Camera shy 

12/5/12

By Dan Brillman 

Do websites that publish mug shots have the right to charge removal fees? Ohio lawyer Scott Ciolek says no, and he calls the practice extortion. The Toledo Blade reports on a lawsuit filed by two people who were photographed by the police after being charged with crimes. Though charges against both plaintiffs were ultimately dropped, their pictures were picked up by websites like bustedmugshots.com and remain there; if Ciolek's clients want the photos to be removed, they have to pay a fee.

Google the name of one of the plaintiffs, Phillip Kaplan, and the site bustedmugshots.com comes to the top of search results. "I think it's affected my opportunities at more gainful employment," says Kaplan, who is a freelance graphic designer and copywriter. "I don't get a lot of call-backs."

If people want to avoid paying for the removal, they can submit an appeal, which can take time and be a hassle, says Ciolek.

The photos, the article points out, are accessible from local police websites. What is illegal, Ciolek says, is when the third-party sites try to profit from them. State law says that consent is required for profiting on a persona, except if deemed newsworthy.

Art less 

12/5/12

By Erin Geiger Smith 

The maxim that crime doesn't pay is apparently doubly true when it comes to stealing art.

This news comes courtesy of the BBC, who talked to Robert Wittman, founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's art crime team. Whittman said art burglars can often pull off the crime -- for instance, nicking two Renoirs and a Rembrandt from the National Museum of Stockholm in 2000 -- but rarely have the know-how to take it to the next level, which means actually selling the goods.

Burglars, according to the BBC, aren't trusted to bring to the table three things necessary to make an art sale: authenticity, provenance and, the most difficult of all for a thief, legal title. (The Stockholm museum's paintings, by the way, were eventually recovered before the thieves made any cash.)

Above it all 

12/5/12

By Erin Geiger Smith 

One would be hard-pressed to find a big-firm partner or associate who hasn't heard of Above the Law or its founding editor, David Lat. But Lat's renown now has expanded beyond the legal world, thanks to a profile in Details magazine, compete with a modish portrait of a casually dressed Lat, face half-shadowed, laptop and notebook at the ready.

The article, "How Gossip Transformed the Legal Industry," notes how Above the Law breaks plenty of news on topics ranging from law firm bonuses to attorney layoffs. The author also gets into Lat's stellar legal credentials -- Yale Law School, an associate position at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and a stint at the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey -- as well as his early blogging days, when Lat was the anonymous author behind judicial gossip site Underneath Their Robes.

Bottom line: It's a fun read about a nice guy and his super-successful site. And, let's be honest, how often does a legal-news denizen garner mainstream treatment?

One correction, though. The article credits Above the Law with breaking news early on about the collapse of law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf with a brilliantly titled post, "Where's LeBoeuf?" However, as that post itself noted (and as that other stalwart of legal blogging, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, also pointed out), it was reporter Casey Sullivan who was first to report on just how serious the now defunct Dewey's financials were. Sullivan is, of course, now at Reuters; at the time he was with California's Daily Journal.

Data values 

12/5/12

By Suhrith Parthasarathy 

"Europe v-facebook.org," a group led by Austrian law student Max Schrems, is preparing to file a lawsuit in Ireland over Facebook's privacy policy, reports The New York Times. Facebook's European business is incorporated in Ireland and earlier this year Europe v-facebook.org lodged a complaint with the Irish data protection office, pointing to problems with Facebook's data collection.

Facebook said it would address some of the group's concerns, agreeing, for example, to shorten the length of time it retained consumer data and to build a photo archive of an individual only with prior consent. But Schrems says many problems remain and Facebook's policy is too vague to comply with European law. With no recourse available against the company directly in this case, he says Europe v-facebook.org will sue the privacy regulators for failing to adequately enforce the law, The Washington Post reports.

Schrems's campaign against Facebook began as a class assignment, when he was spending a semester at Santa Clara University in the United States and heard a lecture by a Facebook privacy lawyer. He was surprised by the lawyer's limited grasp of European data protection laws and decided to write about the social media company's privacy policies, according to Forbes. Schrems is now looking to raise between €100,000 and €300,000 (about $130,000 and $400,000) through a website, crowd4privacy.org, to fund the lawsuit, which he hopes will be settled ultimately by the European Court of Justice.

 Moral hazard 

12/5/12

By Dan Brillman 

The debate that will not die continues its march from the courtroom to the editorial pages. This past weekend, New York Times ethical columnist Chuck Klosterman answered a reader who asked if law schools are acting immorally by taking prospective students' money while knowing the dismal job prospects that await. Klosterman said no -- the schools are doing their part in preparing the young legal minds of tomorrow. If tomorrow isn't so great, well, that's "just fiscally unfortunate," Klosterman wrote. In his opinion, it's up to the schools to train and the students to get jobs. There's no quid pro quo contract that anything is owed.

Them's blogging words to Above the Law's Elie Mystal. As a regular reader of the site might know, Mystal does not thinklaw schoolshave students' best interestsin mind but instead are worried about their place in the annual U.S. News rankings and about their own coffers. He says one of Klosterman's errors is equating the purpose of college (where students go for a liberal arts education while they decide what they want to do) to that of law school (where people go to get jobs in the law). If schools want to turn out employable lawyers, they should offer vocational training with a first-year primer of classical legal theory thrown in, says Mystal.

Summary Judgments for December 4 

Summary Judgments for December 3  

Summary Judgments for November 30 

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