Minnesota Judicial Branch: Court of Appeals Special Term Orders Now Available Online. “The Minnesota Court of Appeals, in partnership with the Minnesota State Law Library, is now making available the Court of Appeals’ Special Term Orders in an easily searchable online database on the State Law Library website. The database includes Special Term Orders issued beginning January of this year.”
Reuters: AI can’t hold patents to U.S. inventions (for now). “Three years ago, Stephen Thaler filed two patent applications naming a single inventor, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), following Director review, found the applications to be incomplete for lacking a valid inventor on the ground that a machine cannot be an inventor. Thaler appealed the USPTO’s final decisions to the District Court, which similarly concluded that an ‘inventor’ must be a natural person. Thaler then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, with the sole issue being whether AI qualifies as an ‘inventor’ under U.S. patent law.
MIT News: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior. “Using a randomized field experiment, researchers found that Wikipedia articles on decided cases, written by law students, guide both the decisions that judges cite as precedents and the textual content of their written opinions.”
BNN Bloomberg: Alleged Russian Hackers Get Another Chance To Fight Google Suit. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google failed to persuade a judge to issue a default judgment against two Russians accused of operating a botnet that allegedly hacked into more than a million computers and devices worldwide. Google had requested that Dmitry Starovikov and Alexander Filippov be found liable without a trial, claiming they had failed to reply to the lawsuit within legal time limits.”
UK Government: Court judgments made accessible to all at The National Archives. “As the official archive and publisher for the UK Government, The National Archives has long-standing experience in storing and publishing information securely. Under the Archive’s expertise, they will be preserved, managed and made widely accessible for years to come. New court and tribunal decisions from the superior courts of record – The Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, and Upper Tribunals – will now be available on The National Archives Find Case Law site.” This archive is still being populated and will expand over time.
Sixth Tone: China’s Judicial Transparency Project Faces an Uncertain Future. “In 2013, China’s Supreme People’s Court officially launched China Judgements Online, a free online database containing decisions from all levels of China’s legal system, from local courts all the way up to the SPC itself. By 2020, the database was home to more than 100 million documents…. But now, that may be coming to an end. Zhou Yuzhong, a lawyer, found that courts uploaded slightly more than 100,000 judicial documents in 2021, a nearly 80% drop from the previous year. Meanwhile, a number of rulings have quietly disappeared from the database.”
Techdirt: Court Gets An Easy One Right: Section 230 Says Omegle Isn’t To Blame For Bad People On Omegle . “For reasons I don’t quite understand, some people blame Section 230 for the bad people on Omegle, and there have been a few recent lawsuits that try to get around Section 230 and still hold Omegle liable for the fact that bad people use the site. As others have explained in great detail, if these lawsuits succeed, they would do tremendous harm to online speech. We’ve discussed all the reasons why in the past — but pinning liability on an intermediary for speech of its users is the best way to stifle all sorts of important speech online.”
WFLA: Request denied: Sarasota business can’t require customers be vaccinated against COVID-19, judge says. “A Leon County circuit court judge denied a request from a Sarasota business to allow it to require customers be vaccinated, upholding a state law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis banning ‘vaccine passports.’”
Techdirt: Court Says Google Translate Isn’t Reliable Enough To Determine Consent For A Search . “Pre-printed consent forms have been vetted and edited. Google Translate, as powerful as it is, generates what it thinks is the best translation of what it’s hearing, and its best is years away from being at the level of someone truly bilingual. Thus, it’s fallible enough it shouldn’t be used to ask people who speak other languages to waive their rights.”
Techdirt: Top German Court Says Facebook Must Inform Users About Deleting Their Posts Or Suspending Their Account, Explain Why, And Allow Them To Respond. “We’ve just written about Germany’s constitutional court grappling with the issue of whether government users of zero-days for surveillance have a responsibility to report the flaws they use to the relevant developers. Another senior court in the country has been pondering an even thornier question that is occupying judges and lawmakers around the world: how should social media police so-called ‘hate speech’ on their services in a way that respects fundamental rights on all sides?”
AP: Tennessee Supreme Court Full Case Records Now Online. “The opinions have long been available electronically, but the associated case files were stored in more than 10,000 boxes in the attic of the Capitol building, according to a news release from the Administrative Office of the Courts. For more than a decade, Library and Archive staff has been cleaning and indexing these records. Today, around 85% of the collection is available online.”
BBC: US cheerleader wins free speech case against her former school. “The US Supreme Court has ruled in favour of a teenager who was kicked off her school cheerleading squad over a profane social media post. In an 8-1 ruling, it concluded that the Mahanoy Area School District had violated Brandi Levy’s freedom of speech under the First Amendment.”
The Register: EU court rules in Telenet copyright case: ISPs can be forced to hand over some customer data use details. “Europe’s top court has ruled ISPs can be forced to hand over the details of customers who are alleged to have downloaded material illegally online – but only if they meet certain criteria. That’s the latest judgement in another case involving Cyprus-based Mircom International Content Management Consulting, and Belgian ISP Telenet.”
Techdirt: Nevada’s Top Court Says The State’s Journalist Shield Law Also Applies To Bloggers. “Some good news for journalists in Nevada, via FourthAmendment.com. A decision made earlier this year by a state court has been reversed, resulting in an expansion of the protections offered by the state’s journalist shield law.”
Reason: How Often Has the U.S. Supreme Court Struck Down a Federal Law? Part II. “The Judicial Review of Congress Database is now publicly available. It includes a list of all the cases in which the Court has substantively reviewed the constitutionality of an act of Congress from 1789 through the spring of 2018, as well as a variety of associated information such as identifying information about the statute that was reviewed, a measure of its importance, and the length of time between the passage of the statutory provision and its review by the Supreme Court.”
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