This makes him okay in my book, Boston affiliation notwithstanding.
Everything about Gronkowski seems oversize, from feet to personality. But his hands, sheathed in white gloves (“makes them look twice as big,” guard Logan Mankins said), are his most recognizable feature. At media day Tuesday, a television reporter asked Gronkowski if he could lean forward and compare hand sizes. His were roughly twice as big. Then she asked if he could name the cast from “Jersey Shore.” He obliged.
This site, which was born from Stanford, provides a single database to documents all patent litigation:
In order to study disparities and other trends in patent litigation, some of the world’s biggest technology companies and law firms funded a team of IP experts and leading computer scientists to map out every electronically available patent litigation event and outcome. The result of this collaboration was the IP Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC), the most legally rigorous patent litigation database and search engine in the world. The IPLC was launched in December 2008 as a fully searchable web-based “almanac” on U.S. IP litigation.
Update: This report discusses their research.
To ensure comprehensiveness, we identified relevant cases in two independent ways. The first, employing attorneys and artificial intelligence experts on the IPLC database, swept over 31,000 U.S. patent infringement lawsuits and 1.7 million contemporaneous litigation events. See Ex. A. The second legal team searched using exogenous, state of the art methodologies and tools. Then the two preliminary result sets were combined and analyzed.
Lex Machina verified 90 (ninety) federal cases or case clusters (i.e., groups of related lawsuits) with one or more “merits analysis event” on § 102(g)(2). Id. A prototypical merits analysis event (or “MAE”) is a summary judgment order, but it may also be a Federal Circuit opinion, a trial outcome, a substantive evidentiary order, or another judicial analysis.
This discusses their features.
The IP clearinghouse is discussed on SSRN here. And here is how they got their data:
The data set is derived from PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), an electronic service that allows users to obtain case and docket information from federal courts. After downloading all available cases from more than ninety courts (and by hand-collecting and scanning documents from others), raw data sets are parsed by a computer program into specific motions, objections, and decisions. The data is then hand-checked by research assistants to ensure integrity. Associated documents also are made available.
From The Economist, TechCrunch (It’s expensive–“Lex Machina is announcing free access to its service for small mobile app makers who have been sued (not a bad deal considering access is usually $10,000 per year, per seat on the SaaS model).”),
Howard Bashman links to a notice from the 9th Circuit’s Public Information Office, telling the public that the court will release its decision in Perry v. Hollingsworth (the SSM case) tomorrow.
The Court anticipates filing an opinion tomorrow (Thursday, February 2) by 10 a.m. regarding the public release of videotapes made of the civil bench trial in Perry v. Hollingsworth, the Proposition 8 case. Note that this is not the main appeal regarding the constitutionality question.
I didn’t know that courts actually do this. If only the Supreme Court gave advance notice! Erwin Chemerinsky thinks this would be a good idea.
Apparently it is. There may be some First Amendment issues—is this a time, place, manner regulation; who is a “journalist”; how are credentials dispensed? But it would seem good form for Congress to simply let citizen journalists film, so long as they are disrupting no one. Reminds me of some of my musings over the Supreme Court’s credentialing process.
From Steven Greenhouse:
A former unpaid intern for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, accusing its parent company, the Hearst Corporation, of violating federal and state wage and hour laws by not paying her even though she often worked there full time.
In her lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the intern, Xuedan Wang, and her law firm are asking to make the case a class action on behalf of what they say are hundreds of unpaid interns at Heart Magazines, which also publishes Cosmopolitan, Seventeen and Good Housekeeping.
Employment experts say a growing number of young people, hundreds of thousands of them, do unpaid internships each year as they seek to get a foot in the door and gain work experience. But some interns and labor advocates assert that many employers are taking advantage of these interns — and violating Labor Department rules in the process — by using the interns essentially to do the jobs of other workers and not providing a bona fide educational experience.
The lawsuit against Hearst states, “Employers’ failure to compensate interns for their work, and the prevalence of the practice nationwide, curtails opportunities for employment, fosters class divisions between those who can afford to work for no wage and those who cannot, and indirectly contributes to rising unemployment.”
According to the lawsuit, Ms. Wang, who graduated from Ohio State University in 2010, was an intern at Harper’s Bazaar from August 2011 to December 2011 and said she generally worked 40 hours a week but sometimes as many as 55 hours. Her lawyers said that Ms. Wang, with a degree in strategic communications, coordinated pickups and deliveries of fashion samples between Harper’s Bazaar and fashion vendors and showrooms and assigned other unpaid interns to help carry out the pickups and deliveries.
She also helped maintain records on the fashion samples and process reimbursement requests for corporate expense reports.
I think she may have some trouble getting a job in the future (would this constitute unlawful retaliation?).
For my prior thoughts on the value of unpaid interns see here, here, and here.