From the US Supreme Court today, six cases to close out the term:
Bad day for filesharers out there. The Court says that distribution of the mean of copyright infringement, with intent to foster copyright infringement is actionable, and specifically, Grokster is guilty:
Three features of the evidence of intent are particularly notable. First, each of the respondents showed itself to be aiming to satisfy a known source of demand for copyright infringement, the market comprising former Napster users. Respondents. efforts to supply services to former Napster users indicate a principal, if not exclusive, intent to bring about infringement. Second, neither respondent attempted to develop filtering tools or other mechanisms to diminish the infringing activity using their software. While the Ninth Circuit treated that failure as irrelevant because respondents lacked an independent duty to monitor their users. activity, this evidence underscores their intentional facilitation of their users. infringement. Third, respondents make money by selling advertising space, then by directing ads to the screens of computers employing their software. The more their software is used, the more ads are sent out and the greater the advertising revenue. Since the extent of the software.s use determines the gain to the distributors, the commercial sense of their enterprise turns on high-volume use, which the record shows is infringing. This evidence alone would not justify an inference of unlawful intent, but its import is clear in the entire record .
The second monument case, and less helpful than Van Orden, below as it basically says that the County’s new “secular” reason for posting the 10 Commandments is simply not credible in light of its previous, non-secular, justification. Basically, the majority sees this switch in justification as alitigation strategy, and not a credible step away from past endorsement of the religious tenets.
The Court slaps down the 6th Circuit for standing in the way of Tennessee’s efforts to impose the death penalty on Mr. Thompson. The 6th Circuit delayed finalizing its order after the Supreme Court denied cert. for 5 months.
Dad takes kids. Mom has restraining order “preventing” him from doing these. She calls the cops and gets no action from them. Dad kills the kids. Is the city responsible? No, although police have mandates to act, actual service from the police is an “entitlement” for us taxpayers, not a right.
This is the Texas 10 Commandments case, and it leaves the field somewhat muddy as there is a 4 judge plurality (Rehnquist, Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy) with Breyer concurring in the result (the monument can stay), but not the method used to reach it. The 4 judge plurality finds that the monument in question, set out among other historical monuments, merely reflects the long history in this country of drawing from and citing to religious tenets in governance. So the test employed here is sort of, well we’ve endorsed religion all along, so now we can continue to cite religious principles, calling it history, instead of endorsement. But the new test is only to be applied for monuments in a historical context, with the plurality doing enough hair splitting to save prior cases on posting the 10 Commandments in schools.
This entry was posted
on Monday, June 27th, 2005 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Indianalaw.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
