Posts tagged Justice
SEO Services Alert: Internet Marketing Blueprint Unveiled at ’12 AAJ Winter Meet – Justice News Flash
Sep 29th
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SEO Services Alert: Internet Marketing Blueprint Unveiled at '12 AAJ Winter Meet
Justice News Flash Phoenix, AZ When you design your house you need an architect; when you design your lawyer Internet marketing campaign you need an SEO architect who understands the online legal marketing industry. Cepac lawyer marketing consultants that are … |
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Why Aren’t Cameras Allowed in the U.S. Supreme Court? Ask Chief Justice Roberts
Jun 25th
Chief Justice John Roberts swept onto the U.S. Supreme Court as a camera-ready jurist with an air of modernity. But there’s one area where he has shown little willingness to adapt to the information age: allowing cameras that would let the public watch real time what happens inside the country’s highest court.
Advocates for open government have been pushing the Supreme Court for decades to reveal its work in progress to the public at large. And they have had successes. The court once squirreled away audio recordings in the National Archives, often long after the cases had been argued. Today, those recordings are posted to the Supreme Court website every Friday during argument sessions. But video has proven a step too far. With the court expected to release this week its decision on the constitutionality of the health care bill, Chairman Patrick Leahy and Ranking Member Chuck Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee are prodding Roberts to let cameras in.
“Their work should be as transparent as any other branch of government,” says Bruce Collins, general counsel of C-SPAN, which along with several dozen organizations also asked Roberts to air the health care decision. The court has not responded.
As the Supreme Court’s chief administrator, Roberts is the decider on the court’s operations. In his silence, he seems to be doing something for which he’d tear a lawyer to pieces: resting on assumptions.
One of the most frequently heard worries is that putting cameras inside the Supreme Court would turn the courtroom into a stage. But there are strong reasons to believe that the internal dynamics of the court would keep participants from behaving badly. Lyle Denniston has covered the Supreme Court for more than 50 years, lately for the closely watched SCOTUSblog. “A lawyer gets up in the Supreme Court and… knows that they have one task – that is, to persuade five people,” Denniston said in a C-SPAN interview. The audience is the nine folks in robes, and there’s a very good chance that the focus it takes to win over a majority is a more powerful force than the desire to make a flashy public showing.
And there’s a similar thing happening on the bench. During oral arguments, the justices are working to win over one another. Ironically, that might help to explain a phenomenon, noted in lower courts, where justices appear to become more conservative on camera. They seem to grow increasingly worried about protecting both collegiality and the court’s authority.
Several newer justices, for instance, have testified during their confirmation hearings that live Supreme Court footage seems like a pretty good idea. “I think it would be a great thing for the institution, and more important, I think it would be a great thing for the American people,” Elena Kagan testified during hers. Once on the court, though, by all appearances they refrain from rocking the boat. Stephen Breyer’s evolution sums up the trend. While chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, he volunteered his court for cameras. But after a decade on the Supreme Court, Breyer said that the justices are trustees of a “reputation of great importance so that government will work fairly in America… And not one of us wants to take a step that could undermine the courts as an institution.”
Breyer’s framing suggests a failure of imagination. The flourishing open government movement isn’t simply about peeling back the curtain on wrongdoing. Openness can be affirming, too.
And that raises the possibility that Roberts and company are actually damaging the court by closing it off. “By being somewhat remote from the popular culture,” C-SPAN’s Collins explains the argument (which he disagrees with, naturally), “they retain the dignity and therefore enhance the authority of the court.” Yet documentary footage provides fodder for dissections that remind us all that these opinions aren’t descended from the heavens. There’s public appetite for it, and in the digital age, there are the tools to do something with it. SCOTUSblog’s in-court live blog, for example, drew a reported 70,000 readers on Friday, when there was a chance that the court was going to issue the health care decision. (That prompted an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter to tweet, “One day we’ll tell our grandkids about how we were using Cover It Live [sic] to figure out what the Supreme Court is doing.”)
A less mysterious Supreme Court would be more tightly moored to American life as a whole, in the same way that Americans tend to hate Congress but approve of their congressperson.
If there’s something that Chief Justice Roberts has proven skilled at, it’s threading needles. Here, he has a chance to figure out a decision everyone can rally behind. Congress, for its part, lets C-SPAN’s cameras in but doesn’t allow for reaction shots. Roberts could get similarly creative, like stationing a camera behind the bench – good live-blogging material, bad source footage for “The Daily Show.”
Behind-the-bench shots might reveal bald spots. But it’s not such a bad thing for the public to be reminded actual humans are up on that bench.
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The Swift Hand of Justice Rebukes Myspace for Shattering the Sanctity of Privacy
May 9th
In a settlement announced yesterday by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the present owners of music-information-sharing service Myspace (now with a small “s”) agreed never to do again what it cannot really do now even if it wanted to: share its members’ personal identification with a parent company that runs a major advertising network.
Blast from the past
For those who don’t remember Myspace, much less this once-prominent case, we need to go back to 2008, before social networks were also platforms, and APIs were things that Microsoft got sued for not disclosing. In this era, the exchange of data between MySpace (then with a big “S”) and its parent company in 2008, Fox Interactive Media, took place without the use of extra details such as encryption and permissions. Since MySpace no longer treated FIM as a third-party, it enabled FIM’s advertising platform – then called “Fox Audience Network,” or FAN – to serve advertisements to a MySpace member by serving up his “Friend ID,” essentially a series of decimal digits.
The way you reconstructed that member’s MySpace page URL was simply by tacking that Friend ID onto the end of the domain name http://www.myspace.com/. From there, pulling up every personal detail that “friend” already shared on MySpace, including his full name, was a trivial matter.
FIM’s assembly of such a powerful advertising network out in the open, blatantly, without members’ consent, was once one of the hot-button issues of the Web. It helped make the MySpace brand synonymous with “privacy violation” and may have helped trigger the exodus of users to Facebook, which had grown from an interesting contender to the undisputed social networking champion in the course of 2008 alone.
Justice delayed…
Some would say Myspace has already served its sentence, with the trimming of its “s” as just one symbol of its penitence. In the settlement agreement order, the FTC commissioners mandated that Myspace must now submit itself to a biannual review of its privacy policies for the next 20 years. It then went into substantial detail in ensuring that mandate is carried over into whatever form Myspace takes in the future, and whichever parent or parents end up owning it.
Despite Myspace’s fall into irrelevance, the ruling itself does have some pertinence, particularly with respect to whose pillar the FTC looks to for support. The U.S. currently has a safe harbor agreement with the European Union, which presents a framework for U.S. companies to avoid violating EU law when they exchange potentially personally identifiable data with other parties. The framework mandates that online services notify users when their personal data is about to be shared with others, give them tools for researching how that data may be used and give them the option of canceling such sharing. It’s really a trade agreement between governments, but until the U.S. is capable of codifying such language in a law that pertains to native commerce, it’s the best the FTC can do. It charged Myspace with violating the principles of that agreement, and it was successful in eking out a settlement.
That fact may give lawmakers cause to continue delaying any serious discussion of hardening U.S. privacy law for yet another term of Congress.
There are plenty of tech-savvy Web users young enough not to remember what MySpace was. At a time when the Internet industry was just waking from the delerium of the “bursting bubble,” MySpace was the first great hope for building viable properties again. In July 2005, it was acquired by FIM, which rode its wave of success, at least at first. Then, in a stunning move that may have changed the Internet forever, Google paid FIM $900 million not to launch its own search engine, effectively stunting the service’s growth. (No such deal has ever been reached between Google and Facebook, some would say to the latter’s credit.)
The service is not dead, however. RWW’s John Paul Titlow reported in February that the steep drop in Myspace’s user base may have at last subsided, settling at perhaps one-fourth what it was at its peak. Still, the service’s diminished status is commemorated today by the fact that Google treats the term “MySpace” in the context of a query as a misspelling of “Facebook.”
Now that’s justice.
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Apple Lawsuit: US Justice Department Alleges Price Collusion
Mar 8th
According to recent reports, the U.S. Justice Department is planning to sue Apple Inc. and five U.S. publishing companies for violating antitrust laws related to price collusion. The accusation and lawsuit is centered on the rising price of e-books and an agreement between Apple and five major publishers to switch to a new pricing model [...]
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Europe Refers ACTA to Court of Justice, Decision Could Nullify Enforcement
Feb 22nd
In a move ostensibly to confirm the European Parliament’s opinion that the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is above board – but perhaps also to alleviate its own suspicions – E.U. Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht has opted to refer the treaty to the Court of Justice (ECJ). While Comm. de Gucht expects his support of ACTA to be ratified, the Court’s decision could end up blocking enforcement of the treaty throughout the continent.
This even though 22 of the E.U.’s 27 member nations have already signed on to the treaty. Under the terms of the Treaty of Lisbon with which the E.U. was formed, the European Parliament must give consent to any treaty becoming law among its member nations. It will be holding public hearings on that very question next week.
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“We are planning to ask Europe’s highest court to assess whether ACTA is incompatible – in any way – with the EU’s fundamental rights and freedoms, such as freedom of expression and information or data protection and the right to property in case of intellectual property,” reads a statement from Comm. de Gucht this morning from Brussels. “I believe the European Commission has a responsibility to provide our parliamentary representatives and the public at large with the most detailed and accurate information available. So, a referral will allow for Europe’s top court to independently clarify the legality of this agreement.”
At issue is whether enforcement of the treaty would put Internet service providers in the uncomfortable (and, as far as Europe is concerned, illegal) position of providing back-channel access to suspected IP thieves and pirates to content rights holders, especially in the entertainment industry. Also, the treaty may be interpreted as compelling governments to enforce means to block infringing users from accessing the Internet, or similarly to block ISPs from enabling themselves to be accessed by them. The European Commission had already endorsed ACTA.
But the treaty had not always been negotiated in the public light. As a result, citizens who are only just now becoming aware of its existence are skeptical why the treaty wasn’t made subject to judicial review prior to the endorsement.
In the wake of the historic SOPA/PIPA defeat in the U.S., European lawmakers are eager to stay on the right side of public opinion. At the same time, they can’t exactly be seen as backtracking on their existing stance. While the E.C. was on record in opposition to ACTA’s being negotiated in secret, it did not put up much of a fuss after negotiated drafts were made public, and the most potentially offending parts were stricken.
One of those removed parts would have facilitated so-called “three strikes laws,” which would bar individuals’ access to the Internet after three intellectual property-related offenses. In a statement last week, E.C. Vice President Viviane Reding reminded Europeans that she had a hand not only in getting that provision removed, but with inserting in its place a provision that would ensure it never re-emerge elsewhere.
“In spite of significant political pressure, I instead supported – in the name of the European Commission and in close alliance with the European Parliament – the inclusion of an Internet freedom provision in the final text of this legislation,” stated Comm. Reding. “Under this provision, ‘three-strikes laws,’ which could cut off Internet access without a prior fair and impartial procedure or without effective and timely judicial review, will certainly not become part of European law. This situation can and must not be changed by the ACTA agreement.”
The E.C. is the upper house of the E.U. legislature; Parliament is the lower house. According to Parliament, now that the E.C. has consented to ACTA, it cannot make changes to it. But it can decline its consent, the effect of which would be to nullify its enforcement, even among those member nations that have already signed.
Leading the ACTA debate in Parliament is MEP David Martin (U.K.), who issued this statement earlier today: “We will wait for the ECJ ruling before we draw conclusions, but an open political debate in the European Parliament is also necessary on the measures foreseen by ACTA. We must guarantee a good balance between intellectual property rights, which are fundamental for the European economy and job creation, and individual freedoms.”
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Are You Paying Apple Too Much For E-Books? The Justice Department Thinks So
Dec 8th
Have you noticed that the cost of some new e-books seems to be a few dollars higher than it was before? The U.S. Justice Department certainly has and they’re investigating why that is and if it’s legal. Specifically, the DOJ is looking into whether Apple and major publishers collided to set e-book prices in a manner that would violate antitrust laws, the agency confirmed yesterday.
Media reports have pointed to the existence of such an investigation since last year, but yesterday an Justice Department official publicly acknowledged it, saying, “We are also investigating the electronic book industry, along with the European Commission and the states attorneys general.” That’s right, Europe and a handful of U.S. states are concerned about e-book pricing as well.
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So what’s the big deal? When Apple launched the iPad and its iBooks marketplace in 2010, it worked out a deal with publishers to allow them to set the prices of the books themselves. In return, Apple gets a commission on each sale. As innocent as that may sound, the practice, known as “agency pricing”, may actually be a violation of antitrust law.
Authorities are looking into allegations that Apple took this route as a way of challenging Amazon, which had started selling e-books at prices lower than most paperbacks, something the publishers view as a potential threat to their traditional revenue streams.
Governments weren’t the first to raise their eyebrows at the practice. These investigations come after several class action lawsuits were filed against Apple and the major publishing houses for alleged price-fixing.
For publishers, having prices set higher means more than just increased revenue. It helps them delay the cannibalization of print sales, which still make up the majority of their income as less lucrative e-books grow in popularity. For Apple, such an arrangement with the publishers enabled them to launch an e-book marketplace to compete with Amazon and better market its iPad tablet as a device that’s ideal for reading and content consumption.
For consumers, however, the pricing model doesn’t make as much sense. In many cases, people end up paying just as much for an e-book as they would for a paperback. That doesn’t quite add up considering e-books forgo the costs of printing and distributing.
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Lawyer Marketing: Debunking Popular Law Firm Marketing SEO Myths – Justice News Flash
Jul 4th
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Lawyer Marketing: Debunking Popular Law Firm Marketing SEO Myths
Justice News Flash These are some common SEO myths that unscrupulous law firm marketing agencies may try to sell you on: 1. You will see SEO results in only a few weeks: Obtaining top placement on Google, Yahoo and Bing for lawyer Web ranking results can't be achieved … Marketing Pilgrim Welcomes New SEO Channel Partner Web CEO The SEO content war of good and evil |
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Lawyer Internet Marketing Tips- More SEO Mistakes to Avoid in Law Firm Marketing – Justice News Flash
May 19th
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Lawyer Internet Marketing Tips- More SEO Mistakes to Avoid in Law Firm Marketing
Justice News Flash As legal business development trainer Larry Bodine noted in his article Top 8 SEO Mistakes to Avoid in Lawyer Marketing, “SEO is an important part of the work that goes into a website. Just a single mistake could be detrimental to your traffic and … Google Places Combined with Mobile Websites Giving Local Businesses Massive … |
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