Cultivated Compendium

The Wrap reports that--despite a national injunction barring FilmOn X from streaming free broadcast TV programming on its Internet service everywhere but in the Second Circuit--the company went ahead and started streaming in the Boston area.

FilmOn X was going to ask for a further carve-out from the injunction issued by a District of Columbia federal judge because a Boston-area federal judge ruled that broadcasters were not entitled to a temporary restraining order of FilmOn X's competitor, Aereo, in the New England area.

But FilmOn X didn't wait until the court ruled. The result? "A district court judge on Tuesday threatened to find FilmOn X in contempt of court for beginning to air network affiliates from Boston despite her injunction barring the company from airing network stations outside New York and Massachusetts," The Wrap reported.

UPDATE: The judge's order also rejected FilmOn X's request to modify her preliminary injunction.

A judge is expected to rule on a challenge to Michigan's same-sex marriage ban today, the Detroit Free Press reported. The challenge is to a constitutional amendment adopted by voters. This is an example of an area left untouched by the U.S. Supreme Court: do state-level bans on same-sex matrimony violate federal or state constitutional rights?

The trial judge who sentenced former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin to send apologies written on her photo to every other judge in Pennsylvania won't rule if she violated her probation for not sending those mea culpas just yet. The Associated Press reported the trial judge will wait until the intermediate appellate court rules. Orie Melvin's lawyers argued sending the apologies before her appeal is through would violate her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. She was convicted of misusing the resources of her chamber on her judicial campaigns.

When Orie Melvin was sentenced for politicial corruption, the judge fashioned an unusual sentence:

* three years of house arrest;

* orders to send a picture of herself with an apology written on it to every member of the Pennsylvania judiciary;

* orders to send letters of apology to every member of the staff of her sister, a former state senator also convicted of using taxpayer resources on political campaigns;

* orders to send apologies to every member of her staff ordered to conduct political work even though it is not allowed under the law for government employees to do so;

* orders to send an apology to every member of her family;

* orders to serve in a soup kitchen three times a week, pay a $55,000 fine, and to not use the honorific of justice for the three years she will be on house arrest and for the two years she will be on probation.

The Onondaga Nation's land-claim lawsuit ended after an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected. The circuit court had ruled the tribe had waited took long to seek redress for the loss of their territory in New York. The Syracuse Post-Standard reports the tribe may turn to international forums instead: "The nation said it will pursue the claim in international venues -- the United Nations or the Organization of American States Commission on Human Rights."

The Washington Post reports on how the National Security Agency is sweeping up contacts lists in Americans' e-mail accounts and instant messaging accounts. For example, "during a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation," The Post reported. Over the course of a year, that would be millions of accounts. Is this contact information being paired with the already-revealed collection of nearly every record of phone calls made in the United States?

Even Americans who aren't living or working abroad are having their contact information collected because "data crosses international boundaries even when its American owners stay at home. Large technology companies, including Google and Facebook, maintain data centers around the world to balance loads on their servers and work around outages," The Post also reported.

On an amusing note, spam is just as annoying for spies as it is for the rest of us. "Spam has proven to be a significant problem for the NSA — clogging databases with information that holds no foreign intelligence value," The Post also reports.

An Eighth Circuit judge, who dissented in an American Indian's woman's appeal of her 10-year sentence for killing her baby, told a law school forum he supports her early release, The Grand Forks Herald reported. Judge Myron Bright, now 94, said the defendant would have gotten a lighter sentence if she was not on an American Indian reservation. The judge remarked "because of historical jurisdiction taken by federal courts in Indian Country in the 19th century and more recent special laws, Indians convicted of serious crimes on reservations face harsh federal sentences. For the same crimes, he said, non-Indians 'across the road' would get much more lenient state sentences," the paper also reported.

A clerk in North Carolina will begin to accept same-sex marriage applications, but there's a caveat. He won't sign the applications unless he gets the permission of the state attorney general. And according to this Chicago Tribune article, the attorney general personally supports same-sex matrimony but will defend North Carolina's Defense of Marriage Act barring same-sex unions.

Challenges to Michigan's state constitutional ban on giving any preference to race in the field of education will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court today. In an unusual circumstance, two sets of plaintiffs will make separate arguments in the court. Reuters reports: "One group opposed to the ban, from the University of Michigan, employs measured rhetoric, relies on more recent cases joined by conservative justices and tries to assure the court it can rule narrowly when striking down the Michigan ban. The other group, a long-standing Detroit-based coalition advocating for minority rights, is pushing a more expansive legal rationale and, in more impassioned rhetoric, invokes the orations of two late champions of racial justice in the 1960s, Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson."

The Recorder reports on a couple problems that arise out of large privacy class actions:

One, the classes are so large that, even though claimaints in class actions typically only are entitled to a small amount per person, they are too large to settle because they require settlement funds worth billions of dollars.

Two, the people whose privacy was invaded aren't known to the class-action lawyers and to the court and it requires further invasion of their privacy to identify them to give them notice of the class action.

Three, giving unclaimed, or cy pres, funds to legal charities is increasingly coming under attack.

A mother who drowned her three children in a bathtub may be entitled to receive part of their $350,000 estate because she was found not guilty by reason of mental disease, the Associated Press reported. Nassau County Surrogate Court Judge Edward McCarty must decide next month if she is entitled to a share of the proceeds from two lawsuits in which the children's fathers claimed social workers failed to properly monitor the woman and children, the AP also reported. Nassau County settled the cases.

The AP also reports on the history of Son of Sam laws: "New York was the first state to enact a Son of Sam law in the 1970s following the capture of notorious serial killer David Berkowitz. Its intent was to bar Berkowitz and other criminals from profiting from their crimes through the commercial exploitation of their stories. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in 1991 for violating the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression, ruling it would have encompassed works including Henry David Thoreau’s 'Civil Disobedience' and 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.'" Then New York revised its Son of Sam law.