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Supreme Court

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The Supreme Court’s ruling on the claim of immunity by former President Donald Trump was condemned in a dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and President Joe Biden afterward.

The nation was rocked on Monday (July 1), as the Supreme Court issued its ruling on former President Donald Trump’s claims of absolute immunity for his actions in office. The vote was 6 – 3, as all of the conservative justices including Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that Trump was entitled to absolute immunity for acts carried out in his official capacity as president, but also ruled that not all of those acts were official. The ruling was seen as a major win for Trump as his trial to determine his role in the events leading up to the January 6 insurrection will now not take place until after the November presidential elections.

The three liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented, with Sotomayor delivering a blistering opinion underscoring the severity of what took place. “Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency,” Sotomayor wrote, pointedly criticizing their conservative colleagues and Roberts, who authored the ruling. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” She would end the dissent with “The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.”
Sotomayor’s opinion also called out how the majority – including Trump-appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Comey Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh – didn’t offer clear guidelines as to what is deemed official. President Joe Biden issued a nationwide address on Monday evening noting that “America will have to render a judgment about Donald Trump’s behavior” and said the ruling “almost certainly means that there are almost no limits to what the president can do. “This is a fundamentally new principle,” Biden said. “It’s a dangerous precedent, because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law.” Biden also highlighted the danger apparent if Trump returns to office in November urging people to vote for democracy, stating that he “will be even more emboldened to do whatever he pleases whenever he wants to do it.” 

When the U.S. Supreme Court’s nine justices released their annual financial disclosures on Friday (June 7), Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported a cooler-than-usual line item: that Beyoncé had personally gifted her four concert tickets.
In a yearly report required by federal ethics laws, Justice Jackson listed her various investments, as well as a nearly $1 million book advance she received from Penguin Random House for her Lovely One memoir set to hit bookshelves this fall.

But the most notable item was under gifts, where the justice listed “Concert Tickets (4),” valued at $3,711. The source of those tickets? “Beyonce Knowles-Carter.”

Trending on Billboard

The filing, obtained by Billboard, did not include any more information, like what particular shows Justice Jackson had attended or how KBJ and Queen Bey had connected. A spokesperson for Beyoncé did not immediately return a request for comment.

This year’s SCOTUS disclosures have drawn far greater attention than usual, following revelations last year that Justice Clarence Thomas had received undisclosed expensive gifts, including trips aboard a private plane, from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. In his own report on Friday, Justice Thomas formally amended the disputed trips to his earlier filings but did not list any new travel reimbursements for 2023.

Members of the federal judiciary are not barred from owning investments, earning outside income or even accepting gifts like expensive concert tickets. But they must disclose such income to avoid any potential conflicts of interest involving cases that they’re tasked with deciding.

When faced with a financial conflict of interest — or even the appearance of such bias — lower federal judges are required to recuse themselves from cases. In a new code of conduct issued last year after the Thomas-Crow uproar, the high court agreed to follow essentially those same rules. But those new regulations noted that recusals are harder at the Supreme Court, where a justice cannot simply be replaced by another judge.

In the case of Justice Jackson, such questions would only arise if Beyoncé had business before the high court — an outcome that’s not impossible, given the rash of copyright litigation in the music industry, but seems unlikely any time soon.

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The whitest section of Baton Rouge, the Black-majority Louisiana state capital, is now the newly-incorporated city of St. George. The state Supreme Court overturned the rulings of lower courts in what advocates for the change are excited about while others, including the Baton Rouge’s NAACP chapter, are calling it a modern-day secession.

According to WGXA, Norman Browning, the St. George Transition District Chairman, called last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling “a historical and exciting day for the City of St George citizens” and vowed to “build an efficient, productive, and vibrant city while contributing to a thriving East Baton Rouge Parish.”
Well, here’s what the NAACP had to say about all of that:

“The St. George plan poses significant risks to our education system, threatens the continuity of critical programs, and challenges community representation. The creation of a new municipality introduces considerable uncertainty around funding allocation for our schools, jeopardizing the cornerstone of our community’s future: education.”
For the record, this decision was the culmination of a yearslong battle between proponents of the new city and opponents, many of whom view the move as a microcosm of recourse-siphoning colonization. Up until now, the latter group was winning that battle in the courts.
Here’s a little history on the matter reported by the Advocate:
Baton Rouge leaders took St. George organizers to court in 2019 over the proposed city, just two weeks after 54% of voters living within the proposed city’s limits voted “yes” on the incorporation in a November election.
Baton Rouge leaders argued in their petition — and had argued for years leading up to the election — that the new city would financially cripple Baton Rouge’s city-parish services and force layoffs by taking away an estimated $48.3 million in annual tax revenue. They also argued that St. George’s proposed budget was inaccurate and that it’d actually operate with a deficit.
Twice the courts have sided with Baton Rouge and shot down the proposed city, once in 2022 when a district judge ruled that St. George couldn’t operate with a balanced budget and was “unreasonable,” and again last year when the First Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that St. George organizers hadn’t followed state law for getting on the election ballot.

The fight for St. George preceded the 2019 election by a decade — it originally started out as a movement to create a separate, independent school district before evolving over the course of several years into a full campaign to create a new city.
Organizers for St. George, who reside in the predominantly White and affluent Southeast corner of the parish, said for years that the city-parish government and school system were poorly run and that they wanted more localized control of tax dollars.
St. George is comprised of 68,000 residents, only about 12% of whom are Black, which is why opponents have argued that the incorporation proposal was essentially segregation by another name and inherently racist. The Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t really address whether or not the move is racist, the justices simply argued that the St. George organizers followed the proper steps for incorporation and that it would provide its residents with proper public services.
But the question remains: At what cost to other Baton Rouge residents?

It seems that even some members of the U.S. Supreme Court are Swifties.
Capping off a year in which Taylor Swift’s name has repeatedly been mentioned on Capitol Hill, at the Department of Justice and on NFL broadcasts, it came up Tuesday during Supreme Court arguments in a major case over social media and the First Amendment.

As part of a legal hypothetical aimed at probing the questions in the case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked an attorney from the U.S. solicitor general’s office a question about how court should “evaluate a government employee controlling access to private property.”

“What if we have, you know, a big concert, Taylor Swift has a big concert in a private … area, a park something, and the police recognize there are going to be large crowds, et cetera, and so they come and they help with the screening of the bags and they, you know, kick out people who are rowdy,” Jackson asked. “Because it’s private, we would say that’s not state action?”

The case before the justices (Lindke v. Freed) is about whether or not public officials, including presidents, can block users on social media platforms like Facebook. Put another way: When is a government employee’s use of social media a “state action,” which is tightly governed by the First Amendment? And when is it just the action of a private citizen, which is not?

In her question, Jackson was trying to use the Taylor concert to illustrate the difficulty of pinpointing that dividing line, and testing one theory advanced by solicitor general’s office. Police are obviously agents of the government, but would their actions during such a private Swift concert not be an action by the state?

In her answer, Assistant U.S. Solicitor General Masha Hansford said the officers’ actions should still be treated as “state action” even at the Swift concert, since they would still be “carrying out their official duties.” But Justice Jackson pushed the question further.

“But Taylor Swift could have hired [a private security guard],” Jackson said. “I mean, they’re not doing anything more than a private security guard could have done, right? So what makes it that they are [engaging in] state action?”

Though Swift herself has never been directly involved in a Supreme Court case, Tuesday’s arguments were not the first time her name has come up at SCOTUS.

During arguments in a different case back in 2021, the justices repeatedly cited Swift’s lawsuit against a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who the superstar had claimed groped her at photoshoot. In that case, Swift sought only sought $1 in so-called “nominal damages” against Mueller – a legal tactic used in cases in which litigants want to prove a point but aren’t seeking a big payday.

The 2021 case before the justices dealt with that very same issue, and they repeatedly raised Swift’s case as a comparison.

“I’m not really interested in your money,” Justice Elena Kagan at the time, speaking from Swift’s point of view. “I just want a dollar, and that dollar is going to represent something both to me and to the world of women who have experienced what I’ve experienced.”

“What Taylor Swift wanted was, you know, vindication of the moral right, the legal right, that sexual assault is reprehensible and wrong,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett added later during the same arguments.

Maybe Swift’s case had an impact: Two months later, the Supreme Court ruled that litigants could indeed sue over the same kind of nominal damages Taylor had won against Mueller.

Back in 2018, when music producer Sherman Nealy filed a lawsuit against Warner Music Group, it was just a run-of-the-mill copyright case. Nealy claimed that Flo Rida’s 2008 tune “In the Ayer” featured an unlicensed sample of “Jam the Box,” a 1984 track released by Pretty Tony that he owns.

It’s the same kind of claim that’s made in federal courts every day.

But five years later, Nealy’s lawsuit is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will use it as a vehicle to answer big unresolved questions about how much money can be awarded in copyright cases. Are those damages limited to just the last three years before a case was filed? Or can they range back decades, adding potentially many more millions to the total?

The high court’s eventual ruling, which the justices will issue next spring, will apply to all forms of copyrighted works, but the music industry is paying particularly close attention. In a filing earlier this year, record labels and music publishers called the case “exceptionally important” to their business.

Pay After Delay?

The controversy at the center of the case against Warner dates back to 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled that the movie studio MGM could be sued for copyright infringement over Raging Bull, even though the case was filed decades after the Martin Scorsese-directed film had first been released in 1980. The studio argued that long delay was unfair, but the justices pointed out that the Copyright Act has a three-year statute of limitations that resets with every new infringement.

Under the court’s interpretation of the law, as long as copies of an allegedly infringing book, song or movie had been sold during the three years prior to the lawsuit, it was fair game for a copyright case. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that ruling led to a surge in long-delayed infringement cases, including a high-profile lawsuit against Led Zeppelin over the 1971 song “Stairway To Heaven.”

But like many Supreme Court decisions, the Raging Bull ruling ultimately raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them: if you can sue many years later, how far back can you seek damages? If you successfully sue someone in 2023 over a song that came out in 1995, can you demand payment based on 27 years of illegal sales?

In the Raging Bull ruling, the Supreme Court seemed to say no. In her opinion, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was fairly clear: “A successful plaintiff can gain retrospective relief only three years back from the time of suit. No recovery may be had for infringement in earlier years. Profits made in those years remain the defendant’s to keep.”

In the years since, the New York-centric U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has taken that language literally, ruling a copyright accuser cannot win damages for any for any conduct older than three years – full stop. If you wait to sue over a hit song from the 1990s, you cannot tap into those huge profits when you win the lawsuit.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (covering California) disagrees. If you can prove that you only recently “discovered” the fact that your copyright was infringed, the Ninth Circuit says you can seek damages going back all the way to all the way back to the very first infringement – potentially decades worth of penalties.

That means the two courts that contain the vast majority of the country’s creative industries are directly divided over how copyright law works – a so-called “circuit split” that the Supreme Court is tasked with correcting.

Heading To Court

Nealy sued Atlantic Records, Warner Chappell and Artist Publishing Group in Florida federal court in 2018, arguing he had never actually granted them a valid license for his “Jam the Box” to be sampled in Flo Rida’s “In the Ayer,” which reached No. 9 on the Hot 100 after being released in July 2008.

In 2021, the judge overseeing the case cited Raging Bull and ruled that Nealy couldn’t win any money from earlier than 2015. Though Nealy said he had only learned of the illegal sample in 2016 and wanted damages going all the way back to 2008, the judge cited the Supreme Court’s “binding precedent” that had “explicitly delimited damages to the three years prior.”

But earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned that ruling. Siding with the Ninth Circuit’s approach, the appeals court ruled that Nealy’s late discovery of the infringement was a different situation than the one dealt with in Raging Bull – and that any similar “discovery rule” cases would be allowed to seek damages as far back as they went.

Warner quickly appealed that decision to the Supreme Court. Repped by elite SCOTUS attorney Kannon Shanmugam of the law firm Paul Weiss, the company argued in a May petition that the “discovery” approach would unfairly expand the “financial exposure” of a copyright defendant and potentially lead to frivolous lawsuits that aimed to “extract settlements.”

“Deprived of a predictable limitations period and faced with expensive, time-consuming, and difficult litigation in order to defend years-old uses of copyrighted works, defendants will often be left with no choice but to settle claims early even in the absence of wrongdoing—or potentially never enter valuable agreements in the first place,” Shanmugam wrote for his client.

“Vitally Important”

The phrases “retroactive relief” and “three-year lookback period” might make your eyes glaze over, but the Nealy v. Warner case has big implications for copyright-heavy industries like music.

After the Raging Bull ruling dropped in 2014, artists and labels saw a rash of long-delayed cases. The lawsuit against Led Zeppelin – which resulted in more than six years of costly litigation before the band was ultimately cleared of all wrongdoing – was the most prominent, but it was just one of many. Meatloaf was sued over his 1993 song “I’d Do Anything For Love”; U2 was accused of ripping off its 1991 hit “The Fly”; and another case claimed that Notorious B.I.G.’s 1993 hit “Party and Bullshit” featured an unlicensed sample.

If the Supreme Court eventually rules in favor of Nealy, it would almost certainly encourage more age-old cases, creating a far larger potential prize for a successful accuser. As Nealy’s attorneys argued at an earlier stage of his case, when it comes to years-old copyright claims, “the vast bulk of damages” will typically fall outside the three-year limit.

Labels and publishers are watching the case closely. In a June brief at the Supreme Court, the Recording Industry Association of America and National Music Publishers’ Association didn’t advocate for either camp, but simply urged the justices to take up a case that is “vitally important to the music industry.”

“Because copyrights are the music industry’s most consequential asset, music labels and music publishers regularly find themselves both enforcing and defending copy right lawsuits,” lawyers for RIAA and NMPA wrote. “Without a clear national rule setting the temporal limits of recoverable damages, amici and their members face serious uncertainty.”

The U.S. Department of Justice is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to avoid a case alleging Google stole millions of song lyrics from the music database Genius, calling it a “poor vehicle” for a high court showdown.
Genius — a platform that lets users add and annotate lyrics — wants the justices to revive its lawsuit, which claims that Google improperly used the site’s carefully-transcribed content for its search results, after the case was dismissed by a lower court last year.

But in a brief filed Tuesday (May 23), the U.S. Solicitor General told the Supreme Court to steer clear. It said the case was a “poor vehicle” for reviewing the issues in the case, and that the lower court did not appear to have done anything particularly novel when it dismissed the case against Google.

“In the view of the United States, the petition for a writ of certiorari should be denied,” the government wrote.

Genius sued the tech giant in 2019, claiming Google had stolen the site’s carefully-transcribed content for its own “information boxes” in search results, essentially free-riding on the “time, labor, systems and resources” that go into creating such a service. In a splashy twist, Genius said it had used a secret code buried within lyrics that spelled out REDHANDED to prove Google’s wrongdoing.

Though it sounds like a copyright case, Genius didn’t actually accuse Google of stealing any intellectual property. That’s because it doesn’t own any; songwriters and publishers own the rights to lyrics, and both Google and Genius pay for the same licenses to display them. Instead, Genius argued it had spent time and money transcribing and compiling “authoritative” versions of lyrics, and that Google had breached the site’s terms of service by “exploiting” them without permission.

But in March, that distinction proved fatal for Genius. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dismissed the case, ruling that only the actual copyright owners — songwriters or publishers — could have filed such a case, not a site that merely transcribed the lyrics. In technical terms, the court said the case was “preempted” by federal copyright law, meaning that the accusations from Genius were so similar to a copyright claim that they could only have been filed that way.

In taking the case to the Supreme Court, Genius argued the ruling would be a disaster for websites that spend time and money to aggregate user-generated content online. Such companies should be allowed to protect that effort against clear copycats, the company said, even if they don’t hold the copyright. “Big-tech companies like Google don’t need any assists from an overly broad view of copyright preemption,” the company wrote.

Such petitions are always a long shot since the Supreme Court takes less than 2% of the 7,000 cases it receives each year. But in December, the justices asked the DOJ to weigh in on whether it should take the Genius case.

In Tuesday’s filing, the DOJ said firmly that it should not — arguing, among other things, that the lower court’s ruling for Google had been largely correct. Though the agency had quibbles with some of the lower court’s analysis, it said Genius was essentially using contract law to claim the same rights as a copyright owner — the exact scenario in which such claims can be “preempted” by federal law.

“In substance, petitioner asserts a right to prevent commercial copying of its lyric transcriptions by all persons who gain access to them, without regard to any express manifestation of consent by website visitors,” the agency wrote.

The Supreme Court will now decide whether or not to hear the case; a decision on that question should arrive in the next several months. A spokesperson for Genius did not immediately return a request for comment on the DOJ’s filing.

Read the DOJ’s entire brief HERE.

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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginny Thomas, are accused of hiding a slate of luxury trips gifted to them by a wealthy GOP donor according to a new report. These trips took place several times over the past two decades but were never reported on tax filings.
Pro Publica published an in-depth report regarding the trips that Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife took on behalf of real estate magnate, Harlan Crow, who is from Dallas, Texas. Crow is a known GOP donor with deep pockets, having delivered millions in donations to several Republican Party and conservative campaigns.

In the aforementioned report, the publication reveals that the Thomases traveled to faraway destinations such as Indonesia on Crow’s dime, which included island-hopping on a superyacht. Pro Publica said of one 2019 trip the couple took, the costs would’ve gone just north of $500,000.
It appears that Thomas has taken annual trips with Crow but failed to disclose details according to the investigative report. Along with the yacht trips, Thomas has flown on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000, an aircraft that costs range between $26 to as high as $50 million. Thomas has also traveled to the all-male exclusive retreat, the Bohemian Grove alongside Crow and spent time at Crow’s East Texas ranch. Further, Thomas takes an annual week-long summer trip to Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
The failure to disclose the gifts might be a violation of a law passed after the Watergate scandal in the 1970s which requires justices, judges, federal officials, and members of Congress to disclose large financial gifts and expensive trips under the guise of gifts.
Pro Publica obtained a statement from Crow explaining the nature of the gifts. A portion of it can be read below:
On a number of occasions, we have made contributions to projects celebrating the life and legacy of Justice Thomas, just as we have done with other great leaders and historically significant figures. He and Ginni never asked us to do any of this. We did so because we believe Justice Thomas to be one of the greatest Americans of our time, and we believe it is important to make sure as many people as possible learn about him, remember him, and understand the ideals for which he stands. We will continue to support projects that advance this goal.
This report comes as Thomas’ wife, Ginny, is under heavy scrutiny due to her ties to conservative groups and her position as an activist among her political contemporaries. Crow has also donated to an organization helmed by Mrs. Thomas.
Justice Clarence Thomas did not respond to the publication’s questions.

Photo: Drew Angerer / Getty

The U.S. Supreme Court looks like it might be about to jump into a lawsuit filed by the music database Genius that accuses Google of illegally copying the site’s lyrics and posting them in search results.

After a lower court dismissed the case in March, Genius – a platform that lets users add and annotate lyrics – asked the high court to hear the case and overturn the ruling. Though it called the ruling “unjust” and “absurd,” such petitions are always a long shot; the Supreme Court takes less than 2% of the 7000 cases it receives each year.

But the odds for Genius just got better. In an order Monday, the justices asked the U.S. Solicitor General to file briefs in the case “expressing the views of the United States” on whether or not the court should hear the case against Google.

That kind of request (a “call for the view of the Solicitor General,” or CVSG, in SCOTUS parlance) indicates that the justices think the issues in the case might be significant enough for the court to tackle. Genius has warned that the ruling for Google threatens “a vast swath of internet businesses”; Google says that’s “alarmist hyperbole” and the case does not deserve the high court’s time.

Neither Genius nor Google immediately returned requests for comment on Tuesday.

Genius sued the tech giant in 2019, claiming Google had stolen the site’s carefully-transcribed content  for its own “information boxes” in search results, essentially free-riding on the “time, labor, systems and resources” that goes into creating such a service. In a splashy twist, Genius said it had used a secret code buried within lyrics that spelled out REDHANDED to prove Google’s wrongdoing.

Though it sounds like a copyright case, Genius didn’t actually accuse Google of stealing any intellectual property. That’s because it doesn’t own any; songwriters and publishers own the rights to lyrics, and both Google and Genius pay for the same licenses to display them. Instead, Genius argued it had spent time and money transcribing and compiling “authoritative” versions of lyrics, and that Google had breached the site’s terms of service by “exploiting” them without permission.

But in March, that distinction proved fatal for Genius. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dismissed the case, ruling that only the actual copyright owners – songwriters or publishers – could have filed such a case, not a site that merely transcribed the lyrics. In technical terms, the court said the case was “preempted” by federal copyright law, meaning that the accusations from Genius were so similar to a copyright claim that they could only have been filed that way.

In taking the case to the Supreme Court in August, Genius argued the ruling would be a disaster for websites that spend time and money to aggregate user-generated content online. Such companies should be allowed to protect that effort against clear copycats, the company said, even if they don’t hold copyrights.

“It serves no public purpose … to bar these companies from enforcing their contracts so that behemoths like Google can vacuum up content and increase their internet dominance,” Genius wrote. “Big-tech companies like Google don’t need any assists from an overly broad view of copyright preemption; they already control vast swaths of the internet, to the public’s detriment.”

Google obviously disagrees. In a response to the Supreme Court, the company urged the justices to avoid the case and reject Genius’s “alarmist hyperbole,” arguing that the lower ruling was “plainly correct.” Google said Genius was trying to use an agreement “inconspicuously tucked behind a tiny link” to create “pseudo-copyright” control over songs written by other people.

“Genius does not own the copyrights to any of the lyrics. Genius nevertheless wants to prevent any website visitor from reproducing or publicly displaying the lyrics,” Google’s lawyers wrote. “Its solution? Ignore the true copyright owners and invent new rights through a purported contract.”