Welcome back to Legal Geek! The topic this week is whether college athletes will succeed in bids to unionize, and the implications of such an action.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp08
Although the sports world and the nerd world typically share a small window of shared fandom, there are a select few of us who enjoy both worlds. And when a top-flight school like Northwestern rocks the college football world by having the football team petition to unionize as employees of the university, more than just sports fans should pay attention to this fascinating legal case.
When Northwestern college football players asked the National Labor Relations Board to recognize the team as a union, most legal pundits thought the petition would be denied. However, the smart kids and legal counsel won the day this week when the NLRB ruled that the football players are actually employees and can unionize to collectively bargain for benefits, including long-term worker's compensation coverage and perhaps even payment.
While Northwestern University will certainly appeal and fight this, the ruling appears to be sound in reasoning and will be different to overturn. This is yet another chink in the armor for college athletics, where department heads get rich while athletes struggle to make ends meet. A major conference football team brings in millions in revenue but sees only a miniscule percentage of that in scholarships and stipends. A shining example of this hypocrisy hit the news this week when Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith received an $18K bonus for an individual OSU wrestler winning a national championship. Needless to say, the wrestler will see none of that money.
Although public universities are held to state law standards unlike private schools like Northwestern, this NLRB ruling could be the first big step in ensuring that these athletes get better benefits and a bigger piece of the money pie they create. That's a better situation for all involved, as it may encourage players to stay in college athletics longer, thereby improving college sports and also the level of incoming professional athletes as well.
However, it will also dramatically change collegiate athletics, as the bigger sports like football and basketball may be subject to much different rules like a semi-pro league rather than other sports. Thanks to equality laws and regulations like Title IX, this could be a Pandora's box for the NCAA. To put it bluntly, this March Madness may just be the beginning.
Bottom line: College athletics is about to undergo a fascinating sea change, as players bargain for more benefits and perhaps even royalty rights from their likenesses in other ongoing legal battles. For sports geeks, this could fundamentally change the sports we love in ways hard to comprehend now.
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Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy or in the comments below.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Monday, March 17, 2014
Legal Geek No. 7: Actor Copyrights and How Appeals Courts Work
Welcome back to Legal Geek! The topic this week updates a recent story on actor's copyrights to help answer a listener question on how appeals work.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp07
A listener Robert has asked for a brief overview of how appeals work, likely relative to the ongoing court battle over the Innocence of Muslims movie trailer discussed on a previous segment.
As a reminder, Judge Kozinski and a three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that actors have some sort of limited copyright in their performance in a film. This extension of traditional copyright allowed the court to order Youtube and Google to take down the controversial movie trailer.
Since the ruling, the U.S. Copyright Office has denied registration to the very copyright that the Ninth Circuit panel based this opinion upon. As a result, Google immediately petitioned for a rehearing of the takedown order in front of a larger panel of Ninth Circuit judges called an en banc hearing. That request has been denied, but Google still has options.
Federal lawsuits generally begin in District Courts, which are 94 local/regional courts across the country with at least one in each state. Appeals from District Court decisions go to one of the 12 regional Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Ninth Circuit covers many of the westernmost states, for example. Three judge panels are typically used, but these decisions can be overturned by the en banc rehearings mentioned previously or by the Supreme Court.
Thus, to keep it simple, Google and Youtube will continue to fight this legal battle in the Ninth Circuit until all options are exhausted, and then if still unsuccessful, a petition for a Supreme Court hearing will happen. The Supreme Court typically only gets involved in important questions about Constitutional law, and the proper scope of copyright would be a good issue in view of the different opinions of the executive branch at the Copyright Office and the judicial branch at the Ninth Circuit.
Bottom line: The news is bad for Google this week, and Innocence of Muslims will get taken down based on a questionably-reasoned decision. But this critical copyright fight is not over until the Supreme Court says it is over.
Thanks again to Robert for the question.
------
Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy or in the comments below.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp07
A listener Robert has asked for a brief overview of how appeals work, likely relative to the ongoing court battle over the Innocence of Muslims movie trailer discussed on a previous segment.
As a reminder, Judge Kozinski and a three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that actors have some sort of limited copyright in their performance in a film. This extension of traditional copyright allowed the court to order Youtube and Google to take down the controversial movie trailer.
Since the ruling, the U.S. Copyright Office has denied registration to the very copyright that the Ninth Circuit panel based this opinion upon. As a result, Google immediately petitioned for a rehearing of the takedown order in front of a larger panel of Ninth Circuit judges called an en banc hearing. That request has been denied, but Google still has options.
Federal lawsuits generally begin in District Courts, which are 94 local/regional courts across the country with at least one in each state. Appeals from District Court decisions go to one of the 12 regional Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Ninth Circuit covers many of the westernmost states, for example. Three judge panels are typically used, but these decisions can be overturned by the en banc rehearings mentioned previously or by the Supreme Court.
Thus, to keep it simple, Google and Youtube will continue to fight this legal battle in the Ninth Circuit until all options are exhausted, and then if still unsuccessful, a petition for a Supreme Court hearing will happen. The Supreme Court typically only gets involved in important questions about Constitutional law, and the proper scope of copyright would be a good issue in view of the different opinions of the executive branch at the Copyright Office and the judicial branch at the Ninth Circuit.
Bottom line: The news is bad for Google this week, and Innocence of Muslims will get taken down based on a questionably-reasoned decision. But this critical copyright fight is not over until the Supreme Court says it is over.
Thanks again to Robert for the question.
------
Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy or in the comments below.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Legal Geek No. 6 - Has The Stone Finally Turned on the NSA?
Welcome back to Legal Geek! The topic this week is whether privacy rights are finally winning the day against the NSA's record keeping on all U.S. citizens.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp06
Depending on your views of privacy laws and your political leanings, the downstream effects of the horrible 9/11 attacks on America are a more protected country, or a more oppressive Big Brother society. When the USA Patriot Act went into effect shortly after those attacks, the floodgates opened for the NSA to tap into bulk phone and e-mail communications of all citizens to look for outliers that could indicate potential terrorism.
However, this began to highlight the sheer amount of tracking and information the government and companies were beginning to accrue on regular U.S. citizens. Although such tracking can lead to nifty innovations such as the anticipatory shipping methods of Amazon from a previous episode, it can also make you feel like your rights to be a private citizen are impinged.
With both the dramatically different Bush and Obama administrations extending the rights of the government to keep wiretapping communications, the NSA keeps on collecting information. But simply collecting information is not enough apparently, as the NSA recently petitioned to hold onto records beyond the five year period that was authorized by Congress in the Patriot Act.
The NSA argued that the destruction of five-year old records and metadata needed to be stopped because there are six lawsuits ongoing against the government where those records may be subject to discovery requests. But these lawsuits are ironically from citizens suing to try and stop or limit the NSA's powers due to privacy rights, so it is unclear that these plaintiffs would ever want to encourage those records to be held for longer periods of time.
Thankfully, the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court deemed this extension would be contrary to the law and policy concerns. First, the five-year destruction policy is by Congressional statute, which trumps the common law court-made rules of avoiding evidence spoilation during civil trials. Second, the value of the information as foreign terrorism intelligence is basically gone after five years, so there is no policy reason to hang onto these records longer. Thus, the NSA has been turned back from a further extension of the much-maligned wiretapping and record-gathering rights. While that will not end the story, it does prove there is a limit at which our privacy rights trump the NSA.
Bottom line: Although last week's decision by the Surveillance Court is a minor victory for privacy, there is a long way to go for advocates of true Internet privacy. It will be interesting to watch how Snowden and other Internet privacy advocates continue to try and turn the tide against the NSA.
------
Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and segment topic suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy or in the comments below.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp06
Depending on your views of privacy laws and your political leanings, the downstream effects of the horrible 9/11 attacks on America are a more protected country, or a more oppressive Big Brother society. When the USA Patriot Act went into effect shortly after those attacks, the floodgates opened for the NSA to tap into bulk phone and e-mail communications of all citizens to look for outliers that could indicate potential terrorism.
However, this began to highlight the sheer amount of tracking and information the government and companies were beginning to accrue on regular U.S. citizens. Although such tracking can lead to nifty innovations such as the anticipatory shipping methods of Amazon from a previous episode, it can also make you feel like your rights to be a private citizen are impinged.
With both the dramatically different Bush and Obama administrations extending the rights of the government to keep wiretapping communications, the NSA keeps on collecting information. But simply collecting information is not enough apparently, as the NSA recently petitioned to hold onto records beyond the five year period that was authorized by Congress in the Patriot Act.
The NSA argued that the destruction of five-year old records and metadata needed to be stopped because there are six lawsuits ongoing against the government where those records may be subject to discovery requests. But these lawsuits are ironically from citizens suing to try and stop or limit the NSA's powers due to privacy rights, so it is unclear that these plaintiffs would ever want to encourage those records to be held for longer periods of time.
Thankfully, the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court deemed this extension would be contrary to the law and policy concerns. First, the five-year destruction policy is by Congressional statute, which trumps the common law court-made rules of avoiding evidence spoilation during civil trials. Second, the value of the information as foreign terrorism intelligence is basically gone after five years, so there is no policy reason to hang onto these records longer. Thus, the NSA has been turned back from a further extension of the much-maligned wiretapping and record-gathering rights. While that will not end the story, it does prove there is a limit at which our privacy rights trump the NSA.
Bottom line: Although last week's decision by the Surveillance Court is a minor victory for privacy, there is a long way to go for advocates of true Internet privacy. It will be interesting to watch how Snowden and other Internet privacy advocates continue to try and turn the tide against the NSA.
------
Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and segment topic suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy or in the comments below.
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