Pandora's box

11/6/12

By Caitlin Tremblay 

The music biz is awash with lawsuits these days. There have been copyright cases and fights over digital royalties, and now Internet radio giant Pandora is filing a suit of its own. The personal radio service has sued licensing group the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, in an attempt to set "reasonable" licensing fees, according to Bloomberg (hat tip: The Verge).

Pandora says it has been trying, unsuccessfully, to come to an agreement with ASCAP for over a year. Now the company is asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to intervene with a blanket licensing fee that covers all of the work ASCAP represents, from Beyonce to Alan Jackson to Duke Ellington. (The Hollywood Reporter has the petition.)

Pandora also claims that other more traditional broadcasters are receiving preferential treatment. Clear Channel, which owns an Internet radio service called iHeartRadio, reached a licensing deal with ASCAP earlier this year and Pandora says it wasn't extended these terms. ASCAP hasn't commented on the suit.

www.lawyers.com 

11/6/12

By Dan Brillman 

Are online legal services a peek at the not-too-distant future? An article in The Wall Street Journal looks at various sites, some of which just offer quick and cheap answers to questions like what's the difference between a will and a trust, while others are extensions of traditional brick-and-mortar firms.

At pearl.com, for example, consumers can ask direct questions to lawyers, doctors, mechanics, computer technicians and home repair professionals. The cost depends on the complexity of the question and how soon you need the answer, but the average is about $30, according to WSJ. You can also get a cyber-lawyer on retainer for $99 a month through the site, whose professionals are hired after background checks. DirectLaw.com has a different model and serves more to connect consumers with its 250 law-firm members, who will provide online consulting.

Being lumped in with tradesmen might ruffle traditionalists who fear the ill effects of quickie and faceless counsel, but Internet business has always been about tapping new revenue streams. Eighty percent of questions at pearl.com, which claims over $100 million in annual revenue, were for lawyers.

Peeping cops 

11/6/12

By Suhrith Parthasarathy 

A former police officer who said that fellow cops illegally accessed her driver's license record more than 400 times to peek at her photograph will receive more than $1 million, reports Wired.

Anne Marie Rasmusson, formerly with the St. Paul Police Department, claimed that between 2005 and 2012, 140 officers checked out her Department of Motor Vehicles record with no official reason, according to the Minneapolis Post. Rasmusson said she became aware of this in 2009, when a former colleague mentioned that he and his partner had often viewed her driver's license photo. Rasmusson, Wired says, was once overweight and had undergone a dramatic makeover.

In August 2011, Rasmusson said she contacted the Department of Public Safety requesting it to restrict access to her DMV file. When she explained her reason, a worker in the office investigated and found that Rasmusson's records had been illegally accessed by cops for many years, Wired reports.

Finally, in March 2012, Rasmusson filed a data breach lawsuit against the agencies, individual officers and governing bodies involved in auditing the DMV database, according to City Pages. After she had reached settlements with the St. Paul City Council and other smaller communities, the Minneapolis City Council agreed after a Nov. 2 meeting to pay $392,000 to settle the claims without admitting any wrongdoing. The total awards come to just over $1 million.

Arbitration avalanche? 

11/6/12

By Terry Baynes 

A group of plaintiffs' lawyers are trying crowd-sourcing as a way to overcome a landmark 2011 Supreme Court ruling that thwarted class actions.

Last year, the Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion ruled that consumers who signed AT&T phone contracts with mandatory arbitration clauses had waived the right to bring a class action against the telecom giant. Unhappy consumers should instead arbitrate their claims individually, said the court. The decision was derided by plaintiffs' lawyers and consumer rights activists as a "get out of jail free card" for companies, allowing them to add arbitration clauses to their contracts -- as Netflix, PayPal and Sony, among others, have done.

Now two plaintiffs' lawyers, Philip Friedman and Gary Mason, are launching a website loosely modeled after Groupon to see if there is a way to undercut the Concepcion ruling. Just as Groupon measures consumer enthusiasm for a deal, ConsumersCount.org gauges how many consumers are willing to file arbitration claims against an offending company, with the goal of being able to inundate businesses with such claims.

"Browse. Submit. Act. Are You Outraged? Did It Happen To You? You Build The Crowd, We'll Make The Case," reads ConsumersCount.org, which elicits consumer responses on a variety of situations, including Sirius XM's use of "unwanted robocalls" and Nissan failing "to refund vets lease payments."

Beneath each type of claim is a percentage bar, measuring the level of consumer interest. Once enough people indicate they have had the specific problem, the bar turns from red to green. That's the cue for Friedman and Mason, or lawyers they work with, to move forward, filing masses of individual arbitrations against the company. Friedman and Mason don't give a specific number but are hoping to be able to overwhelm a company with hundreds or even thousands of complaints.

The idea is that the arbitration claims are relatively easy for plaintiffs' lawyer to file en masse, but they become a headache for a corporation, which will be forced to deal with each claim individually, explains Mason. "If it happens enough, companies will want class actions again. They're not going to like having multiple arbitrations and being exposed to them endlessly. We want to prove: Be careful what you wish for," Mason said.

Consumers and plaintiffs' lawyers can submit their own complaints to the site, too, but not everyone is impressed with ConsumersCount.org's crowd-sourcing approach.

Andrew Pincus of Mayer Brown, who represented AT&T in the Concepcion case, called the site a "marketing front for plaintiffs' law firms, masquerading as a consumer site." He said if the group was truly interested in helping consumers, it would encourage them to file a complaint with regulators.

Alan Kaplinsky, an attorney at Ballard Spahr who has helped financial companies draft their arbitration agreements, called the new website "very misguided" and a "great disservice" to consumers. He noted that arbitration allows consumers to resolve their disputes in months, not years, and at little to no expense. Companies bear most of the cost under the rules of the American Arbitration Association and JAMS Inc, the two major arbitration administrators, he said.

Following Concepcion, company lawyers predicted that consumers blocked from court would seek redress through the arbitration system. But according to the AAA, based in New York City, there hasn't been a large influx of claims. The AAA says it typically handles between 1,000 and 1,500 individual consumer arbitrations a year. Richard Naimark, the group's senior vice president, reported a slight recent increase, but "nothing really substantial at this point."

Summary Judgments for November 5 

Summary Judgments for November 2 

Summary Judgments for November 1 

Follow us on Twitter @ReutersLegal | Like us on Facebook