"The Fraley plaintiffs sued Facebook, alleging that its 'Sponsored Stories' feature, which displays ads on Facebook containing the names and pictures of users who have 'Liked' a product, violated California’s Right of Publicity statute. The statute forbids the commercial use of an individual’s name or likeness without consent. Integral to the plaintiffs’ claim was the assertion they had been injured because they were “celebrities” to their Facebook friends, such that their endorsements of the products in the Sponsored Stories held economic value—economic value that they were deprived of when Facebook published their Stories without their consent." -
Famous for Fifteen People (Stanford Law Review): Celebrity, Newsworthiness, and
Fraley v. Facebook (Citizen Media Law Project)
posted by wikipedia brown boy detective
on Feb 10, 2012 -
9 comments
Can an employer "wrongfully hire" someone? Apparently so, at least in the State of Minnesota, where Chandramouli Vaidyanathan
successfully sued Seagate Technology to the tune of $1.9 million based on Minnesota's
"False Statements as Inducement to Entering Employment" statute, which makes it illegal "to induce, influence, persuade, or engage any person to change from one place to another in this state, or to change from any place in any state, territory, or country to any place in this state, to work in any branch of labor through or by means of knowingly false representations".
[more inside]
posted by The Gooch
on Dec 27, 2011 -
46 comments
Indian author Pankaj Mishra writes a brutal
takedown of Niall Ferguson's latest book,
Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the
London Review of Books.
Ferguson responds to the critical book review with a
lawsuit.
[more inside]
posted by bodywithoutorgans
on Dec 5, 2011 -
107 comments
Yesterday, the Supreme court granted
certiorari to several of the challenges to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
Here's a great roundup of several news stories. I like the
NPR story for a quick summary of the issues. The Court will hear a total of 5.5 hours of oral argument, and a decision is expected by the end of the current term, in June.
posted by insectosaurus
on Nov 15, 2011 -
77 comments
Over the years, he's become so well versed in restaurant labor law that his attorneys don't even charge him for filing lawsuits anymore. 'They take them on spec,' he boasts. 'By now, they know that if I file something, it's legit.' Eddie Santana, restaurant rebel,
has filed 30 lawsuits against companies — nearly all restaurants and bars — for everything from illegal tip pools to excessive uniform costs. He's netted $144,924.79 after attorney fees from 20 separate settlements. And from the nine suits still pending, he hopes to make another $100,000, if not more.
posted by shakespeherian
on Mar 21, 2011 -
49 comments
New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera's
column last weekend excoriated HP and SAP, and presented Oracle in a positive light.
One problem: Nocera's fiancee is the PR person for Oracle's lead attorney in its lawsuit against SAP.
Woops. (via gawker)
posted by VicNebulous
on Oct 14, 2010 -
25 comments
The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its "copyright infringement" claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000. ... for a 3 year period, they spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000. (via Slashdot)
posted by Joe Beese
on Jul 14, 2010 -
63 comments
SEC sues Goldman Sachs for fraud . GS has already come under fire for "betting against" financial products it was marketing, a practice that apparently helped it prosper from the real estate bubble but come out relatively unscathed. The SEC now says that one such product was designed specifically so that a Goldman business partner, Paulson & Company, could take a short position on it. Investors were apparently not advised of this fact. Goldman's stock was off more than 10% in the half hour following the announcement.
[more inside]
posted by grobstein
on Apr 16, 2010 -
48 comments
Google Alleges That Viacom ‘Secretly Uploaded Its Content to YouTube, Even While Publicly Complaining About Its Presence There’ Zahavah Levine, chief counsel for YouTube in its litigation with Viacom, explains:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. […] Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
[
via DF]
posted by ocherdraco
on Mar 18, 2010 -
49 comments
The Donald Sterling Rule "Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling lives by his own rules. And the only one that matters, apparently, is this:
all bad deeds go unpunished. Over the last six years, nearly two dozen L.A. residents have sued Sterling for engaging in racist housing practices and Jim Crow-style bigotry. In a 2003 deposition, the 76-year-old real estate mogul admitted to paying a former employee to have sex with him in an elevator. Three years ago, the U.S. government charged him with "willful" mistreatment of African-American and Latino tenants, and earlier this month, he agreed to pay the Dept. of Justice nearly $3 million to settle a federal racial-discrimination housing lawsuit, the largest award ever for a case of its kind." So why, asks California's
Tenants Together,
has the NBA said nothing about Sterling's less than sterling behavior?
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Nov 27, 2009 -
27 comments
A U.S. District Court judge recently
dismissed a
complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased and eaten "Cap'n Crunch with Crunchberries" for four years because she believed "crunchberries" were real fruit.
[more inside]
posted by Four-Eyed Girl
on Jun 5, 2009 -
153 comments
A clinic nurse first removed her
intrauterine birth-control device without permission, says the patient in a federal action, then told her that "having the IUD come out was a good thing," because "I personally do not like IUDs. I feel they are a type of abortion. I don't know how you feel about abortion, but
I am against them."
posted by tehloki
on Jan 20, 2009 -
119 comments
Fifty Norwegian artists (including the national symphony orchestra KORK), who recorded Prince covers in honor of his 50th birthday June 7, have been slapped with a lawsuit by the short-tempered star.
For now, all 81 songs can be
previewed free on C+C Records' website, and some are also available on
MySpace in streamable medley form.
Source.
posted by astruc
on Jun 28, 2008 -
43 comments
