The Supreme Court has refused to consider appeals from Samsung Electronics in a case against Rambus, a memory design and patent licensing company, closing a saga that began in 2005 over alleged patent infringement.
The court's decision to stay out of the case leaves in place an April appeals court ruling (PDF) that a district court had no jurisdiction to grant an order that--while technically in favor of Rambus--included negative opinions about the company.
Rambus first sued Samsung in 2005 for allegedly violating its patents of various dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, devices. Samsung immediately countersued in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, claiming that the patents were invalid and unenforceable.
In a similar case, a district court found Rambus guilty of spoliation of evidence. Rambus quickly settled that case and, in September 2005, moved to dimiss its claims against Samsung. However, Samsung's attorney fees were still in dispute, so Rambus offered to fully compensate for them.
Samsung refused the offer but continued with its court motion to obtain them. The district court in July 2006 denied Samsung its attorney fees--in that sense ruling in favor of Rambus--but included in its ruling a lengthy opinion addressing allegations that Rambus was guilty of tampering with evidence.
Unhappy with this turn of events, Rambus argued that the court lacked jurisdiction to even give the ruling, since its offer to pay Samsung the attorney fees rendered the case moot. In April of this year, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with Rambus, vacating the previous order and remanding the case back to the court with instructions to dismiss Samsung's complaint. The Supreme Court's decision not to hear Samsung's appeal leaves the lower court's decision in place.
The U.S. Department of Justice has been fighting an extended legal battle since 1998 to enforce a federal law that targets Web sites deemed "harmful to minors." On Tuesday, it lost again.
This week's ruling (PDF) by the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit Court of Appeals means Web site operators can continue to relax, at least for now, about the Child Online Protection Act being enforced against them. COPA includes criminal penalties, including fines and six months imprisonment, for anyone found guilty of violating it.
The court concluded that COPA "cannot withstand a strict scrutiny, vagueness, or overbreadth analysis and thus is unconstitutional" and upheld a lower court's ruling from March 2007 that said the federal law was unconstitutional.
As a side note, because the law was written so long ago, it's surprisingly limited. It applies only to material delivered "by means of the World Wide Web"--meaning it doesn't cover peer-to-peer file sharing, the Usenet newsgroups that alarm New York's attorney general, games like Virtual Hottie 2, those naughty things happening in Second Life, videos watched via a third-party iPhone application, or streaming porn viewed through the VLC, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player desktop applications.
Still, it's too early to say that this is the end of COPA. The Bush administration is guaranteed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has come up with some surprising rulings in the two times it has already reviewed the law.
That's not a typo. The Supreme Court has handed down two preliminary rulings, once in 2002 and again in 2004. The first time it sent the case back to the Third Circuit with instructions to broaden its legal analysis beyond the law's interaction with community standards; the second time it wanted a review of whether "technological developments" have affected the law's constitutionality.
Now the court seems ready for a final ruling probably by next summer--and the more conservative justices conceivably could assemble a majority to uphold COPA as constitutional.
It could work like this: The Supreme Court's ruling in 2004 against the Justice Department and in favor of the ACLU commanded a narrow 5-4 majority, with justices Stephen Breyer, William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, and (separately) Antonin Scalia dissenting.
The Breyer-written dissent said that COPA places "minor burdens on some protected material--burdens that adults wishing to view the material may overcome at modest cost. At the same time, it significantly helps to achieve a compelling congressional goal, protecting children from exposure to commercial pornography. There is no serious, practically available 'less restrictive' way similarly to further this compelling interest. Hence the Act is constitutional." Scalia went even further.
In the last four years, of course, John Roberts has succeeded Rehnquist and Samuel Alito has succeeded O'Connor, who was often a swing vote on free speech matters. The question for next year is whether the court's conservatives can pick up a majority, which would uphold COPA as constitutional and breathe life into a decade-old law that everyone else has forgotten about.
The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a Maine law that slapped severe restrictions on sales of cigarettes via mail order and the Internet.
In their opinion (PDF) on Wednesday, the justices said a 1994 federal law trumped the Maine statute restricting sales and shipments of tobacco.
The 1994 federal law in question says that no state may enact a law "related to a price, route, or service of any motor carrier...with respect to the transportation of property."
That seems pretty clear: cigarettes are property, and the Maine regulations targeted motor carriers transporting them. But Maine says that "public health" concerns--namely, preventing kids from ordering smokes online--justified its rules.
One part of Maine's regulations said that only Maine-licensed retailers may ship tobacco to state residents. Another section said that only licensed shippers may transport cigarettes to Maine residents.
In his opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer didn't buy it. He wrote:
Maine's inability to find significant support for some kind of "public health" exception is not surprising. "Public health" does not define itself. Many products create "public health" risks of differing kind and degree. To accept Maine's justification in respect to a rule regulating services would legitimate rules regulating routes or rates for similar public health reasons. And to allow Maine directly to regulate carrier services would permit other States to do the same.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concurred with the opinion, but said that the 1994 federal law was written to deal with the trucking industry--and Congress probably never envisioned the growth of online commerce (meaning, presumably, the rise of sites like esmokes.com and buydiscountcigarettes.com). Ginsburg wrote:
State measures to prevent youth access to tobacco, however, are increasingly thwarted by the ease with which tobacco products can be purchased through the Internet...While I join the court's opinion, I doubt that the drafters of the (1994 law), a statute designed to deregulate the carriage of goods, anticipated the measure's facilitation of minors' access to tobacco. Now alerted to the problem, Congress has the capacity to act with care and dispatch to provide an effective solution.
The case was decided narrowly on federal preemption grounds, and the court did not discuss the Jenkins Act or arguments related to the dormant commerce clause. Also, for the record, the specific language at issue in the Maine statute didn't single out Internet sales (it's just that its effect was pretty Internet-specific).
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