuters has reported. The deal wraps up a saga that started in 2020 stemming from a lawsuit filed by a police and firefighter retirement fund challenging stock options granted to Tesla's board starting in 2017. Directors also agreed not to receive compensation for 2021, 2022 and 2023, and change the way compensation is calculated. 

Tesla's current board includes Elon Musk, his brother Kimbal, Fox News mogul James Murdoch, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and former Tesla CTO JB Straubel. The case is separate from a lawsuit filed by shareholders against a $56 billion compensation package awarded to CEO Elon Musk.

The Police and Fire Retirement System of the City of Detroit accused Tesla's board of giving itself unfair and excessive compensation in the form of 11 million stock options between 2017 and 2020, saying it grossly exceeded norms for a corporate board. The $735 million settlement will be paid back to Tesla in what's called a "derivative lawsuit" — the largest ever awarded by Delaware's Court of Chancerty, according to Reuters. 

Tesla argued that stock options were used to ensure Director's incentives were aligned with investor goals. Tesla has yet to comment on the affair, but in court documents, said that it agreed to settle to eliminate the risk of future litigation. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is fighting a separate lawsuit to defend his $56 billion pay package. It was brought by shareholder Richard Tornette, who claimed that "the largest compensation grant in human history" was given to Musk, even though he didn't focus entirely on Tesla. In 2020, he received the first of 12 $700 million payments as part of that package. 

Biden administration officials can freely communicate with social media companies — for now. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has put a pause on Judge Terry A. Doughty's order that prohibits most federal officials from talking to companies like Meta about content. According to The New York Times, the three-judge panel has ruled for Doughty's preliminary injunction to be put aside "until further orders of the court."

If you'll recall, the state attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden and other top government officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci. They accused the current administration of pressuring social media companies to censor certain topics and remove content. The lawsuit, the Washington Post reports, is based on emails between the administration and social networks, wherein the former questioned the companies' handling of posts on their websites containing conservative claims on the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential elections, as well as anti-vaccine sentiments. 

Doughty, a Trump-appointed judge, said the plaintiffs "produced evidence of a massive effort" by the defendants "to suppress speech based on its content." He also wrote in his decision that if the allegations are true, "the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States history." His order prohibits federal agencies that include the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security from asking online platforms to take down content with "protected free speech." They could still, however, communicate with those entities for issues related to criminal activity, national security and election interference by foreign players. 

Conservatives have long believed that mainstream social media platforms are biased against right-wing ideologies. That had led to the launch of social networks associated with conservatives, such as Parler and Donald Trump's Truth Social. The state attorneys argued that federal officials crossed the line by threatening to take antitrust actions against social networks and to limit their Section 230 protections, which allow internet companies to moderate content on their platforms as they see fit. It's worth noting that former President Trump previously signed an executive order that sought to limit federal protections offered by Section 230 after Twitter fact-checked a false tweet he posted.

The Justice Department appealed Doughty's order the day after it was issued, arguing that it was too broad and could limit the government's ability to warn people about false information in times of emergency. Apparently, the administration has already felt its effects after its scheduled meeting with Meta to discuss strategies on how to counter foreign disinformation campaigns was cancelled. This stay will allow federal agencies to continue working with online platforms until the court could look further into the complaint. The appeals court has ordered for the case's oral arguments to be expedited so a final decision could be reached in the near future. 

Twitter — or more precisely, its parent company X Corp. — has sued four John Does who have allegedly "engaged in widespread unlawful scraping of data" from the website. They were described as "unknown persons or entities" in the lawsuit, which only mentioned their IP addresses. The lawsuit accused them of flooding Twitter with automated requests far exceeding "what any single individual could send to a server in a given period" aimed at scraping data. In a response to a tweet about the lawsuit, Elon Musk said these entities tried to scrape the entirety of Twitter in a short period of time and blamed them for the rate limits the website implemented earlier this month.

Musk announced in early July that the website was putting a strict cap on how many tweets users can read each day "to address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation." Unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts a day, while verified (and, hence, paid) accounts were allowed to see 6,000 tweets. The defendants for this lawsuit were apparently to blame for those limits. "These requests have severely taxed X Corp.’s servers and impaired the user experience for millions of X Corp.’s customers," the company wrote in its complaint. 

X Corp. also described the defendants' activities in the lawsuit as "unlawfully scraping data associated with Texas residents." But as CNBC notes, the US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruled in 2022 that the scraping of data that's publicly available online doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). It was a landmark ruling that brought a long-running lawsuit by LinkedIn to a close. The business-focused social media platform filed a complaint in an attempt to block its rival companies from scraping information visible on users' public profiles.

"Data scraping companies profit off the innovation of companies like X Corp. while harming X Corp. and compromising user data," the company also said in its lawsuit. Twitter is now seeking $1 million in damages to make up for the defendants' actions.