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Good morning. Here’s what you need to know today: Internet service provider Cox is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after the 4th Circuit said it was liable for its users’ music piracy, teeing up a major question before the high court. Plus, prosecutors want “El Mayo” moved from Texas to Brooklyn for trial, and Bayer scores a win in its fight against Roundup cancer claims. It’s Friday – we made it!
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Internet service provider Cox Communications asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a ruling that held the company responsible for its users’ music piracy and led to a $1 billion verdict for a group of major record labels against the ISP, our colleague Blake Brittain reports.
Cox argued that the 4th Circuit’s decision to hold it liable for piracy of thousands of songs from labels including Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group had created “confusion, disruption, and chaos on the internet,” and was a split from three other circuits. In February, the appellate court upheld part of a jury verdict that said Cox had committed secondary copyright infringement by failing to address user piracy but threw out the $1 billion the jury awarded to the labels as unjustified.
An attorney for the labels called the petition “substantively meritless.” But Cox said that it could only avoid liability under the lower court decisions by terminating internet service for “entire households, coffee shops, hospitals, universities, and even regional [ISPs] — the internet lifeline for tens of thousands of homes and businesses — merely because some unidentified person was previously alleged to have used the connection to infringe.”
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- The law firms Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro and Winston & Strawn, which led litigation against the NCAA that could allow college athletes to be paid for the first time, are vying for hundreds of millions in fees. They told U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland, California, that the settlement’s total value is over $20 billion, based largely on student athletes’ future earnings, and are arguing for an annual stake in that compensation. Read more about the unusual fee structure – and what it could mean for the firms – in this week’s Fee Tracker.
- California attorney Lisa Bloom and her law firm will pay more than $274,000 to resolve claims that they gave the U.S. government false information in connection with a COVID-19 pandemic relief program, federal prosecutors said. The Bloom Firm will pay about $204,000 while Bloom and her husband Braden Pollock will each pay more than $35,000 to settle allegations under the False Claims Act.
- Former President Donald Trump is seeking to delay the sentencing in his New York criminal hush money case until after the election. Trump is scheduled to be sentenced two days after Justice Juan Merchan is set to decide on his bid to overturn the Manhattan jury’s guilty verdict in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity. In a letter to Merchan, Trump’s lawyers said he needed time to appeal Merchan’s decision.
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That’s how much Chevron will pay the city of Richmond, California, over 10 years in a settlement ending a standoff over a proposed ballot measure that would have put a new tax on the company’s local oil refinery. Richmond planned to seek voters’ approval for a tax on the refinery, saying Chevron should pay its fair share to the community it has been in for more than a century. Chevron sued to block the measure. Under the deal, the city will drop the ballot measure and Chevron will dismiss its lawsuit.
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The takeaway from a Delaware Supreme Court decision on Wednesday to affirm a whopping $267 million fee award to plaintiffs lawyers who won a $1 billion settlement against Dell, writes Alison Frankel, is that the state justices trust their lower-court colleagues to do the right thing when it comes to fee awards in giant shareholder cases. The Supreme Court reminded Chancery to be wary of windfall fee awards but rejected calls to adopt a new standard that would grant plaintiffs lawyers a lower percentage of megafund recoveries.
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- Sources have told Reuters that as soon as today, Johnson & Johnson could announce that 75% or more of claimants alleging the company’s talc sickened them have voted in favor of a bankruptcy settlement that would halt current and future cases. J&J is preparing to have a subsidiary seek bankruptcy protection as soon as next week to execute the settlement, the sources said.
- U.S. District Judge Robert Chatigny will hear oral arguments in the Connecticut school system’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit brought by four women challenging a school policy allowing transgender women to participate in sex-separated athletics. The women, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, say the policy violates Title IX, while the schools say Title IX has never been interpreted to mean that transgender athletes must be prohibited from sex-separated teams.
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Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
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- Bayer won a legal victory in its fight to limit liability from claims that its Roundup weed killer causes cancer, after the 3rd Circuit said federal law shields the company from a lawsuit by a Pennsylvania landscaper claiming the product’s label should have included a cancer warning. Bayer said the decision creates a circuit split, which could move the U.S. Supreme Court to get involved.
- Stellantis has been sued by shareholders in the U.S. who said the European-American automaker defrauded them by concealing rising inventories and other weaknesses, before posting disappointing earnings that caused its stock price to fall. The complaint said Stellantis artificially inflated its stock price for much of 2024 by making “overwhelmingly positive” assessments about inventories, pricing power, new products and operating margin.
- Physician-owned U.S. Anesthesia Partners failed to persuade the 5th Circuit to intervene in an FTC antitrust lawsuit that accused it of causing patients to overpay for care through serial acquisition of health practices across Texas, allowing the case to move ahead. The court said it couldn’t get involved until there was a final judgment in the case.
- Harvard University has settled a lawsuit accusing the Ivy League school of ignoring sexual harassment by a professor who three graduate students said had threatened their academic careers if they reported him. In a filing in federal court in Boston, Margaret Czerwienski, Lilia Kilburn and Amulya Mandava voluntarily dismissed their 2022 lawsuit following months of mediation.
- PepsiCo must face a proposed class action for marketing its Gatorade protein bars as good for consumers even though they have more sugar than protein and more sugar than typical candy bars, U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts in San Jose, California, said in a ruling. Pitts said reasonable consumers might be misled by PepsiCo’s “self-proclaimed science-backed claims.”
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- Kaufman Dolowich hired Annalisa Zulueta as a litigation partner in San Francisco. Zulueta was previously at Lewis Brisbois. (Kaufman Dolowich)
- Simpson Thacher & Bartlett picked up partner James Rapp for the firm’s public company advisory practice. Rapp, who was previously at Skadden, is based in New York. (Simpson Thacher)
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Tech transactions are undergoing a major metamorphosis with the growth of AI technology, so tech transactions lawyers need a deeper understanding of the legal ramifications, ethical considerations and operational intricacies associated with AI, writes Steven Henry of Major, Lindsey & Africa. Here’s what Henry says lawyers need to be prepared for.
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