Here’s another experiment: use the comments section to suggest a legal case or news story you think belongs on this site. A few ground rules:
* Only stories with live links, please. No stories that have happened to you or a friend personally, no matter how compelling, unless you can point to someone’s already-published writing or reportage on it.
* It doesn’t have to be something that just happened, but if it’s not new, do check our archives to see whether we’ve already covered it. Here’s a stored Google search to start you off.
* As usual, comments are held for review, along the lines of a letters to the editor section.
5 Comments
I nominate the Sawkins vs Hyperion case from the UK.
(news story)
Small record company hires musical historian to transcribe original 17th century musical scores into modern notation. Historian later sues for royalties, claiming his work entitled him to claim original copyright on the scores. Record company eventually loses, and has pay small amount to historian (according to UK satirical magazine Private Eye, about £5.000)
Legal bill from plaintiff’s lawyers? £758.000
Mary Lindor sued by RIAA even though she’s never owned a computer:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/02/03/0313250.shtml
You have to fight for your fundamental rights:
Denmark’s government ruled in 2001 that institutionalized citizens have the right to have sex, and that caregivers must even take them to visit prostitutes. (Prostitution is legal in Denmark.) Mr. Torben Vegener Hansen, 59, who has cerebral palsy and lives at home on government assistance, is challenging the government also to pay for prostitutes to make house calls, claiming that he is unable to have sex manually because of his illness and must be accorded this ‘human right’ by a service similar to the government’s meals-on-wheels program.
The streets of the United States may not be paved with gold, but the America culture of complaint can be awfully lucrative.
Two Salvadoran illegal immigrants found themselves confronted in 2003, upon making their way informally into the United States, by pistol-wielding Casey Nethercott..
A Cochise County judge has since awarded the pair ownership of Mr. Nethercott’s 70 acre ranch near Bisbee, Arizona, as the result of the confrontation.
http://neveryetmelted.com/?p=541
Here’s a free-speech- chilling case from the U.K. that’s at least had one positive result:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/4672792.stm
Hard-right political activist Nick Griffin was apparently covertly filmed – prior to the Tube bombings – warning of Muslim violence. Never mind that it actually came true. He was tried by the Crown for “stirring up racial hatred.” I have not seen Big Media stateside covering this trial, though I haven’t been checking everywhere.