In another major blow to copyright lawsuits filed by the porn industry, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of NY, ruled that porn distributor Liberty Media could not rely on a theory of negligence in its copyright infringement case against a NY man named Cary Tabora. The complaint alleged that Tabora’s roommate, Schuyler Whetstone, […]
Category: Constitutional Law
For years, since Congress passed the draconian and rigid Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) in the wake of the first WTC bombing and the Oklahoma City attack, Federal appeals courts have not seen fit to extend the Act’s harsh one year statute of limitations on habeas corpus appeals, even in cases of actual […]
That pesky Constitution got in the way of a criminal conviction yet again in the case of People v. Torres a 2011 case out of Onandaga County in Upstate NY. Vincent Torres was convicted by a jury of burglary,sodomy and sexual abuse. Onondaga County Judge William Walsh barred the defendant’s wife from the courtroom for […]
Just this morning, a client asked me a question: Can his potential adversary use deleted, private Facebook messages between them as evidence in the breach of contract case he was thinking about bringing in court? (Of course if the adversary had not also deleted them, he could just introduce them that way, but the client […]
So I go away on a cruise for a week and the Supreme Court of the United States decides to put out a series of major decisions that shows the division among the justices and the deepening politicization of the Court. But this is not a Constitutional Law blog. If you want heady analysis about […]
As the nation waits for the Supreme Court to rule on the President’s Health Care Program, I expect the decision will be a greatly splintered and divided one which will most likely add to the run of 5-4 decisions that will be the Roberts Court’s legacy. Without a doubt, this is the most polarized and […]
So I have openly railed against copyright and trademark trolls using extortionate letters to extract unreasonable settlement amounts from folks accused of infringing on their intellectual property. In fact, I have a whole website devoted to the topic: www.extortionletterinfo.com. But Wednesday’s Newsday had a cover story about Long Island Railroad disability pension fraud that revealed […]
The then Mayor of the Village of Freeport was vindicated by the Second Department (a NY Appeals court covering Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Nassau, Suffolk, and parts of Upstate NY), for remarks he made in a public election debate during which he called the plaintiff, a commercial real estate developer, “an extortionist” who was “trying […]
A long time ago, I wrote an article entitled “The Constitution is Overrated” and friends and colleagues of mine who knew the admiration and passion that I have for this country’s grand document were surprised at the piece which faulted, not the document itself, but how courts have applied it; rarely, do courts give those […]