Appeals Court Pretty Sure DOJ Use-Of-Force Guidelines Don't Violate Police Officers' 2nd And 4th Amendment Rights

Furnished content.


A few years ago, some Seattle police officers came up with a novel plan to battle DOJ-imposed limits on their use-of-force. Since their union wisely decided to steer clear of this ridiculous legal battle, the officers chose to crowdfund their way into the federal court system.Armed with a little over $3,000 and some particularly dubious arguments, the protesting cops filed a lawsuit claiming their Second and Fourth Amendment rights were being violated by the DOJ's use-of-force restrictions. It did not go well.

The officers' arguments were unsupported by the Constitution or case law, Chief U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said in an opinion issued Monday.[...]Plaintiffs can point to no case establishing that the Second Amendment codified a free-standing right to self-defense, as opposed to case law interpreting the textual Second Amendment rights to “keep and bear arms” in light of their purposes…[...]Nor did she agree with the officers' insistence that the policy violated a "right of self-defense as embedded in the Fourth Amendment," which protects against unreasonable search and seizures. Pechman said the argument grossly misconstrued Fourth Amendment law.

The Ninth Circuit seemed skeptical of Seattle police officers’ claims that a new use-of-force policy mandated by the Department of Justice violates their Second Amendment rights.U.S. Circuit Judge N. Randy Smith told the officers’ attorney he didn’t “have much of an argument” at a three-judge panel appellate hearing on Monday.

If the officers had real concerns about the use-of-force policy, they should have brought them before the federal judge overseeing the police reforms rather than asking an appellate panel to “create a new fundamental constitutional right,” [city attorney Gregory] Narver said.

0 comments, click here to add the first

US Court Upholds Enforceability Of GNU GPL As Both A License And A Contract

Furnished content.


Free software dominates modern computing, from smartphones to supercomputers -- only the desktop remains a stronghold of proprietary code. Most of that free software has the Linux kernel at its heart, and a key element in the success of Linux -- and of thousands of other coding projects -- is the GNU General Public License. Although the first version of the GNU GPL was released by Richard Stallman back in 1989, and version 3 was issued in 2007, there have been surprisingly few court cases examining it and other open source licenses, and whether they are legally watertight.A key case is Jacobsen v. Katzer from 2008. As a detailed Groklaw post at the time explained, the US appeals court held that open source license conditions are enforceable as a copyright condition. Now we have another important judgment, Artifex v. Hancom, that clarifies further the legal basis of open source licenses. It concerns the well-known Ghostscript interpreter for the PostScript language, written originally by L. Peter Deutsch, and sold by the company he founded, Artifex Software. Artifex was a pioneer in adopting a dual-licensing approach for Ghostscript. That is, you could either use the software under the GNU GPL, or you could avoid copyleft's redistribution requirements by taking out a conventional proprietary license.Hancom is a South Korean company that produces Hangul, word-processing software that is primarily used in South Korea as an alternative to Microsoft Word. Artifex says that Hancom incorporated Ghostscript into its Hangul software, but neither sought a proprietary license, nor complied with the terms of the GPL by releasing the source code for the application that incorporated Ghostscript. As a result, Artifex took legal action, alleging copyright infringement and breach of contract. Hancom asked the court to dismiss Artifex's complaint on several grounds, but they were all denied. The most significant ruling is on Hancom's claim that the GNU GPL was not a contract. In her order, embedded below, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley wrote:

The GNU GPL, which is attached to the complaint, provides that the Ghostscript user agrees to its terms if the user does not obtain a commercial license. Plaintiff alleges that Defendant used Ghostscript, did not obtain a commercial license, and represented publicly that its use of Ghostscript was licensed under the GNU GPL. These allegations sufficiently plead the existence of a contract.

there is harm which flows from a party's failure to comply with open source licensing.

Generally, copyright claims may afford plaintiffs more damages and stronger remedies than contract claims. However, contract claims may help a plaintiff pursue a violator's worldwide conduct in a way that jurisdictional limits on copyright claims might not allow. Breach of contract claims may also be able to address reputational harm and other indirect non-economic benefits that a plaintiff might derive from enforcing open source license conditions. A breach of contract claim might also, in certain instances, allow for specific performance of open source obligations.

0 comments, click here to add the first