Today, Judge Rakoff rejected an attempt by the parties in the Petrobras securities litigation (see our prior coverage here) to keep parts of the settlement agreement in that case out of the public record. Judge Rakoff had previously rebuffed the parties’ request to keep parts of the settlement agreement confidential, and the parties had
Judge Rakoff
Judge Rakoff: “KinderGuides” to Literature Infringe Copyrights of Original Works
In an opinion last week, Judge Rakoff ruled that children’s illustrated versions of classic novels called “KinderGuides” infringed the copyrights associated with the original works. He rejected the defendants’ arguments that the removal of adults themes and addition of commentary rendered the publishing of the Guides “fair use”:
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Judge Rakoff: Sarah Palin’s Allegations Against NY Times Do Not Amount to Necessary Showing of Maliciousness
In an opinion today, Judge Rakoff dismissed Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against the New York Times (see our prior coverage here) because the allegations (even taking into account additional facts from an evidentiary hearing) amounted to a showing of negligence, at best. The opinion begins:
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Second Circuit Reverses Judge Rakoff, Finds Uber Arbitration Clause is Enforceable
As part of the ongoing Uber antitrust litigation, the Second Circuit yesterday reversed Judge Rakoff’s earlier ruling that the arbitration clause in Uber’s terms of service was not enforceable (see our previous coverage of Judge Rakoff’s decision here, and the interlocutory appeal here).
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N.Y. Times Moves to Dismiss Palin Defamation Suit, Arguing Editorial Concerned Palin’s PAC, Not Palin Personally
Last week, the New York Times Company moved to dismiss a defamation suit brought by Sarah Palin over a New York Times editorial drawing a connection between SarahPAC’s publication of a “crosshairs map” referencing Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the mass shooting where she was wounded in 2011 (see our previous coverage of the suit here).
The Times argues that SarahPAC cannot be considered an alter ego of its namesake, meaning that the editorial was not “of and concerning” her:
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In Sarah Palin’s Defamation Case Against N.Y. Times, Judge Rakoff Indicates Trial by December
Sarah Palin sued the New York Times Tuesday (see the complaint here) over a recent editorial suggesting that her political action committee’s use of “stylized cross hairs” over the districts of several members of Congress in online materials was responsible for the “political incitement” of Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six people and wounded…
SCOTUS: NY Credit Card Surcharge Law Regulates Speech
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court held that New York State’s law preventing merchants from charging an additional fee for using a credit card (see our previous coverage here) regulates speech, and remanded the case to the Second Circuit to determine whether the law can survive First Amendment scrutiny. Judge Rakoff had initially ruled in favor of the merchants, but the Second Circuit found that the law was permissible as it only regulated the relationship between the two prices rather than speech.
In an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court found otherwise:
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Judge Rakoff: Executives Cannot Buy Company Products at Grossly Inflated Prices to Trigger Earnout Bonus
The summary judgment ruling, issued yesterday, begins:
Why would the executives (and former principals) of a paddle-board division of a sports and recreation company cause the company to make a one-time $60,500 purchase of one million stickers that the executives themselves immediately attempted to repurchase from the company for approximately $4 million? The answer
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Judge Rakoff Bemoans “Insidious Trend” of Ordinary Citizens’ Decreasing Access to Courts
Judge Rakoff has published in The New York Review of Books a piece entitled Why You Won’t Get Your Day in Court, in which he describes several factors that have caused ordinary citizens to have less and less access to courts. He argues, for example, that the Supreme Court’s decision in AT&T v. Concepcion, which upheld mandatory arbitration clauses with class action waivers, treated the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial like an “outmoded procedure that could be forfeited in the interest of saving time.”
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Supreme Court Grants Cert in Case Challenging New York’s Credit Card Surcharge Ban
Today the Supreme Court granted certiorari in a First Amendment challenge to New York’s ban on credit card surcharges. The law allows merchants to charge different prices for cash and credit card purchases, but, according to the plaintiffs, it violates the First Amendment by prohibiting them from calling the extra charge for credit card purchases…