Suing unauthorized movie sharers, cont’d

“In the past five months, Virginia-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver has filed suits against thousands of individuals accused of illegally downloading independent films—an operation that could yield the firm and its clients more than $19 million in damages.” Doing business as U.S. Copyright Group, the firm subpoenas ISPs to obtain IP addresses of illegal sharers “and threatens to sue each person for $150,000 unless they agree to a $1,500 to $2,500 settlement fee.” [ABA Journal] Earlier here, etc.

Claim: Citibank fired me for being too attractive

Debrahlee Lorenzana of Queens, N.Y. says managers at Citibank considered her turtlenecks and tailored pencil skirts “too distracting” and asked her to stop wearing them. When she said that other employees wore similar garb, per her court papers, she was told that wasn’t relevant “as their general unattractiveness rendered moot their sartorial choices, unlike plaintiff.” [NY Post] More: Ted at PoL citing earlier coverage of Lorenzana’s lawyer in this space; Above the Law.

Drop-side crib ban: a regulatory taking?

Reader Chaim Gordon, a Georgetown 2L and former clerk with the Institute for Justice, cc’d us on an excerpted email to call our attention to

… a potential rule by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) or legislation by congress (S. 3400, H.R. 5386), see, e.g. (PDF), banning “the sale, manufacture, distribution, and use in public facilities of drop-side cribs.” As a parent, I feel violated (not really, because I own two such cribs already), and as a multiple-drop-side-crib-owner, I feel robbed.

I have been following this story for over a year now, and it seems to me that this rule/legislation is likely to implemented (I think that a rule is more likely than a bill). Originally, I thought that this ban was an effort by the crib manufacturers to reduce potential liability without losing market share by way of voluntary action. I now think that something more sinister is at work here. I now think that the manufacturers want to increase demand for their product by taking a large portion of the used-crib market/family-gift competition out of the picture. (Drop-side cribs used to comprise around 50% of the new crib market, and now, because of CPSC warnings and voluntary measures, that percentage has dropped to around 20%.) This of course comes at the expense of the innocent parents who may have been counting on selling their used cribs or giving their used cribs to family members (and at the expense of parents who will have to pay more for a used/new crib). Personally, I have never heard of a regulation that limited the rights of consumers to resell (or give away) their legitimately purchased, but now considered deficient, product (consider used cars without airbags).

Read On…