A 21-year-old man from Idaho, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, faces federal charges for attempting to assassinate President Barack Obama.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 1751(c), Ortega-Hernandez could be sentenced for a term of up to life in prison if convicted of the charges.
According to the FBI affidavit attached to the criminal charges (below) and reports, gunshots were heard in the vicinity of the White House last Friday night.
A hat tip to our friend Ed Walters over at FastCase who alerted us to the news that Colorado has proposed adopting a public domain citation format for its Supreme Court and Court of Appeals published opinions. (Yay!) By our count, this means there will now be seventeen states using some form of universal / vendor neutral citation for their court opinions.
A link to the proposal (in PDF) is here. Public comments are welcome on the proposed changes but must be in by December 12, 2011.
I recently blogged about a roadblock in the Cameron Todd Willingham investigation; specifically, the Texas Attorney General’s Office issued an opinion that the examination was outside the scope of the Texas Forensic Science Commission’s investigative authority. Incendiary, a new documentary about the case, is opening across the United States. Incendiary chronicles the original investigation, trial and subsequent investigation by the Commission. It provides an extraordinary look into the Commission proceedings, the science and the defense attorney’s perspective. It picks up where Frontline left off, going even deeper into this long and complicated investigation.
Here is a rundown of October’s highest scoring lawyers on Justia Legal Answers, along with a look at which Onward blog and Facebook posts readers viewed the most.
Justia Legal Answers’ Top 10 Legal Answerers for October 2011
You know I love Halloween, right? Last year I wrote about selling haunted houses. This year it’s Halloween IP. We have two suits queued up in Dockets regarding trademark of Halloween Haunted House brands. It’s time for some trademark awesomeness: who owns the right to scary names?
First up with Happy Halloween, Inc. [seriously] v. Screams, LLC [no, seriously]. Both parties run haunted houses in Texas. According to the complaint, Happy Halloween, Inc. had hosted a website at screams.com for 14 years. Screams, LLC, filed an action to transfer that domain, alleging cyber-squatting and trademark violation. Screams LLC registered the mark “Screams” with the USPTO. The registration was filed on July 15, 1996, and its first use in commerce is listed as May 18, 1996. Happy Halloween registered the domain name screams.com on January 22, 1997, according to the complaint. So, while Screams was technically first, it’s sat on this for 14 years with no action — laches, anyone? Happy Halloween claims that the term “screams” is a “generic term characteristic of the Halloween season.” It denies that it is cybersquatting, and considering the facts, that seems pretty clear.
On Monday, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit extended its decision to keep sealed the videos from Perry v. Schwarzenegger (the federal trial on California’s same-sex marriage initiative, Proposition 8).
It’s the fifth anniversary of Open Access Week and I thought I’d pull together some resources to mark the occasion for folks who might be interested in learning more about its impact on legal scholarship and free law. (NB: Hat tips to Sara Glassmeyer, Rob Richards and our peeps at Legal Research Plus!)
An interesting copyright suit has come across the wires: Astrolable, Inc. v. Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. The complaint alleges that Defendants infringed on the Plaintiff’s copyright assignment to historical time zone information with their Timezone (tz or zoneinfo) database. The Timezone database, also called the Olson Database, is a library of historical timezone information. It is intended primarily for use with computer systems, notably UNIX (from which Mac OS X is derived). That means that time zone information for computers running UNIX and Mac comes from this library, which is included in the operating system.
The tz database was originally compiled by Arthur David Olson at the NIH, and has been edited and maintained by Paul Eggert at UCLA. Olson and Eggert are the named defendants in this complaint. The database was housed on NIH servers until the complaint at issue was filed. ICANN has since taken over the database. This suit is important because UNIX systems rely on updates to the tzdatabase to run time zone information. The complaint was filed by Astrolabe, Inc., a company that sells astrology software. Astrolabe asserts that it is the copyright assignee for the ACS Atlas. It appears that the heart of the complaint is that defendants used ACS’ historical time zone data to populate the tz database.
You hope that your computer is secure. Your clients depend on it, and your law firm’s insurance carrier prefers it.
An unsettling discovery by Stanford University computer science student Feross Aboukhadijeh, however, could test that theory. He says that that a malicious website using Adobe Flash, when combined with ‘Clickjacking,’ could actually turn your webcam and microphone on without you knowing it.
Creepy, eh?
Here is a rundown of September’s highest scoring lawyers on Justia Legal Answers, along with a look at which Onward blog and Facebook posts readers viewed the most.
Justia Legal Answers’ Top 10 Legal Answerers for September 2011
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