Cultivated Compendium

While some New Mexico county clerks are issuing same-sex marriage licenses, one county is not doing so after a local judge put a case on hold-pending a ruling on same-sex marriage by the New Mexico Supreme Court. New Mexico's laws are silent on whether same-sex marriages are prohibited or allowable. That state's Supreme Court is picking up the issue after "clerks from all of New Mexico’s 33 counties voted Aug. 28 to seek a ruling from the high court on the legality of same-sex marriage," the Rio Rancho Observer reports. 

A federal judge from the Middle District of Pennsylvania has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to require farmers and developers and others to reduce the amount of pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay watershed upstream from the terrifically polluted bay. The Washington Post reports the six-state effort is one of the most sweeping efforts ever to address pollution.

After the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that a wedding photographer's refusal to photograph same-sex weddings violates the state's Human Rights Act, the photographer is seeking certiorari in the US Supreme Court. SCOTUS Blog reports that the photography business argues that complying with the law forces them to violate their Christian beliefs and violates their constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. If the court takes up the issue it could set the parameters on how far protections for gay Americans will extend.

After a hearing officer from Connecticut's Freedom of Information Commission recommended that 911 calls related to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting  in Newtown be released, a prosecutor has objected on the grounds, among others, that the commission does not have jurisdiction and that the recommendation would violate a new state law exempting many records of the shooting from the right-to-know arena. The media outlets seeking the information want to examine how law enforcement responded to the school shooting. The full commission will hear the case later this month.

Almost 40 years ago, Arizona adopted a judicial merit-selection system in which a nonpartisan commission recommends a panel of at least three candidates for judicial vacancies, and the governor must make his or her judicial appointment out of those nominees. Then Arizona enacted a law this spring requiring that the commission submit at least five nominees to the governor unless two-thirds of the commission rejected an applicant. Today, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the law violates that state's consitution. Court reformers, including the Brennan Center for Justice and Justice at Stake, opposed the change. According to Justice at Stake, the law "was an attempt by legislators to throw open the courtroom doors to greater political influence on the judiciary." Here's the full statement from Justice at Stake: http://www.justiceatstake.org/newsroom/press-releases-16824/?jas_applaud...

After the British phone-hacking scandal led to the Leveson report, libel reform is on the horizon. One possible change is to make it so losing plaintiffs would only have to pay their legal costs, not the costs of their winning opponents.

Yahoo is softening CEO Marissa Mayer's remark this week that the reason the firm isn't doing more to push back against court orders that the tech firm can't reveal how much surveillance has been requested the government is because doing so would result in imprisonment on grounds of treason.

A Yahoo spokeswoman, according to the Wall Street Journal, explained: '"The point is that Yahoo fought in lower court and then again in appellate court, and we lost,' said spokeswoman Sara Gorman by email. 'At that point, failure to comply would be in contempt of valid legal process that had undergone two levels of federal court review, and could have led to incarceration.”'

PBS NewsHour has a fascinating transcript of an interview with the CEO of Aereo, one of the new subscription streaming services available to "space-shift" and "time-shift" free TV broadcasts to our computers and mobile devices. Aereo was plainly designed to get around copyright restrictions on public performance rights by being set up with individualized antennas for each customer, and Aereo CEO argues that not only does his technology not violate black-letter copyright law but that it also does not violate the spirit of the law.

Here's an excerpt:

"HARI SREENIVASAN: So, you have got the antenna farms that you're building, essentially. If I'm a customer, I have one particular antenna inside of the Aereo room, so to speak.

But does it seem like a technicality, when you actually don't need 5,000 antennas in a room? You're saying it's to be by the letter of the law. Are you violating the spirit of the law?

But does it seem like a technicality, when you actually don't need 5,000 antennas in a room? You're saying it's to be by the letter of the law. Are you violating the spirit of the law?

CHET KANOJIA: Not at all. I think Congress always intended that consumers to have the ability to have an antenna.

And it's a simple manifestation of that, saying, well, that's what the intent was, the consumer can have an antenna. So, whether I put it in my window or my roof or my neighbor's roof, those aren't restrictions that Congress ever intended or proposed.

So, I think it complies with actually the spirit of the law as well, and perhaps more so, because the idea that consumers should have that choice was always intended by Congress."

Electronic health records are going to become more and more prevalent as the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services have offered payments to health-care providers to implement EHRS with 'meaningful use': http://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/meaningful-use

But with this new way of managing patient information and records comes likely problems, including medical identity theft. Gigaom reports on a survey that finds that medical identity theft is rising:

"According to a new survey from the Ponemon Institute, an independent group that focuses on privacy and data security, medical identity theft is on the rise: since 2012, the number of people affected by medical identity theft has increased nearly 20 percent. The survey, which was sponsored by the Medical Identity Fraud Alliance and ID Experts, found that a total of about 1.84 million people in the U.S. have been affected."

Aereo, the television digital distributor, is arguing that an injunction entered in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against its competitor, FilmOn X, does not affect its legal grounds to rebroadcast free TV programming over the Internet because it uses different technology. Hearst, which has a TV station in the Boston area, argues in the District of Massachusetts that the D.C. injunction against Aereo-competitor FilmOn X (once known as Aereokiller) shows that the use of individual antennas to rebroadcast its copyrighted television content does not defeat its public performance rights.