1. A Moment of Laughter at the Supreme Court
There are moments in the Supreme Court, rare and precious, when the heavy marble walls of the courtroom seem to melt away and the justices become less like demigods of the law and more like a roomful of very smart, slightly sarcastic people trying to figure out a genuinely confusing problem. That happened on Wednesday during oral arguments in Salazar v. Paramount Global, a case that sounds painfully technical on paper but actually touches on something we all do every day: watching videos online while companies quietly track our every click. The courtroom erupted in laughter after Paul Clement, the lawyer representing Paramount Global, made a remark so candidly self-aware that even Chief Justice John Roberts couldn’t resist a comeback. Clement had been offering a series of hypotheticals to argue that a company like Chick-fil-A, which might have a video playing on its website, shouldn’t be considered a “video tape service provider” just because of that. Chief Justice Roberts gently pushed back, suggesting that Clement was cherry-picking easy examples. Clement, with a perfectly timed grin, admitted that it was indeed his “job to focus on” the easy ones. The room laughed. Roberts shot back that he thought the lawyer’s job was to tackle the hard ones, “at least for me.” Clement’s reply—that he wasn’t sure there were that many hard hypotheticals—was both a legal argument and a moment of pure human levity. But beneath the laughter lies a serious and consequential question about privacy in the digital age, a question that could determine whether a 1988 law written for a world of VHS tapes and video rental stores can protect you from Facebook knowing exactly what you watch today.
2. The Man, the Website, and the Video Privacy Protection Act
The case began with a man named Michael Salazar, who did something entirely ordinary: he visited 247Sports.com, a website dedicated to sports news and analysis, signed up for a newsletter, and watched videos on the site while logged into his Facebook account. What he didn’t expect was that his viewing history would be shared with Facebook, which then used that information to serve him targeted advertisements. Salazar wasn’t happy about it. He sued Paramount Global, which owns 247Sports.com, claiming the company violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, or VPPA. That law, passed in a pre-internet era, was designed to stop video rental stores from leaking the titles of movies their customers rented. It prohibits video tape service providers from disclosing personally identifiable information and viewing habits without consent. Salazar’s argument is straightforward: he subscribed to the website’s newsletter, and through that subscription he watched videos. Under the VPPA, a “consumer” is someone who “rents, purchases, or subscribes to goods or services from a video tape service provider.” He says that’s exactly what he did. Paramount, however, sees it differently. The company argues that Salazar subscribed only to a newsletter, not to any audiovisual content. In other words, he wasn’t a video customer; he was a newsletter subscriber who happened to watch some videos. A lower court sided with Paramount, ruling that Salazar needed to subscribe specifically to audiovisual materials. But other courts, looking at nearly identical facts, have reached the opposite conclusion, creating a split that pushed the Supreme Court to step in. The precise question before the justices is whether the phrase “goods or services from a video tape service provider” refers to all the provider’s goods and services or only its audiovisual ones. That might sound like a narrow legal distinction, but its answer will shape how hundreds of websites handle your personal data.
3. Two Very Different Visions of the Law
During oral arguments, the two sides painted radically different pictures of what the VPPA should mean in 2026. Paul Clement, arguing for Paramount, accused the plaintiff of trying to “repurpose the statute” to sweep in people who have never actually rented, purchased, or subscribed to a video. He leaned heavily on common sense. If you refer to “goods or services from a medical service provider,” he argued, you probably don’t mean the hospital cafeteria’s coffee or the valet parking. Similarly, he said, “one does not logically refer to chicken sandwiches or dog bandanas” when talking about a video tape service provider. His point was that the law should be read with an eye toward its core purpose: protecting people who are in the business of consuming video content, not every person who ever clicked play on a webpage. He also pointed out that most websites today automatically play videos the moment you open them, often without any action on your part. If that alone makes a website a video tape service provider, then nearly every company with a website would be subject to the VPPA. That, he argued, would be a massive and unintended expansion of a law aimed at a very specific problem. Joshua Hammack, the attorney representing Salazar, offered a very different reading. He argued that Paramount was asking the Court to impose an “audiovisual limitation” on the phrase “goods or services” that Congress deliberately chose not to include. When Congress wrote the law, it knew exactly where to put such limits. It defined “video tape service provider” in a specific way. It defined “personally identifiable information” in a specific way. But in the definition of “consumer,” it simply said “goods or services” without any qualification. Hammack argued that this choice was “dispositive.” He also pushed back on the slippery slope concern, saying that not every website that happens to host a video is a video tape service provider. You have to actually be in the business of providing videos. And 247Sports.com, in his view, absolutely is.
4. A Law Born from a Scandal and a Videotape List
To understand why this case matters so much, it helps to remember where the VPPA came from. The year was 1987. Judge Robert Bork, a brilliant and controversial conservative, had just been nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court. During his confirmation hearings, a Washington City Paper reporter got a hold of a list of 146 movies that Bork and his family had rented from a local video store. The clerk who leaked the list thought it would be interesting to see what a Supreme Court nominee watched in his free time. It turned out Bork liked classic films, British comedies, and a fair number of Cary Grant movies. But the leak itself ignited a bipartisan firestorm. Democrats and Republicans were horrified that something as private as a person’s movie rentals could be published in a newspaper. Within months, Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, a law that made it illegal for video tape service providers to disclose a customer’s viewing history without consent. It was a rare moment of near-universal agreement that privacy was worth protecting, even if the medium seemed trivial. The law was signed in 1988, the same year the first version of the internet was just starting to connect universities and research labs. No one in Congress could have imagined a world where a sports website would share a user’s viewing habits with a social media giant for the purpose of targeted advertising. Yet here we are. The law, with its clunky references to “video tape service providers” and “subscriber” and “consumer,” is now being asked to govern a digital landscape that moves at the speed of light. The challenge for the Supreme Court is to honor the law’s original spirit—protecting ordinary people from having their private viewing habits exposed—without stretching its words so far that they lose all meaning.
5. The Justices Wrestle with the Modern World
What made Wednesday’s arguments so compelling was the way the justices seemed to genuinely struggle with the collision between an old law and a new world. Chief Justice Roberts, in particular, seemed skeptical of the simple hypotheticals that Clement was offering. Yes, Chick-fil-A is obviously not a video store. But what about a company that sells a little bit of everything, including video content? “There are a lot of stores that sell a lot of different things, including the type of videos that we’re talking about,” Roberts said. He pressed Clement to move beyond the easy examples and confront the messy reality of modern commerce. Clement’s response—that it was his job to focus on easy hypotheticals—drew laughter, but he also made a deeper point. He argued that the standard should be whether a company is genuinely in the business of providing video services, not whether it merely offers some videos as a side feature. If a website’s primary purpose is sports news, and it just happens to have a video player embedded in the page, it shouldn’t be treated the same as Blockbuster or Netflix. Hammack, on the other hand, argued that this is exactly the kind of distinction Congress did not make. The law defines a video tape service provider as any person who, “in the ordinary course of business,” rents, sells, or delivers pre-recorded video cassettes or similar audiovisual materials. That doesn’t mean a company has to sell only videos. It just means that providing videos is a regular part of what they do. The justices probed both arguments with questions about newsletters, subscriptions, cookies, and the difference between watching a video for free and paying for access. They seemed aware that their ruling could have enormous consequences for digital privacy litigation, which has exploded in recent years as plaintiffs have used the VPPA to sue companies ranging from Fox News to the NBA to Paramount over sharing user data with Facebook and other third parties.
6. What Happens Next and Why You Should Care
At the end of the day, the Supreme Court will have to write a ruling that makes sense for both the law and the internet. A decision in Salazar v. Paramount Global is expected by the end of the Court’s current term, likely no later than June 2027. That might seem like a long way off, but the question is worth waiting for. If the Court rules in favor of Salazar, it could open the floodgates to privacy lawsuits against companies that have video content on their websites, even if that content is not the main focus of the business. It would mean that a person who subscribes to a newsletter and watches a few videos while logged into Facebook could sue if their viewing data is shared without consent. It would send a powerful message that old privacy laws can be adapted to protect modern consumers. If the Court rules in favor of Paramount, it would narrow the law significantly, requiring plaintiffs to show that they specifically subscribed to or paid for audiovisual content. That could make it much harder for ordinary internet users to sue companies that track their viewing habits. But beyond the legal technicalities, this case is about something deeply human. It’s about the feeling of being watched, of knowing that the videos you watch in the privacy of your own home—or in the quiet corner of your phone—are being recorded, analyzed, and sold to advertisers without your knowledge. The VPPA was born out of outrage over a leaked list of movie rentals. The Supreme Court now has to decide whether that outrage still matters in a world where data is the currency of the internet. The justices laughed on Wednesday, but the decision they make will be no joke. It will shape the balance between privacy and profit for years to come, and it will tell us whether the law can keep pace with the technology that has transformed our lives. In the meantime, millions of Americans will keep scrolling, keep watching, and keep wondering just who is on the other side of the screen, taking notes.
