Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
From the monthly archives:
Many are lost in a copyright maze: “The American rules infuriate scholars, archivists, musicians and the conservationists who preserve fragile recordings. They fret that by the time the recordings become available, many will be beyond salvation.” [The Economist] “A Trove of Historic Jazz Recordings has Found a Home in Harlem, But You Can’t Hear Them” [Steven Seidenberg, ABA Journal]
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The Senate Judiciary Committee has unanimously approved S. 978, a bill that would raise from a misdemeanor to a felony the unauthorized performance or streaming of a copyrighted work when the infringement takes place at least ten times and either reaps $2,500 or more in revenue, or avoids the payment of license fees whose fair market value would exceed $5,000. Mike Masnick at TechDirt thinks the bill could wind up authorizing the jailing of some persons who embed YouTube videos or post videos of themselves lip-synching hit tunes; CopyHype defends the bill and dismisses the concerns as overblown.
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The EPA may face escalating pressure to un-ban some pesticides effective against bedbugs [Michelle Minton, CEI]
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Disabled-rights lawyers said the suit against the news network “is the first in the nation to seek equal treatment for the deaf from a commercial content provider on the Internet.” Expect many others to follow. [Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle]
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Evil HR Lady and Ted Frank (more here) note some ambitious contentions in a lawsuit against Bayer Healthcare.
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Yet another lawsuit against a Manhattan bar filed by a patron who fell off its mechanical bull [New York Post]
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Individual liberty, free markets, and peace: the world's premier libertarian think tank. Publishes Cato at Liberty, where I blog on contemporary policy issues.