TLDR: This changes noth­ing. Today the Librar­ian of Con­gress announced new rules pro­mul­gated pur­suant to the Librarian’s rule­mak­ing author­ity under the Dig­i­tal Mil­len­nium Copy­right Act to exempt cer­tain actions from the pro­hi­bi­tion against cir­cum­ven­tion of copy­right pro­tec­tion sys­tems found in 17 U.S.C. §1201. The “anti-​​​​circumvention pro­vi­sion” states: No per­son shall cir­cum­vent a tech­no­log­i­cal mea­sure that effec­tively con­trols access to a work pro­tected under this title. The Librar­ian is required by §1201 to make a deter­mi­na­tion every three years as to whether any exemp­tions from this pro­hi­bi­tion are nec­es­sary in order to pre­serve access to copy­righted works. In the words of the Librar­ian, his task [ . . . ]

Read the Rest...

The Supreme Court decided McDon­ald v. Chicago, the sequel to D.C. v. Heller, this morn­ing. A major­ity held that the Sec­ond Amend­ment applies to state and local gov­ern­ments and threw out Chicago’s ban on hand­guns. A plu­ral­ity of four Jus­tices (Alito, Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy) held that the Sec­ond Amend­ment is incor­po­rated by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amend­ment, and avoided address­ing the ques­tion of whether the Slaugh­ter­house Cases, which long ago cas­trated the other half of the 14th Amend­ment, the Priv­i­leges or Immu­ni­ties Clause, should be recon­sid­ered. One Jus­tice, Jus­tice Thomas, wrote a sep­a­rate opin­ion con­cur­ring in the judg­ment, but assert­ing [ . . . ]

Read the Rest...

Via Paul Hsieh at Geek­press, “16 Things Your Lawyer Won’t Tell You”, a piece pur­port­ing to arm con­sumers of legal ser­vices the bet­ter to keep tabs on their lawyers, but which ulti­mately severely mis­rep­re­sents the pro­fes­sion. The over­all prob­lem with the arti­cle is that it assumes that it is immoral for a lawyer to make money off his clients’ legal woes. Here are the most mis­lead­ing points from the arti­cle, and my expla­na­tion of why they are mis­lead­ing. 1. I use forms but charge you as if I did it from scratch. Lawyers who cre­ate and sell oper­a­tive legal doc­u­ments (wills, con­tracts, trusts, &c.) [ . . . ]

Read the Rest...

Attor­ney Alan Gura, with whom I had the plea­sure of din­ing just before he argued Dis­trict of Colum­bia v. Heller to the United States Supreme Court, is now chal­leng­ing Chicago’s hand­gun reg­u­la­tions. The Court granted cer­tio­rari last month. The case, McDon­ald v. Chicago, goes fur­ther than Heller did because the Dis­trict of Colum­bia is a Fed­eral juris­dic­tion. Heller didn’t address whether the Sec­ond Amend­ment also applied against state gov­ern­ments. McDon­ald will now try to answer that ques­tion. Apply­ing the pro­tec­tions of the Bill of Rights (which on their face apply only to the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment) to the states is a legal process called [ . . . ]

Read the Rest...