Bail Bond Sanford – Why Airbnb Will Probably Win Legal Fight Against San Francisco

Source    :  Bloomberg News
By            :  Joshua Brustein
Category :  Bail Bond Sanford, Sanford Bail Bond

Why Airbnb Will Probably Win Legal Fight Against San Francisco

San Francisco has picked a fight with Airbnb that it probably can’t win. On Monday, the home-rental business filed a lawsuit against its hometown, saying that San Francisco’s attempt to get Airbnb to help enforce its housing law is illegal. Airbnb has reluctantly gone along with the city’s efforts to regulate the short-term rental market. As it stands, people can rent out their apartments with some restrictions, but they must also register with the city. Enforcing this law has been tricky, so the city’s Board of Supervisors recently passed an update saying websites like Airbnb can be punished if the people listing homes on their sites haven’t registered with the city. Starting next month, Airbnb will face fines of up to $1,000 per day for each unverified listing, and its employees could also face jail time. But it seems unlikely to get that far, according to many attorneys who follow internet law. Websites like Airbnb have immensely broad protections against attempts to hold them liable for the actions of their users. Airbnb’s suit cites section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, widely considered the most revered law among internet companies. It’s the legal protection that keeps Google from being held responsible for the actions of websites its search engine points to and that lets eBay and Amazon run expansive marketplaces where they don’t have complete control over the vendors using their sites.

While Airbnb sets some rules over the people who use its website, the company is allowed to push pretty much all legal liability onto the users themselves. “Imagine if a state or city required eBay to verify that its sellers had the appropriate local business license,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, and an expert in online legal issues. “That would be an indirect, but very clear, limitation on eBay’s abilities to accept listings, and I think that’s what Section 230 precludes.” The law explicitly excluded copyright violation and federal criminal liability from its purview. Other than that, it’s pretty much open season. Courts have repeatedly sided with companies in Airbnb’s position, including websites whose users sold fake autographed sports souvenirs, defamed other users and posted sexually explicit photographs of minors.

One notable case where a website went too far involved a feature on Roommates.com, where people created personal profiles by selecting their gender and race from a series of dropdown menus, then allowing people to filter out, say, black women. Asking such questions violates federal anti-discrimination laws, and a court found that Roommates.com essentially forced people into an illegal situation. But this exception is essentially an illustration of how far the law goes, said Clay Calvert, the director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. “You have to actually show that it requires you to do something illegal,” he said.  In a blog post, Airbnb referred to the law as the “linchpin of the vibrant and successful internet we know today.” By all accounts, San Francisco will face a challenging road convincing a judge that its new policy doesn’t run afoul of the rule.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that local laws aren’t a big problem for Airbnb. Its users can still be punished, and Airbnb says that the city has already levied about $700,000 in fines against its hosts. At some point, such fines could have a chilling effect that damages the entire Airbnb economy. On the same day the company filed its suit in San Francisco, Airbnb sent an e-mail to users in New York urging them to pressure Governor Andrew Cuomo into vetoing a law that would punish hosts in that state. But for now, the company suggests that San Francisco continues to go after users who aren’t complying. “Instead of punishing Airbnb for publishing unlawful listings, the city could enforce its short-term rental law directly against hosts who violate it,” Airbnb says in its suit.

Read more: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-28/why-airbnb-will-probably-win-legal-fight-against-san-francisco

Sanford Bail Bond – Supreme Court will review unusual citizenship law

Source    : US News
By            : MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press
Category : Bail Bond Sanford, Sanford Bail Bond

Supreme Court will review unusual citizenship law

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to referee a dispute about an odd piece of U.S. citizenship law that treats men and women differently. The justices said they will hear a case about a law that applies only to children born outside the U.S. to one parent who is an American and one who is not. The law makes it easier for children whose mother is a citizen to become citizens themselves. Even after reform legislation in 1986, children of American fathers face higher hurdles claiming citizenship for themselves. The federal appeals court in New York struck down the law in the case of Luis Ramon Morales-Santana. He challenged the law and asserted he is a U.S. citizen after U.S. authorities sought to deport him after convictions for robbery and attempted murder.

Morales-Santana is the son a of a Dominican mother and an American father, who left Puerto Rico for the Dominican Republic 20 days before his 19th birthday. For people born before 1986 to parents who are not married, their U.S. citizen fathers had to have lived in the U.S. for 10 years, at least five of them after the age of 14. Morales-Santana’s father missed meeting the second part of that requirement by 20 days. American mothers need only have lived in the U.S. continuously for a year before the birth of a child. Changes to immigration law made in 1986 reduced the total residency time for fathers to five years, only two of which had to be after the age of 14.

By contrast, a child born in the United States, regardless of the parents’ nationality, is a U.S. citizen, as is a child born abroad to two American citizens if one of them has ever lived in the United States. The justices attempted to answer this question in 2011, but divided 4-4 with Justice Elena Kagan out of the case because she worked on while serving in the Justice Department. This time around, the case will again be heard by eight justices, but with Kagan taking part.

Read more: usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-06-28/supreme-court-will-review-unusual-citizenship-law

Bondsman in Seminole County – Supreme Court Says No to Guns for Domestic Batterers

Source    :  Mother Jones
By            :  Stephanie Mencimer
Category : Bail Bondsman in Sanford, Bondsman in Seminole County

Supreme Court Says No to Guns for Domestic Batterers

Should domestic abusers who get convicted of minor domestic-violence charges get to keep their right to own guns just because their crimes were merely reckless, as opposed to premeditated? That’s more or less the question the Supreme Court was considering in Voisine v. US, a somewhat obscure case that was languishing on the court’s docket as one of the last cases decided of the term. In a 6-2 opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan, the high court answered that question with a muted “no.” The case challenges a 1996 amendment to the federal Gun Control Act, sponsored and named after the late New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D), that barred people convicted of misdemeanor domestic-violence offenses from owning firearms. Violating the law carried a federal felony charge with a 10-year maximum sentence attached. The law was a triumph for women’s advocates because it recognized that people guilty of domestic violence were rarely charged with felonies and banned from gun ownership, and that there was a documented relationship between domestic violence and gun homicides. The law was designed to keep guns out of the hands of those perps, even when they’d only been convicted of misdemeanors. Over the past 10 years, the gun lobby and some criminal defense groups have made a fairly concerted attack on the Lautenberg Amendment on various fronts to weaken its reach and try to return gun rights to batterers. Voisine is the third such case the court has heard since 2009. The latest defendants to take on the law are Stephen Vosine and William Armstrong III, neither of whom are model citizens. Voisine has a long track record of beating up his significant others. He pleaded guilty to assaulting his girlfriend in 2003, and was convicted again of assaulting a girlfriend in 2005. After receiving an anonymous tip, federal authorities discovered that Voisine had shot and killed a baby bald eagle. They confronted Voisine about the shooting and he turned over a rifle. During a background check, federal authorities discovered his 2003 domestic-assault conviction. In 2011, he was prosecuted both for killing an endangered bird and for illegally possessing a gun after his prior domestic-violence conviction. He pleaded guilty—but reserved his right to appeal—and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

His co-plaintiff, Armstrong, who is also from Maine, was convicted in 2002 and 2008 on a misdemeanor domestic-assault charges for beating his wife. Two years later, Maine police discovered six guns in his possession when they searched his house for marijuana and drug paraphernalia. He was subsequently charged with illegal gun possession and sentenced to three years’ probation. The lower courts have consistently upheld their convictions, but the Supreme Court vacated the sentences in 2014 and sent them back to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals for reconsideration, to ensure that the crimes for which Armstrong and Voisine had been prosecuted were misdemeanor domestic-violence offenses as defined by the federal law. States can choose how to define a crime, and in Maine, the state law defined a misdemeanor domestic-violence offense as one that included crimes committed in the heat of passion—i.e., reckless actions—as opposed to premeditated ones, which are considered more serious. In some cases, a reckless crime might not even result in a serious injury, but only “offensive touching.” The federal law’s definition of the required misdemeanor isn’t exhaustive; it doesn’t talk about a perpetrator’s motivation for an assault in defining domestic-violence crimes. But the appellate court decided that Maine’s definition of a “reckless assault” still met the requirements of the Lautenberg Amendment and could trigger the lifetime ban on gun ownership. The Supreme Court agreed. It weighed a host of different scenarios to try to narrow down the definition of “reckless,” offering up various hypotheticals. A dissenting Justice Clarence Thomas boiled these down to “The Angry Plate Thrower” versus the “Soapy-Handed Husband,” to illustrate the difference between the use of force in a situation when someone who throws a plate in anger near his wife, even if it doesn’t hit her, and someone with soapy hands who “loses his grip on a plate, which then shatters and cuts his wife.” The soapy handed husband could clearly keep his guns, while the plate thrower could not, according to the majority in the ruling against Voisine.

Domestic-violence advocates had feared that a ruling for Voisine and Armstrong could reopen a loophole in the nation’s gun laws that the Lautenberg Amendment was supposed to close. They provided some pretty chilling examples of the types of behavior that, if prosecuted, could have become exempt from triggering the gun ban if  Voisine and Armstrong had prevailed. The National Domestic Violence Hotline included in its brief examples from women calling its hotline to illustrate how “reckless acts” that don’t necessarily result in injury are usually part of a broader campaign to terrorize and control the victim. Among them were stories like these: “My abuser has played Russian Roulette with me before and has pulled the trigger.” “[My] husband once threatened me with a gun when I once wanted to stay up to finish baking Christmas cookies. He is a control freak, so he didn’t want someone to stay up if he was going to bed.”

“He shot a gun at my feet and someone called the police. [He] was arrested on violation of restraining order but gun charges were dropped.” “[He] never fired the pistol, but he would sit on my chest and point it at my head. He would put it right next to my temple.” In briefs in the case, women’s advocates argued that Congress intended for people such as Voisine and Armstrong to lose their gun rights specifically because the justice system has been so bad at prosecuting batterers. Historically, prosecutors have downplayed domestic-violence crimes. Convictions were rare, and even serious assaults were—and often still are—pleaded down to misdemeanor charges. As a result, the misdemeanor convictions often obscured how potentially dangerous the defendant really was, especially if he got his hands on a gun. Their arguments were apparently persuasive. Only one group weighed in on the side of Voisine and Armstrong: Gun Owners of America, a gun rights group that believes the National Rifle Association is too liberal. Its lawyers, who filed an amicus brief in the case—the 10th such filing they’ve made in cases challenging the domestic-violence gun ban—argue a misdemeanor conviction isn’t sufficient grounds to deprive an American citizen of the right to possess a gun. The gun owners found a sympathetic voice in Thomas, who used the case to offer his first questions from the bench in a decade during oral arguments in February.

Read more: motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/supreme-court-says-no-guns-wife-beaters

Seminole County Bail Bonds – Hundreds of new laws set to take effect Friday

Source    :  Roanoke Times
By            : Jim Nolan Richmond Times-Dispatch
Category : Seminole County Bail Bonds, Bail Bondsman in Sanford

Hundreds of new laws set to take effect Friday

New laws soon to be on the books in Virginia affect everything from guns and marriage to school testing, day care facilities and smoking in cars when a young child is present. There are new ethical guidelines for lawmakers and public officials, procedural requirements for handling reports of campus sexual assault, and regulations for fantasy sports gaming in Virginia. Hundreds of bills that the General Assembly passed this year and Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed into law take effect this Friday.  For avid herpetologists and geologists, there are new state designations: The eastern garter snake becomes the official snake of Virginia, and Nelsonite, an igneous rock first discovered in Nelson County, will be the official state rock. Perhaps the most broadly applicable legislative action was embedded in the state’s $105 billion, two-year budget that takes effect Friday — proposed pay raises for state workers and state-supported local government employees, schoolteachers and university faculty. The raises are due to take effect Dec. 1 but would be delayed if revenues fall short by more than 1 percent for the fiscal year that ends Thursday. If that happens, the governor will have to begin a formal reforecast of revenues for the new two-year budget and adjust spending accordingly.

Here’s a look at some of what’s new starting Friday.

Campus sexual assault
McAuliffe signed three measures that emerged from his Task Force on Combating Campus Sexual Violence. The measures require high school family life curricula to educate students on dating violence and other forms of sexual assault; train law enforcement on handling investigations involving sexual trauma; and tighten requirements for retaining physical evidence from sexual assault investigations. Physical evidence recovery kits from victims who initially elect not to report a sexual assault now will be stored for two years or longer.

Day care
Assisted living facilities, adult day care centers, licensed and registered child welfare agencies, and family day homes may not continue to employ workers who have been convicted of violent felonies. The state also stiffened the penalty for unlicensed child care providers, who can be charged with a Class 4 felony — punishable by two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000 — for criminal neglect if a child dies or is seriously injured in their care.

Death penalty
The Department of Corrections will be allowed to use the electric chair as a default method of execution for inmates sentenced to death if the drugs used for lethal injection are not available.

Ethics
Lawmakers backed tweaks to last year’s ethics overhaul, by agreeing that gifts worth less than $20 will not count toward the $100 annual cap on gifts they can accept from a lobbyist or business. The chairmen of the Rules Committees in the House and Senate may exempt from disclosure the costs of travel by a lawmaker to an event they approve. Lobbyists do not have to disclose the names of any official or family member of an official who pays their own way at an event.

Fantasy gaming
Virginia becomes the first state with a legal framework for daily fantasy sports contests offering cash payouts. The legislation requires daily fantasy sites to register with the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and pay an application fee of $50,000. Consumer protections include an age limit that bars anyone younger than 18 from playing.

FOIA
Only those portions of a public record that contain information that can be excluded under the Freedom of Information Act may be withheld from disclosure, not the entire record.

Guns
A package of legislation passed in a compromise deal between Republican lawmakers who back gun rights and the McAuliffe administration, which sought greater restrictions on gun possession. The package expands recognition of out-of-state concealed-carry permits. That reverses Attorney General Mark Herring’s decision last year to sever ties with 25 states that have looser permitting rules than Virginia. The state will enter into reciprocal handgun carry permit agreements with other states that issue verifiable permits and recognize Virginia concealed handgun permits. The Virginia State Police will be available at Virginia gun shows to run voluntary background checks on firearm purchases. Domestic abusers subject to family abuse final protective orders issued by a judge will be required to surrender their firearms to a third party within 24 hours of receiving them or face felony charges.

Health
A hospital will be required to furnish an estimate of the cost of a procedure for which a patient will be responsible upon the patient’s request, at least 72 hours before a scheduled elective procedure, test or service.

Marriage
A new law requires both partners in a marriage to be at least 18 years old or deemed emancipated by a court in order to be married. It removes exceptions in the law that allowed people to marry at 16 with parental or guardian consent, or people younger than 16 to marry in the case of pregnancy and parental or guardian consent.

Proffers
Lawmakers approved major changes to how local governments extract cash and other concessions from residential developers. The measure will bar localities from denying rezoning requests based on “unreasonable” proffer requests.

Smoking
Smoking will be prohibited in cars when a child who is 8 or younger is in the vehicle. Violators are subject to a civil penalty of $100.

SOLs
Lawmakers backed a bill designed to help prepare students for technology jobs. It calls for the Board of Education to incorporate computer science, computational thinking and coding into the Standards of Learning curriculum. Local school boards also are to develop and implement computer science curriculum for students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Read more: roanoke.com/news/politics/hundreds-of-new-laws-set-to-take-effect-friday/article_044f0af4-2876-5cf7-84b4-61e625f09a0e.html

Bail Bond Seminole County – Legal challenges could upend San Francisco’s new Airbnb law

Source     : SF Chronicle
By            : Carolyn Said
Category : Bail Bond Seminole County, Bail Bondsman in Sanford

Legal challenges could upend San Francisco’s new Airbnb law

Can companies be compelled to police their own customers?
That question is at the heart of San Francisco’s latest attempt to rein in vacation rentals in private homes. Last week, the Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to mandate that Airbnb, HomeAway/VRBO, FlipKey and other vacation-rental marketplaces vet listings to make sure hosts are registered with the city — or face steep fines and misdemeanor penalties. The new rule is no different than requiring car-rental companies to verify that customers have driver’s licenses, said Supervisor David Campos, a longtime Airbnb critic who spearheaded what he calls “commonsense changes” with Supervisor Aaron Peskin.

But Airbnb host Keith Freedman had a different analogy. If crime increases in a neighborhood, “I want more police there, not a law that local businesses have to install cameras and hire their own security,” said Freedman, the policy chairman of the Home Sharers Democratic Club, which represents vacation hosts. “Cities should enforce their own laws.” Few observers expect Airbnb to simply comply by dumping the three-quarters of its San Francisco listings that are unregistered. It may mount a legal challenge before the amendment’s July 27 enactment — something that could drag on in court for years. Or it could come to some kind of agreement with the city, working to streamline registration — also a goal of last week’s legislation — and offer more cooperation in enforcing the law.

In April, Airbnb vowed to purge illegal rentals from its site. It said it has since jettisoned 164 San Francisco listings that may have been removing permanent housing from the city’s stock, a primary consideration for lawmakers. “We are currently considering all options to stand up for our community,” the San Francisco company said. Both Expedia’s HomeAway/VRBO and TripAdvisor’s FlipKey said they are assessing San Francisco’s new law.Legal experts said San Francisco’s latest ordinance could get tripped up by a federal law that shields Internet companies from liability for content on their sites, namely Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Some have called the act “the First Amendment of the Internet.”

“Section 230 immunizes a platform for any types of defects or omissions in content provided by third parties,” said David Greene, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Campos said he kept the federal statute in mind when crafting the law and that he thinks it will withstand legal challenges. Internet companies that simply publish listings, such as Craigslist, would in fact be shielded by the act. However, companies such as Airbnb that engage in short-term rentals as their primary business, would not. “Content has nothing to do with it,” he said. “We’re talking about regulating the conduct these platforms engage in to participate in this business. If a company enters the short-term rental business, we have every right to expect and require certain conduct.”

Greene said that point is in dispute. Companies that handle payment processing may or may not be covered by the federal law. (Airbnb handles all payments on its site; HomeAway handles about a third of payments for its hosts; and FlipKey said it handles payments for the majority of its hosts.) StubHub and eBay successfully used Section 230 as a defense in court against restrictions on some of their transactions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation stood behind Visa and MasterCard when they faced legal challenges for processing donations to WikiLeaks, he said. Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said there are two other legal doctrines in addition to Section 230 that could trip up San Francisco’s law. One is the First Amendment. Companies that list vacation rentals “are structurally just publishing other people’s content, so we have all the rules that apply to free speech,” he said. “In cases like this, it would be treated as dissemination of advertising, which is subject to lower First Amendment scrutiny, but still protected.”

Read more:  sfchronicle.com/business/article/Legal-challenges-could-upend-San-Francisco-s-8051062.php

Bail Bondsman in Sanford – New law revises alcohol regulations

Source     : WBKO
By            : BOWLING GREEN
Category : Bail Bondsman in Sanford, Bondsman in Seminole County

New law revises alcohol regulations

Kentucky law makers have passed a bill that revises alcohol regulations. This move encourages expansion in the state’s distilling and brewing industries. One of the owners of White Squirrel Brewery, Sean Stevens, says he pushed for Senate Bill 11, because he saw a future for the craft beer industry in Kentucky.

“I went up to Frankfort a couple times and helped with the lobbying process of getting funding of a sponsor and getting it put on the House and Senate floor.” The new bill revises many alcohol regulations but the biggest things it does, is it gives a chance for local breweries to almost double in size.

“Before if 25,000 barrels, if you reached that, you could not have a bar. It was distribution only. It was 25,000 barrels and now it’s 50,000 barrels basically,” Stevens said. It’s the bar, or tap room, where their revenue comes from. And before, small breweries like White Squirrel could not sell their beer at festivals and farmer’s markets.  But with Senate Bill 11, they can. “If we went to a festival, we had to go through four different avenues before we could get there. And had to pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time getting the proper permits,” Stevens added.

Read more: wbko.com/content/news/New-law-revises-alcohol-regulations-384049041.html

Bail Bond Sanford – Supreme Court backs tech companies over patent trolls

Source    :  Silicon Angle
By            :  Duncan Riley
Category :  Bail Bond Sanford, Sanford Bail Bond

Supreme Court backs tech companies over patent trolls

The United States Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law introduced in 2011 to make it easier to defeat trolls was legal. Under the Patent Office Regulations companies targeted by patent trolls could contest claims in front of the Patent Office instead of a federal judge, making the dispute resolution process both quicker and easier. Patent trolls however hate the rule, claiming that their inability to appear before a court denies them due process, although as is usually the modus operandi with patent trolls what they really mean is that by not being able to drag a case before a court they were less likely to obtain a settlement from companies who were looking to avoid the excessive legal costs involved in a court hearing.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court case involved a company by the name of  Cuozzo Speed Technologies LLC that claimed a patent for an invention for alerting drivers when they are speeding (seriously); GPS technology company Garmin challenged the patent at the Patent Office, “which invalidated the Cuozzo patent after concluding its claims weren’t innovative when viewed against other prior technologies.” Cuzzo Speed Technologies argued that the Patent Office process denied them due process, however, the Supreme Court found that while the Patent Office rules were different than those used by the court, the agency had taken a reasonable approach in its consideration of Garmin’s challenge to Cuzzo’s patent. Justice Stephen Breyer said in his findings that the Patent Office approach “helps to protect the public” by preventing individuals and companies from claiming overly broad patents that “might discourage the use of the invention by a member of the public.”

Winning

The ruling will be particularly beneficial to tech companies such as Apple, Inc. and Alphabet, Inc. who are regularly challenged by patent trolls over even the most trivial of allegedly patented technologies. Since the introduction of the Patent Office regulations, a reported 80 percent of hearings completed so far have seen the cancellation of the patent in question, hence giving more insight as to why patent trolls are attempting to have the rules changed to how they stood prior in 2011. While the regulations as they stand now are an improvement to the pre-2011 rules, what they don’t do is go far enough with preventing patent trolling to begin with, but for tech companies, in particular, any win is a good win on the subject of patent trolling.

Read more: siliconangle.com/blog/2016/06/22/supreme-court-backs-tech-companies-over-patent-trolls/

Sanford Bail Bond – Daily fantasy sports now legal in Missouri

Source    :  Biz Journals
By            :  Brian Feldt
Category :  Sanford Bail Bond , Bail Bond Sanford

Daily fantasy sports now legal in Missouri

The state of Missouri has joined nine other U.S. states in legalizing daily fantasy sports websites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. Gov. Jay Nixon on June 10 signed House Bill 1941 into law, which exempts daily fantasy sports companies from state gambling regulations. Instead, those companies will be regulated as gaming entities, which requires them to pay the Missouri Gaming Commission an application fee of $10,000 and an annual fee of 11.5 percent of the operator’s net revenue in Missouri from the previous year, or $11,500 annually. Those companies must also apply for a license with the commission before Oct. 1. The fees are expected to generate up to $10 million in new revenue for the state, according to State Sen. Joe Keaveny, D-St. Louis. Other states that have passed laws to permit daily fantasy sports include Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Virginia. Another 20 states are considering similar legislation. Illinois is considering outlawing daily fantasy sports.

Users of daily fantasy sports websites bet on games in which they assemble teams of professional athletes and engage in competition based on the players’ statistical performances in real games. The Fantasy Sports Trade Association, in a statement, said Missouri’s law “largely falls in line with the core principals the Fantasy Sports Trade Association seeks with all legislation,”

“The bill recognizes fantasy sports as a game of skill and installs basic consumer protections,” the statement said. “However, the high tax rate will create challenges for small operators. We are in agreement with Representative Scott Fitzpatrick and Senator Eric Schmitt who both spoke out against the taxes and regulations that were added to the bill.” The size of the daily fantasy sports industry is unclear, according to research firm Eilers and Krejcik Gaming. Worth around $3 billion today, the industry could grow to anywhere from $8 billion to $18 billion by 2020 depending on how states react to the industry.

Read more: bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/biznext/2016/06/daily-fantasy-sports-now-legal-in-missouri.html

Bondsman in Seminole County – Supreme Court May Take Action On State Assault Weapon Bans

Source     : Huffington Post
By            : Reuters Release
Category : Bail Bondsman in Sanford, Bondsman in Seminole County

Supreme Court May Take Action On State Assault Weapon Bans

The U.S. Supreme Court may weigh in this week on gun control, an issue smoldering again following the June 12 Orlando massacre, with the justices due to decide whether to hear a challenge by gun rights advocates to assault weapon bans in two states. The Connecticut and New York laws prohibit semiautomatic weapons like the one used by the gunman who fatally shot 49 people at a gay night club in Orlando in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The Supreme Court will announce as soon as Monday whether it will hear the challenge brought by gun rights groups and individual firearms owners asserting that the laws violate the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms. The U.S. Supreme Court may weigh in this week on gun control, an issue smoldering again following the June 12 Orlando massacre, with the justices due to decide whether to hear a challenge by gun rights advocates to assault weapon bans in two states.

The Connecticut and New York laws prohibit semiautomatic weapons like the one used by the gunman who fatally shot 49 people at a gay night club in Orlando in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The Supreme Court will announce as soon as Monday whether it will hear the challenge brought by gun rights groups and individual firearms owners asserting that the laws violate the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms.

Read more: huffingtonpost.com/entry/supreme-court-assault-weapon-ban_us_5766a39ee4b0853f8bf12960

Seminole County Bail Bonds – Supreme Court Rules on Legal Fees in Copyright Cases

Source    :  New York Times
By            :  ADAM LIPTAK
Category :  Seminole County Bail Bonds, Bail Bondsman in Sanford

Supreme Court Rules on Legal Fees in Copyright Cases

The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled that a Thai student who in 2013 won a copyright case involving imported textbooks should have another chance to persuade a lower court that the textbook’s publisher should pay his legal fees. The usual rule in American civil litigation is that each side pays its own lawyers regardless of who wins. But the Copyright Act allows judges to “award a reasonable attorney’s fee to the prevailing party.” Federal appeals courts have applied different standards in deciding when fee awards in copyright cases are warranted. The judge in the student’s case, in New York, awarded him nothing, relying on a decision from the federal appeals court there that focused on whether the losing side’s position had been “objectively reasonable.” The publisher easily met that standard, the judge said, as it had won a $600,000 judgment against the student, won an appeal in 2011 and lost in the Supreme Court by a 6-to-3 vote in 2013.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, said whether the losing side’s position was objectively reasonable should play a major role in the analysis. But she said the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, and the district courts it supervises, may have placed nearly dispositive weight on that one factor. Justice Kagan said other considerations — including motivation, deterrence and compensation — must also play a role in the analysis. But she appeared to suggest that the student, Supap Kirtsaeng, was unlikely to prevail under the correct standard. This was Mr. Kirtsaeng’s second trip to the Supreme Court. In 2013, he prevailed, with six justices agreeing that he had been entitled to help finance his American education by selling textbooks imported from Thailand. Since publishers charged different prices for essentially the same books in the two markets, Justice Kagan wrote on Thursday, there was “a ripe opportunity for arbitrage.” The 2013 ruling, which clarified an ambiguous phrase in the Copyright Act, said imported copyrighted goods were subject to the same rules as goods bought in the United States: Owners of particular copies can do what they like with them.

In the new case, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, No. 15-375, Mr. Kirtsaeng sought more than $2 million in legal fees from John Wiley & Sons, the publisher that had sued him. Even as the Supreme Court handed Mr. Kirtsaeng a modest victory on Thursday, it rejected his main argument. He had said courts should give special consideration to whether the lawsuit in question had helped clarify a difficult and important legal issue. Awarding legal fees to the winning side, he said, would encourage such cases to be litigated. “Kirtsaeng’s proposal would not produce any sure benefits,” Justice Kagan wrote. “Fee awards are a double-edged sword: They increase the reward for a victory — but also enhance the penalty for a defeat.” In a footnote, Justice Kagan considered how Mr. Kirtsaeng himself might have calculated whether to proceed in the earlier case, concluding that the decision probably turned on his appetite for risk. Among his possible reactions, she wrote, were “six of one, half a dozen of the other,” “depends if I’m feeling lucky that day” and “the higher the stakes, the greater the rush.” Mr. Kirtsaeng’s proposed standard, she concluded, was “entirely speculative.”

Read more: nytimes.com/2016/06/17/business/supreme-court-rules-on-legal-fees-in-copyright-cases.html?_r=0