Vanity unfair

1/15/13

By Ted Botha

It's every writer's fantasy: Sell the movie rights to your magazine article and become rich and famous. But Conde Nast, the owner of titles like Vanity Fair, Wired and GQ, is roping in that dream in a big way, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

To give you an idea of what kind of stories have made it to the screen, consider onetime articles published by Conde Nast that led to "Argo," "Eat Pray Love" and "Brokeback Mountain."

With the magazine market and its profits diminishing, however, Conde Nast wants to pay less to option articles and to reap more for itself, according to the Times. If Condé Nast decides to option an article under the new boilerplate contract, the writer will receive $2,500 to $5,000 for a 12-month option. If the story is developed into a major feature film, the writer will get no more than 1 percent or $150,000 of the purchase price. ("Argo" has so far grossed $166 million, according to the Times.) TV shows and made-for-TV movies bring the writer less.

The new contracts have angered writers and their agents, who argue that it's another cut into their already rapidly shrinking compensation. "It's far outside the traditions of the industry," Paul Aken, executive director of the Authors Guild, told TheWrap. "It's less than 50 percent of a typical deal of what a writer would get when their book or magazine story is made into a movie or a television show."

Game of chicken

1/15/13

By Dan Brillman

As the country deals with a particularly rough flu season, people are either rushing out to get flu shots or are secure in the knowledge they already have the right antibodies coursing through their veins.

But is it legal to force employees to get inoculated? Above the Law looked into the question and noted that most of the cases where people have been fired for refusing the shot have been in the healthcare field.

A case in point is Sakile Chenzira, who lost her job at Cincinnati Children's Hospital in December 2010 after saying no to the shot. According to AOL, Chenzira is a vegan and objected to the vaccine because it is made using chicken eggs.

She sued the hospital, saying that her veganism should be afforded rights given to those who would claim a "religious accommodation."

Late last month a U.S. District Court in Ohio ruled that the case could proceed. Judge Arthur Spiegel rejected the hospital's motion to dismiss, writing that Chenzira "could subscribe to veganism with a sincerity equating that of traditional religious views."

The case will be heard by a jury in July, when flu season hopefully will be over.

The letter of the law

1/15/13

By Suhrith Parthasarathy

In the wake of the suicide on Friday of 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swartz, federal prosecutors who had charged him with hacking into the computer servers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have been criticized for pursuing the case. Swartz's friend Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said prosecutors abused their role. Swartz's family released a statement saying his death is not simply a personal tragedy but "the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." But Orin Kerr, writing in The Volokh Conspiracy, argues that while the prosecutors may have exercised their discretion unfairly (a subject that he intends to cover separately), the charges themselves were based on a fair reading of the law.

Kerr says none of the charges raised against Swartz involved "aggressive readings of the law or any apparent prosecutorial overreach." They involved several different crimes, according to Kerr, including wire fraud, computer fraud, unauthorized access and computer damage. All of these charges, Kerr says, were based on established case law, and "to the extent we're focused on just what the law is, I think that what Swartz was alleged to have done fits pretty well with the charges that were brought."

Iconoclast

1/15/13

By Eileen Daspin

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Vanity Fair weighs in with a profile of Norma McCorvey, now 65, the case's once pseudonymous Jane Roe. Writer Joshua Prager talks to McCorvey's long-time lesbian partner, her mother and her daughter, all of whom have little positive to say about the woman who seemed like the perfect plaintiff to bring a case that established a woman's right to have an abortion. McCorvey, however, turned out to be a difficult personality. In 1995 she turned her back on the pro-abortion lobby and embraced the politics of the opposition. Eventually, she alienated anti-abortion supporters, too. When Prager sought an interview with McCorvey, she texted him that she had a $1,000 fee, and when he told her he would not pay, she texted back, "Then we won't speak."

Slippery slope

1/15/13

By Dan Brillman

There is no explicit "right to privacy" in the U.S. Constitution, but it's there, as part of multiple amendments. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously termed it the "right to be left alone."

In the wake of the Westchester Journal News' controversial decision to publish the names of area handgun owners, New York Times columnist (and former executive editor) Bill Keller examines the paper's choice, vis a vis Americans' changing attitudes toward privacy.

Many people felt that the Journal News interactive vilified gun owners who had done nothing to break the law. But at a time when the "surveillance state" is quietly becoming the comfortable norm, Keller says, the newspaper's move underscores how Americans are both blasé and hypocritical when it comes to privacy matters. "We howl when a newspaper publishes public records about personal behavior. At the same time, we are acquiescing in a much more sweeping erosion of our privacy," writes Keller. As he notes, the Justice Department can now copy and examine collected data without prior suspicion. The decision was made -- behind closed doors -- last month.

It is part of a broader pattern of events, Keller says, that began with 9/11 and now extends to the selling of personal habits to advertisers through Facebook and Google. As Keller points out, notions of privacy have changed so much that there's almost a collective yawn when the goalposts move. One point Keller doesn't mention: We are in the age of outrage overload, where for many things the response to a complicated issue on the way down the slope is increasingly a disinterested, 'Meh. Next.'

Summary Judgments for January 14

Summary Judgments for January 11

Summary Judgments for January 10

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