Cultivated Compendium

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has ruled that Chevron can sue law firm Patton Boggs "for fraud, malicious prosecution and making false statements to the New York court during the titanic legal battle between the U.S. oil giant and one of Washington’s most prestigious law and lobbying firms," The Washington Post reports.

Patton Boggs was hired by Ecuadorian villagers to come up with a strategy to enforce the $18 billion judgment won by plaintiff lawyer Steven Donziger against Chevron for polluting the country's rainforest, Reuters reports. (The award was reduced in 2013 to $9.5 billion.)

Last month, Kaplan ruled Donziger used bribery, fraud and extortion to win the multibillion-dollar judgment, Reuters further reports.

The U.S. Supreme Court seemed skeptical of changing how software patents are enforced during oral argument Monday, Re/code reports: "On Monday, the court heard arguments in a case that could have far-reaching implications for the software industry, as the justices took up the issue of whether the Patent Act authorizes the granting of patents on software based on abstract ideas."

Alice Corp. argues that its patents for its software, designed to reduce the risk of non-payments, were infringed by CLS Bank International, but some of the justices questioned how its patents weren't just a computer version of an unpatentable abstract idea, Re/code said.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case next month that could shape the future of broadcast TV and the contours of copyright law. Aereo, an Internet start-up that streams free broadcast TV over the Internet, argues that a ruling against it would "cripple the entire cloud industry," The Hill reports. Broadcasters argue the streaming services violates their copyrights in their programming.

The U.S. Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments tomorrow on whether software can continue to be patented, The Washington Post reports: "The case, Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, focuses on software built to eliminate 'settlement risk' in currency and financial transactions where money is held in escrow and one party could renege on a deal and leave the other holding the bag. Alice Corp. claims that CLS Bank offers a service that infringes on its patent."

In a 1981 case, the court ruled that patents for inventions that tied a computer program to a real-world application were permissible, but patents involving solely a "mathemetical forumula" were not, The Post reports.

Last week, a divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismissed a case challenging the constitutionality of paying flat fees to Philadelphia defense counsel in capital cases, The Legal Intelligencer's P.J. D'Annunzio reports. Mark Bookman, one of the lawyers who brought the case, told The Legal "'the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had a real opportunity to bring Philadelphia up to, or at least closer to, national standards on how you handle these serious cases. The evidence that this representation is insufficient and has been insufficient for years now is the constant stream of [death penalty] reversals in the state courts and federal courts.”'

The U.S. Supreme Court "appeared likely on Wednesday to protect Secret Service agents from being sued for violating the free speech rights of demonstrators. During arguments in Wood v. Moss, justices of all stripes seemed ready to defer to the Secret Service's need to make split-second decisions to protect the president, without being second-guessed in court," Supreme Court Brief's Tony Mauro reported.

The U.S. Supreme Court appeared split on whether private for-profit companies have to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives to their employees, even if it violates their owners' religious beliefs, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy "asked skeptical questions of both sides, but one interaction with US Solicitor General Donald Verrilli might signal trouble for the Obama administration’s position. Kennedy asked Mr. Verrilli whether the administration’s position might mean that for-profit corporations could be forced to pay for abortions for their employees regardless of any religious objections of company owners. 'No,' Verrilli said immediately. A federal law prohibits such a government command, he said. 'But your reasoning would permit that,' Kennedy persisted."

Tony Mauro, writing in Supreme Court Brief, reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has no plans to provide wider access to the court. The Coalition of Court Transparency, a network of media and open-access organizations, had asked for broadcast of court proceedings or the same-day release of audio from oral transcripts, Mauro also reports.

President Barack Obama plans to get the National Security Agency out of the business of collecting phone call records in bulk, The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports: "Under the proposal, they said, the N.S.A. would end its systematic collection of data about Americans’ calling habits. The bulk records would stay in the hands of phone companies, which would not be required to retain the data for any longer than they normally would. And the N.S.A. could obtain specific records only with permission from a judge, using a new kind of court order." A House Intelligence Committee would allow the NSA to issue subpoenas for specific phone records without judicial approval, The Times also reports.