- Anonymous but mostly plausible Q & A of what went wrong on Wall Street [Rowley/Yahoo Finance] #
- Most PR people still approach bloggers in clueless way [Kevin O’Keefe; more background, PoL; also see Greenfield] #
- Glitnir and Kaupthing sound like Wagnerian trolls, but went on a scarier rampage as Icelandic banks [UK Independent] #
- Not a misprint & no zeros missing: median price of house or condo sold last month in Detroit was $9,250 [Detroit Free Press] #
Archive for October, 2008
Election-season YouTube takedowns
They seem now to be part of the accepted armament of campaign law. “Of course the McCain-Palin team could counter-notify, but the DMCA’s 10-14 business day waiting period makes that option next to useless, when ’10 days can be a lifetime in a political campaign.'” (Seltzer/Citizen Media Law, Levy/CL&P; but see Ron Coleman, Oct. 15: process need not be as slow as waiting period implies).
Related: Does trademark law allow candidates to suppress some types of opposition keyword advertising, as when candidates put up negative ads keyed to each others’ names? [Levy/CL&P]
“Illinois couple surprised to get a $9 million parking ticket”
Wouldn’t you have been too? Data entry was blamed. “Do not send cash,” the ticket advised. (Obscure Store).
Palsgraf at the strip club
The exotic dancer’s shoe flew off during her pole dance, according to Charles Privette, who says he was hit both by the shoe itself and by glass from a broken mirror at the Booby Trap in Pompano Beach, Fla. The club’s manager quoted a paramedic: “I can’t believe you even called us for this!” (Fort Mill Times, Sun-Sentinel, Obscure Store, TortsProf). The title refers to an accident case from 1928, familiar to all law students, in which a chain of unlikely events led to a woman’s injury on a train platform.
“Someone dropped in an extra zero, right?”
Ron Coleman is still puzzling over the size of the legal fees (at least $93 million) in the Mattel/MGA Bratz doll trademark litigation (Oct. 16).
Notable debate moment
“McCain challenged Obama on where he’s broken with his party, and Obama offered some specifics: A vote for tort reform, ‘which wasn’t very popular with trial lawyers’ and which divided Democrats, and support for charter schools and clean coal technology.” (Ben Smith, The Politico, Oct. 15).
Co-blogger Ted (who, it should be noted, is actively supporting McCain this fall) has written on Obama’s legal reform votes here and here.
Bogus Olympic ticket scam
The (genuine) International Olympic Committee and other defendants should be made to pay, according to Texas-based class-action lawyer, Jim Moriarty, who wants “millions of dollars” for 400 victims worldwide. “The lawyer alleges the IOC was aware beijingticketing.com was operating with trademarked Olympic symbols emblazoned on the site,” but failed to act speedily enough or effectively in getting the impostor site shut down. (“Olympic ticket scam: class action”, Sydney Morning Herald, Sept. 23).
McCain and Palin guilty of “criminal incitement”?
[Cross-posted from Point of Law]. I’ve got a new piece just up at City Journal in which I examine last week’s boomlet of interest around the liberal blogosphere in the notion that by riling up campaign crowds about Obama’s links to Bill Ayers, John McCain and (especially) Sarah Palin have engaged in “incitement to violence” of a “borderline criminal” nature that perhaps should even draw the attention of the Secret Service or FBI. (For examples of this boomlet, look among the several hundred occurrences of “Palin + incite” at Technorati between October 7 and 13; I also include a sampling as links in my piece). The article originated in a short post at Point of Law that City Journal asked me to expand into a longer treatment. I must say I find it fascinating that many bloggers, Huffington Post writers, etc. could so casually jettison the hard-won victories of free-speech liberalism, which fought long and hard against “incitement” theories by which criminal penalties might be applied to inflammatory speech. The idea of exposing your opponents to investigation or even arrest because you don’t approve of the contents of their speeches doesn’t seem like a particularly liberal one to me.
More: Stephen Bainbridge takes note.
Update: “Chambers vs. God lawsuit thrown out”
“Lawyers Hope Bailout Bill ‘a Full Employment Act’ for Law Firms”
Snuggling in under the TARP. (Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal, Oct. 15).