I caught up on my Bloomberg Law podcasts last night. My frequent disappointment in our legal
system was renewed. None of these cases
seemed to interpret the law incorrectly. I am not a lawyer, but the legal
experts on the show are pretty good at distilling the cases for an intermediate
level listener (which I consider myself to be).
No, my disappointment stems from how poorly thought out many of our laws
seem to be.
Citizen’s United received plenty of controversy when the
Supreme Court ruled on it years ago.
Rather than revisit that, let’s just start with the premise that having
full disclosure of donor lists makes unlimited political contributions
palatable. Many of you might have heard
that the Koch brothers have launched a nearly $1 Billion (yes, that is with a “B”)
fund to support their political causes.
In the spirit of Citizen’s United, they should reveal the names of their
donors. But hold on. They already won that case, so why stop
there? They appealed to the California
Supreme Court that they shouldn’t have to disclose either. They are supported causes, not
campaigns. So it is not a political lobby
it is a cause lobby. Just in case that
doesn’t work, they claim the harassment exception. In the 1950s, some African-American groups
were the subject of firebombing and lynching.
So they got an except that allowed them to keep names secret. The Koch fund wants the same exemption
because their donors may be harassed because of their donations to this
fund. Why doesn’t it feel right that
these two are parallels?
Many of you might have recently seen the movie Selma. It was a frequent candidate last night at the
Oscars. You might have noticed that the film did not use any of MLK’s famous
speeches. Why? Because of copyright laws. The rights to his speeches are held by his
family and they wanted some serious money to give permission to the film
producers to use them. The principle of
Fair Use allows excerpts to be used in education, news reporting, and parody. Otherwise, the material has to be “transformed”
in way that adds a new creative element to the content. Otherwise, you need the permission of the
copyright holders to use it. But this was a money making film. Having an actor read the speeches and having
it in a movie was not seen as transformative enough. So the screen writers had to write new speeches. Despite the entire movie being a tribute to
the life of MLK.
This is why fantasy leagues have to have real licenses from
the sports leagues who control the copyrights to players names, photos, and
stats (outside of news reporting, satire, etc).
Fantasy leagues only work if you use the real deal. The reverse happened
with the Madden Football video game.
Rather than license the use of real players’ names, photos, and stats
(costing a chunk of change), they modified each of these. Just enough, they thought, to be
transformative. But a real football fan
could figure out who was who with just a little research and thought. EA Sports got taken to court and lost. Not transformative enough.
In another sports case, the PGA Golf Pro Tour is being sued
by the players’ caddies. They caddies
are being forced to wear bibs with PGA sponsors names and logos on them. The caddies are not being paid for this and
it implies to the TV viewer that they support these companies whether they do
or not. You would think that their
contract would make their agreement clear, but it turns out that caddies aren’t
contracting with the Tour. They are
hired individually by the individual golfers.
So how can the Tour make this requirement? Caddies work for the players and the players
are contracted to the Tour. So tough
nougies. The legal expert on the
interview noted that the caddies would be happy to settle for health insurance
(which they don’t get because they don’t work for the tour). But since it looks like the Tour will win the
case, this is still a long shot.
The last rant is the lawsuit by 26 states against Obama’s
executive order regarding immigrants, deportation priorities, and legal
status. First, my personal bias is that
the whole process is broken because immigration is good for the US
economically, socially, and ethically.
But let’s take those considerations out of the picture because they are
not part of this case. The law says that
this large group of people must be deported.
Of course, the budget of the INS does not cover deporting everyone, so
the administration has to prioritize.
And that is not at issue here either if all the administration was doing
was deporting felons first and Dreamers and parents of citizens last. What the
lawsuit hinges on is that the administration is making this public and
official. It would be OK for them to
deport felons and leave Dreamers alone.
But what they want to do is tell the Dreamers that they won’t be
deported any year soon, so they can come out of the shadows, register to work,
drive, etc, and not worry. This
significantly adds to their ability to contribute to the economy. Good for the country. But because it is adding a new kind of
status, it is infringing on the powers held by Congress. And therefore illegal. They are allowed to do things unofficially
and privately. But not officially and
publicly. Even if it benefits the
country.
Sorry for going on and on.
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