U.S. Supreme Court

Chet Kanojia, CEO of television Internet streaming service Aereo, said that his business model of transmitting free broadcast television on the Internet through individual antennas dedicated to each subscriber “has gone from the back of my napkin two years ago, in my house, to in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and national policy in about a 20-month period. So, what else could you ask for, right?” Xconomy reported.

Broadcasters have appealed a decision in the Second Circuit that Aereo is not violating their copyright in their programming. One of their biggest arguments is that a ruling in favor of Aereo would excuse cable networks from paying for broadcast programming.

For his part, Kanojia said that a ruling in Aereo's favor would protect "the consumer in the midst of all this profiteering,” Xconomy also reported.

New York Times reporter James Risen has asked the Fourth Circuit to put on hold its ruling denying that a reporters privilege applies in a criminal case in which he could be forced to testify, Politico reports. Meanwhile, Risen will seek for the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue.

The underlying criminal case involves former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who "has been indicted for leaking Risen information about a CIA operation to provide Iran with flawed nuclear designs as part of an effort to set back that country's alleged nuclear weapons program," according to Politico.

Risen has vowed to go to jail before revealing who his source was.
 

Even though the Third Circuit has held that "secular, for-profit companies aren't afforded religious protection and the constitutional rights of their owners don't pass through to the corporate entity," a district-court federal judge sided with employers that are challenging Obamacare's contraceptive-coverage mandate on the grounds that it violates their freedom of religion, The Legal Intelligencer, Pennsylvania's legal newspaper, reported. The Legal also reported that U.S. District Chief Judge Joy Flowers Conti of the Western District of Pennsylvania denied a request from the Obama administration for an indicative ruling on the application of the Third Circuit case when Conti had granted an injunction for a plaintiff from the contraception mandate.

The issue is being primed for the U.S. Supreme Court. A circuit split is present on the issue between the Third Circuit and the Tenth Circuit.
 

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."

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."

Here's a more in-depth look at the site that "is creating etched-in-stone digital references for scholars and lawyers," GigaOm posted.

The Perma.cc site would solve the issue of broken links to the sources in scholarship by taking readers "to the Perma.cc site where they are presented with a page that has links both to the original web source (along with some information, including the date of the Perma.cc link’s creation) and to the archived version stored by Perma.cc," GigaOm also reports.

As GigaOm also noted, "link rot is a growing issue for both courts and academic journals, but one that is downplayed on the grounds that books and paper are the 'real' authorities while internet sources are ephemeral or, at best, unofficial. As the era of print recedes, however, this anti-digital bias looks more and more untenable."

My prior post on the findings that 50 percent of links in U.S. Supreme Court cases and 70 percent of links in some Harvard law journals are broken: http://www.cultivatedcompendium.com/news/link-rot-50-us-supreme-court-ca...

The New York Times' Adam Liptak has this Sunday Review piece exploring how activist U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.'s court has been. There's a surprise in the findings. " If judicial activism is defined as the tendency to strike down laws, the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is less activist than any court in the last 60 years," Liptak writes.

Lawyers for the Onondaga Nation are not very hopeful that their land claim will get accepted for review, much less get a positive ruling, from the U.S. Supreme Court after the justices ruled that the equitable doctrine of laches barred the land claim of the Oneida Nation, another Haudenosaunee/Iroquois tribe based in New York. However: the "Onondaga’s land rights lawsuit is framed differently from the Oneida and Cayuga cases. It brings environmental issues to the forefront for the first time, naming as defendants various corporations because of the destruction they caused to the land and water. The Onondaga claim crucially does not seek possession of the lands, taxing authority, eviction of the people who live on the land or any action other than acknowledgment that the lands were unlawfully taken from the Nation," Indian Country Today reported.

TV broadcasters are challenging in the U.S. Supreme Court Aereo's business model as an infringement on their copyrights in their programming. FierceCable reports: "Broadcasters argue in the petition that Aereo designed its system to exploit what they described as a loophole in copyright law which has allowed Cablevision to launch its network DVR." Aereo specifically set up its service of streaming free broadcast programming through individual antennas within the Second Circuit because of the Cablevision precedent.

FierceCable also reports a ruling for Aereo could have positive implications for "cable operators and satellite TV distributors who pay retransmission-consent fees to broadcasters."