Supreme Court Justices Laughed When Paramount’s Lawyer Said It Was His Job to Focus on Easy Examples
by Jerome London · Thought CatalogUpdated 6 minutes ago, October 16, 2026
The moment came during oral argument in Salazar v. In Paramount Global, the question is how the internet fits with the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. Paramount’s attorney, Paul Clement, kept reaching for easy examples to argue that a business with videos on its site isn’t necessarily in the business of providing video.
One was Chick-fil-A. “You don’t even have to click on anything, it just starts playing,” he said of the autoplay clip. “And that’s the way that most websites work these days.”
Chief Justice John Roberts wasn’t buying the cherry-picking. “You’ve picked some hypotheticals that are particularly helpful for you,” he said. “So I don’t know why we should focus just on the easy hypotheticals.”
That’s when Clement said it was his “job to focus on” the easy ones, and the courtroom laughed. Roberts shot back that he’d have thought the job was “to focus on the hard ones, at least for me.”
The underlying fight is narrow but consequential. Michael Salazar sued in federal court in Nashville, Tennessee, alleging Paramount violated the 1988 law by handing Facebook a record of the videos he watched on 247Sports.com without his consent. He’d signed up for the site’s newsletter, then used it to watch videos while logged into Facebook, which allegedly used that data to target ads at him.
Paramount says Salazar isn’t a protected “consumer” because he subscribed to a newsletter, not a video service, and a lower court agreed. The justices will decide whether the law’s definition covers all of a provider’s goods or services or only its audiovisual ones, with a ruling expected by the end of the term, likely no later than June 2027.
There’s a court tie to the 1988 statute itself. Congress enacted it after a video store clerk leaked a list of 146 movies that Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and his family had rented, during his confirmation hearings.
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