A bankruptcy judge has dismissed a purported human-rights theory outré enough to have drawn interest from both the United Nations and American legal academia, saying the law guarantees no right to draw water from the Detroit municipal system for free or at rates dependent on ability to pay [Detroit News; Aaron Renn/City Journal and more]
Intellectual property roundup
- “Our mangled patent system,” Cato podcast [with Eli Dourado of the Mercatus Center] Critique of federal circuit [Dourado at Cato Unbound]
- Since SCOTUS’s June decision in Alice v. CLS Bank, many courts have struck down software patents as too-abstract [Timothy Lee, Vox]
- Iqbal-Twombly principles as remedy for patent trollery? [Daniel Fisher]
- ISP resists mass copyright enforcement enterprise’s demand for customer list [DSL Reports]
- Win for Personal Audio in E.D. Tex.: “Jury finds CBS infringes podcasting patent, awards $1.3 million” [ArsTechnica]
- “Premier League Uses Copyright To Pull Down YouTube Video Of Professor Advocating For Stronger Copyright For Premier League” [Mike Masnick, Techdirt]
- A new leaf? “Silicon Valley’s Most Hated Patent Troll Stops Suing and Starts Making” [Business Week]
Three more courtroom defeats for EEOC
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is used to getting its way since most employers would rather settle rather than face the expense and publicity risk of litigating against it. But sometimes, as I note in my new post at Cato, judges get a close look at just how weak the commission’s position is. And then…
More from Bob in comments: “Here’s the problem… major employers have made changes to their severance agreements to comport with the EEOC’s position in CVS. They EEOC has lost the case and still gotten the change they wanted. That’s all they care about. Much like the new Pregnancy Discrimination Act guidance which turns prior guidance and case law on its head. Major employers have already reacted in order to avoid costly litigation though the chances of a neutral court agreeing with the guidance are pretty low.”
“Woman suing Disney, claims ‘Frozen’ is my life story”
“…a list of motifs Tanikumi claims were taken from her book like: two sisters, open doors or gates, and a moon setting….A Disney spokeswoman responded to her claim, saying, ‘This is beyond ridiculous, she needs to let it go.'” [WAFF]
Labor and employment roundup
- Court dismisses case against CVS in which EEOC had sought to redefine standard severance confidentiality provisions as unlawful retaliation [Jon Hyman, Daniel Schwartz, earlier here and here]
- Temp-agency jobs brought in-house: “The NLRB Forces CNN to Rehire Workers Terminated Over a Decade Ago” [Alex Bolt, Workplace Choice]
- “NLRB may encourage your employees to file OSHA, FLSA claims too” [Eric B. Meyer, Employer Handbook] “You’re NOT Paranoid — The Agencies ARE Ganging Up” [Dabney Ware, Foley & Lardner]
- “The U.S. Department of Labor claims it can’t come up with the cash to fully reimburse Oregon farmers for the $220,000 it unlawfully coerced from them.” [Capital Press, Oregon] House committee flays department over use of “hot goods” orders to arm-twist growers of perishables on labor issues [committee, CQ via Dunn Carney, The Grower]
- Sauce for gander: if left can push labor ordinances at county and municipal level, supporters of right-to-work laws might do the same thing [James Sherk and Andrew Kloster, Heritage]
- “I wonder how large the overlap is between people who want Ray Rice banished from NFL forever and those who want to ‘ban the box'” — @Toirtap
- Jacob Huebert on the Harris v. Quinn decision [new edition of Cato Supreme Court Review]
“Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity…”
California regulates college sex, in a law just signed by Gov. Brown and applying to campuses that accept state money. Key passages:
It is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. … Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.
Earlier here. More: K.C. Johnson on the very bad coverage in the New York Times, and less bad coverage in The Nation. And it’s totally reassuring that a Slate writer who won fame insisting on the guilt of the Duke lacrosse guys is being cited as an authority on why there’s no need to worry about the new California law.
Texas “Law Hawk”
More tasteful advertising, this time for a Fort Worth practitioner.
Free speech roundup
- Coverage of Cato Constitution Day panel on First Amendment with Nadine Strossen, P.J. O’Rourke, Eric Rassbach, Ilya Shapiro [Concurring Opinions] And First-Amendment-oriented articles in the latest Cato Supreme Court Review: Judge David Sentelle on freedom of speech as liberty for all and not just for the organized press, Allen Dickerson on McCutcheon v. FEC, Ilya Shapiro on SBA List v. Driehaus, and Trevor Burrus on protest buffer zones;
- Eric Holder “the worst Attorney General on press freedom issues in a generation, possibly since Richard Nixon’s John Mitchell” [Trevor Timm]
- “7 Things Cracked Got Wrong About Free Speech” [Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, who has a new short book out entitled “Freedom From Speech“]
- As ACLU recognizes, Arizona law purportedly banning revenge porn would do more than that [Masnick, Popehat, Greenfield, Sullum/Reason]
- Critical overview of “media reform” movement led by wildly misnamed pressure group Free Press [Barbara Joanna Lucas, Capital Research Center]
- In lawsuits against Yelp arising from bad reviews, courts have not been impressed by theory that the service extorts reviewed businesses [Paul Alan Levy; a restaurateur upset at Yelp strikes back in a different way]
- Proposal to make scientific misconduct a crime “would seem to raise serious First Amendment problems” [Howard Wasserman]
Spotting their adversaries
Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz on the significance of the IRS having targeted for unfavorable scrutiny “organizations involved in….educating on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” [Volokh Conspiracy] “Presidents have always sought to push against the constitutional limits of their power; but never have they targeted those who merely teach about such limits.”
As always, reducing liberty is the answer
A Connecticut state commission charged with coming up with policy recommendations after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre is considering a draft proposal that would slap new regulations on homeschooling families. “Parents who home-school children with significant emotional, social or behavioral problems would have to file progress reports prepared by special education program teams” under the scheme. [Connecticut Post]