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On October 14, 2026, the justices spent nearly 90 minutes poking at a 1988 statute written for VHS rental records and asking, in essence, whether it still has anything useful to say about the quiet handoff of video-viewing data from a sports website to Meta.
The case is Salazar v. Paramount Global. Michael Salazar signed up for a free email newsletter from 247Sports.com, a Paramount-owned college sports recruiting site. While logged into Facebook, he watched videos on the site. Paramount had embedded Meta’s tracking Pixel, which transmitted information linking his Facebook ID to the videos he viewed—without the kind of consent the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) requires. He sued in Nashville federal court seeking the statute’s $2,500 statutory damages per person, plus punitive damages and fees, on behalf of a class.
District Judge Eli Richardson dismissed the case. So did a divided Sixth Circuit. Both concluded Salazar was not a “consumer” under the VPPA because his newsletter subscription was not itself audiovisual content. The statute defines a consumer as a “renter, purchaser, or subscriber of goods or services from a video tape service provider.” The lower courts read “goods or services” as limited to audiovisual ones. Salazar petitioned the Supreme Court, which granted review on January 26, 2026, to resolve a circuit split. Argument was set for October 14, 2026. A decision is expected by the end of the current term, no later than summer 2027.
Why This Case Is the One That Matters
The VPPA is no longer a relic. Over the past several years plaintiffs have filed waves of class actions against websites that embed the Meta Pixel (or similar tools) on pages that contain video. The theory is simple: the pixel reports the video URL or title along with an identifier (often a Facebook ID cookie) to Meta. That, plaintiffs say, is a knowing disclosure of “personally identifiable information” concerning a consumer, forbidden unless the company obtained the VPPA’s specific, separate written consent.
Settlements have already been substantial. Forbes resolved a VPPA pixel case for $7.5 million (with individual claims up to $15). FloSports settled for $2.625 million. Patreon settled for $7.25 million. NBA Top Shot resolved related claims for roughly $7 million. Formula 1 settled for $5.5 million. These are not outlier numbers; the $2,500-per-person statutory damages, multiplied across large subscriber or visitor classes, create real exposure. Paramount’s counsel told the Court this single case could theoretically reach $250 million given the size of the 247Sports newsletter list.
The Meta Pixel sits on a large fraction of websites, including many of the largest companies. A broad reading of who counts as a “consumer” therefore reaches far beyond traditional video providers. At the same time, other circuits have already limited the statute in different ways. The Second Circuit, in Solomon v. Flipps Media and a later case against NBCUniversal, applied an “ordinary person” test to personally identifiable information: raw technical data that an ordinary person cannot decipher does not count as PII. Courts have also rejected claims against companies whose video is incidental to their business—Chick-fil-A, certain movie theaters, and others have successfully argued they are not “video tape service providers” at all.
The Circuit Split the Court Stepped Into
The same plaintiff, Michael Salazar, produced opposite results in two circuits. In Salazar v. NBA, the Second Circuit held in October 2024 that signing up for a free newsletter and exchanging an email address and other identifiers was enough to make him a “subscriber of goods or services.” The court saw no audiovisual limitation in the consumer definition and treated the NBA as a video tape service provider even though video is not its only business. The Seventh Circuit reached a similar broad conclusion. The Sixth Circuit (and later the D.C. Circuit in a related newsletter case) went the other way, requiring the goods or services themselves to be audiovisual.
That is the narrow question before the Supreme Court: does “goods or services from a video tape service provider” mean any goods or services the company offers, or only its audiovisual ones? The rest of the statute’s machinery—whether Paramount is a video tape service provider at all, and whether the Pixel transmission is personally identifiable information—is not formally presented. Several justices nonetheless wandered into those issues.
What the Justices Actually Asked
Justice Clarence Thomas opened by noting that the statute covers entities that rent, sell, or deliver “prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audiovisual materials.” He wondered how that reaches streamed internet video and suggested that streaming looks more like ordinary television (historically outside the VPPA) than picking up a tape at Blockbuster. Justice Samuel Alito made the same point more bluntly: the law is “based on the technology of the 1980s,” and watching a video on a website is not “similar” to walking into a video store for a VHS tape. Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed the same definition, unpersuaded by the argument that 247Sports has a “profit motive” when it shows videos—every commercial website has a profit motive, she noted, including a Nordstrom page that shows a model wearing shoes.
Chief Justice John Roberts, quieter than usual, invoked a classic Stephen Breyer hypothetical about a “no pets in the park” sign and a man with a pet snail in his pocket. The point was purpose: the VPPA was aimed at protecting people’s video-viewing histories from disclosure, not at every commercial relationship a video-providing company happens to have.
On the other side, Justice Elena Kagan described the case as potentially “paradigmatic.” She sketched a judge who watches a lot of women’s wrestling videos on a sports site; disclosure of that history could be embarrassing. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Paramount’s lawyer, Paul Clement, that he had a “line-drawing problem.” The statute’s core is the knowing disclosure of personally identifying video information without consent; making liability turn on “what particular item the consumer purchased” struck her as arbitrary.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh focused on the floodgates concern. Plaintiff’s counsel pointed to district court decisions holding that companies like Chick-fil-A are not video tape service providers. Kavanaugh noted that even if the Court adopts a broad consumer definition, Paramount could still win later on the provider and PII questions. He and Kagan both observed that companies have a straightforward fix: obtain the consent the statute already contemplates.
A Short Timeline
- 1987–1988: During Robert Bork’s Supreme Court confirmation, a journalist published the list of videos Bork had rented. Congress responded with the VPPA, signed by President Reagan in November 1988. It bars a video tape service provider from knowingly disclosing a consumer’s personally identifiable information (including video-viewing history) without the required consent and provides $2,500 statutory damages.
- 2013: Congress amended the law (the so-called Netflix amendment) to allow electronic consent that lasts up to two years for social sharing.
- 2022: Salazar files the Paramount case in the Middle District of Tennessee (September) and a parallel case against the NBA in the Southern District of New York.
- 2023: District court dismisses the Paramount case on the consumer definition.
- April 2025: Sixth Circuit affirms (divided).
- October 2024: Second Circuit reverses the dismissal in the NBA case, adopting the broad reading of “consumer.”
- October 10, 2025: Salazar files cert petition.
- January 26, 2026: Supreme Court grants certiorari.
- April–July 2026: Merits briefing; numerous amicus briefs from media, tech, retail, and privacy groups.
- October 14, 2026: Oral argument.
- Expected by June/July 2027: Decision.
What Comes Next
The Court does not have to decide the entire modern reach of the VPPA. A ruling that newsletter subscribers can be “consumers” would send the case back for further litigation on whether Paramount is a video tape service provider and whether the Pixel data counts as personally identifiable information. A ruling the other way would narrow a significant category of pixel suits involving free newsletters and similar non-video relationships.
Either outcome will be watched closely by publishers, sports sites, retailers, and anyone else who shows video and uses common tracking tools. The statute’s consent provision remains available; several justices treated it as a practical off-ramp. For the moment, the 38-year-old law written to keep a Supreme Court nominee’s movie rentals private is forcing a fresh argument about what privacy looks like when the video store is a website and the disclosure is a silent pixel.
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