Cultivated Compendium

Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts reports on a Congressional hearing held last week on whether the first sale doctrine should apply to digital goods. Buyers of e-books or e-music can't resell those digital goods or leave them behind when they die because they are licensing the goods from companies like Amazon and Apple, Roberts writes. Congressional members were skeptical about creating a digital-based first sale doctrine, but expressed concern that licenses for digital goods were too lopsided against consumers. "The most popular solution to the problem of diminished property rights appears to be better licenses," Roberts concludes.

Some of the leading plaintiffs attorneys in the country are lining up to sue over General Motors' handling of defective ignition switches, the Wall Street Journal's Ashby Jones reports. GM CEO Mary Barra said an internal report prepared by former U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas "demonstrated a 'pattern of incompetence and neglect' in the auto maker's 11-year failure to recall cars equipped with a defective ignition switch," WSJ further reports.

After the article was published, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ordered GM cases to be consolidated in Southern District of New York where GM's bankruptcy is pending.

The Wall Street Journal's Ed Silverman reports on a rare ruling: brand-name drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline must face a Paxil lawsuit from a plaintiff who took the generic version of the drug.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that generic drugmakers can't be held liable for failing to warn consumers of the risk of their products because they have no authority to change the label approved by federal regulators for the brand-name version.

But the Seventh Circuit denied a bid by GSK to dismiss the lawsuit even though the plaintiff took a generic version of Paxil, WSJ reports. GSK's liability stems from designing and labeling the drug, WSJ further reports.

Many in the burgeoning drone industry are frustrated by the Federal Aviation Administration's glacial pace in issuing new rules to regulate the use of these lightweight flying devices and regulators' application of old rules to ground the use of drones for newsgathering and other commercial purposes. Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts suggests the FAA should use a permit system like the one used for motor vehicles. The CEO of Airware, a startup that provides hardware and software to drone businesses, told Gigaom "the best way to resolve the ongoing legal conflicts involving drones is to designate separate airspaces for manned and unmanned aircraft, including a buffer zone between them. Doing so, he said in a recent phone interview, would permit a more relaxed set of rules for drones. Specifically, [CEO Jonathan] Downey suggested this might involve a permit system where drone owners could obtain a license after passing a test."

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb struck down Wisconsin's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, the Wisconsin State Journal reports. “'Quite simply, this case is about liberty and equality, the two cornerstones of the rights protected by the United States Constitution,' U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb wrote in her Friday ruling," according to the Journal. Crabb also wrote that, "'If the state is going to deprive an entire class of citizens of a right as fundamental as marriage, then it must do more than say, ‘this is the way it has always been’ or ‘we’re not ready yet.'"
 

Kristen Hansen, with the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Journal, "'We just don't think that the majority should vote on the civil rights of the minority.'"

Connecticut enacted the strongest gun laws in the country in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting. Now 23 attorney generals from other states are joining a challenge to the constitutionality of those laws, the Connecticut Law Tribune's Jay Stapleton reports. The coalition of attorney generals filed a similar amicus brief to challenge New York's gun laws.

"The coalition claims Connecticut's gun law violates the law established in [the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in District of Columbia v.] Heller by banning versions of the AR–15 semi-automatic rifle, which is popular with hunters and sports shooters. It was also the type of weapon used in the Newtown shootings that killed 26 students and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012," Stapleton writes.

A federal judge in Idaho, while upholding the National Security Agency's surveillance program of telephone records because of legal precedent, urged the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the surveillance is unconstitutional, the Wall Street Journal reported: Judge B. Lynn "Winmill said there is a 'looming gulf'' between a 1979 Supreme Court precedent that allowed the government to gather the phone records of a single suspect, and the NSA program that collects millions of phone records of Americans to build a searchable database, including the time, duration, and numbers dialed. The program doesn't gather the content of calls."

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal of New York Times' reporter James Risen over a lower court ruling that he must identify his confidential source for a national security story, Risen's colleague Adam Liptak reports. Risen could face jail if he refuses to comply with the court order. While the Obama administration said in its brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that there is no evidentiary privilege for reporters not to identify confidential sources who have broken the law, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. hinted that federal prosecutors may not ask for Risen to be jailed for contempt if he refuses to testify, Liptak further reports.

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a draft rule to regulate the carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants, the Wall Street Journal reports. The mandate would require plants to cut their emissions by 30 percent by 2030. EPA is taking comment on the measure as well as another measure that would result in an estimated reduction of carbon emissions by 24 percent in 2025.