For more than a year now, Paul Hansmeier has attempted to offset the losses generated by the flagging Prenda Law brand with class action lawsuits predicated on supposed ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) violations. Hansmeier isn’t suddenly a do-gooding social warrior seeking equitable treatment for disabled Americans. He’s just shifted the focus of his modus operandi. Hansmeier sues and sues and sues, offering out-of-court settlements to the defendants. This is money Hansmeier shouldn’t theoretically be able to demand, but he’s found a loophole that works for him.
In most cases, federal and state laws governing disability access don’t provide punitive relief. They can only be used to get property owners to correct shortcomings and to recover the plaintiff’s reasonable legal expenses. However, Hansmeier has been making claims under a Minnesota law that the property owners are committing a bias offense, which is a misdemeanor. In correspondence seeking a settlement with Peterson, he wrote that the law exposes defendants to a fine of $500 per incident, as well as punitive damages.
Using this, Hansmeier has demanded anywhere from $2,500 to $15,000 from the businesses he’s sued. The end result has been some companies paying up rather than fighting back, while others have decided to cease doing business entirely. The 84-year-old owner of an antique shop targeted by a Hansmeier suit has closed her business as a result of his litigious actions. At the point it shut down, it was making around “$50 a day.” Now, the business is completely inaccessible — both to the disabled and non-disabled alike.
Month: January 2015
Sarah Palin vs PETA
I despise Sarah Palin as much as the next sane person. Well, I would imagine that John McCain has stronger feelings about her, but that’s another story. I agree that she should be beaten into dust by the marketplace of ideas – since she has very little, if anything, to sell in that marketplace.
Nevertheless, watching her fight with PETA is sorta like watching two assholes fight in a bar. You ever been in a bar where two assholes, both of whom could use a beat down, wind up fighting with each other? As long as you stay out of the way, everyone wins. They both get a beating of some sorts, and perhaps one or both go to jail. Then you go on with your night, laugh your ass off, drink too much, slump into a cab, get home and laugh your ass off some more. Meanwhile, the assholes get stitches and bail bondsmen in their lives.
I find this deeply offensive
So we just had a story about a 19-year-old guy being arrested for making a (bad) joke tweet about an out of control garbage truck. The Northumbria police who arrested Ross Loraine are insisting that the bad joke was a “malicious communication” under The Communications Act. Many people have been calling out this rather ridiculous attack on free speech, but police in Scotland seem to be doubling down. They just sent out the following tweet:
How Copyright Forced A Filmmaker To Rewrite Martin Luther King’s Historic Words
Among the most powerful moments of Selma, the new film about the march Martin Luther King, Jr. led in 1965 in support of voting rights for African Americans, are the speeches, sermons, and eulogies King delivered during that tumultuous period. However, the speeches performed by actor David Oyelowo in the film do not contain the actual words spoken by King. This is because the King estate would not license the copyright in the speeches to filmmaker Ava DuVernay. Thus, the King estate’s aggressive stance on copyright has literally forced the re-writing of history.
According to the Washington Post, the King estate licensed the film rights to King’s speeches to DreamWorks, with Steven Spielberg producing any resulting films. DuVernay said that she never even asked for the rights to King’s speeches “because we knew those rights are already gone, they’re with Spielberg.” She added that she knew that there were strings attached to the rights: “with those rights came a certain collaboration.” In other words, the King estate uses its control over the copyright to control how King is portrayed. The Post article suggests that this control has prevented the making of a feature film about King
RightWay_On the go H20
this is possibly the dumbest idea i have ever seen on kickstarter and that is really saying something
Windows XP Remake…
here’s the pitch, in its entirety:
About this project
We are already missing the operating system XP, and we want to make a remake about it. With new design that can make you feel that you will have the old XP.
Risks and challenges
There is low risks.
Perpetual motion machines are impossible…
Long time ago, I’ve been thinking about a concept that we can use the mass of an object to move its gravity center, and fall forward. If applied to a wheel, that concept could be a source of infinite and free energy! So, I want to create a prototype, to test my concept.
Someone with a serious lack of knowledge in physics…
i know nothing about physics but i can already tell that this guy has no idea what he is talking about, and i’m even more certain that he doesn’t need $5k to fund this experiment
Indian Government Orders 32 Web Sites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin, DailyMotion And Vimeo
“It now appears that the blocks are being carried out on the instructions of [India’s] DoT (Department of Telecom). The telecom body reportedly issued a notification regarding the same on December 17. A screenshot of the circular has been posted on Twitter by Pranesh Prakash. The notification mentions that 32 URLs including Pastebin, video sharing sites Vimeo and DailyMotion, Internet archive site archive.org and Github.com( a web-based software code repository), have been blocked under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. DoT has also asked ISPs to submit compliance reports. However, we have not been able to verify the authenticity of the circular.”
When The FISA Court Rejects A Surveillance Request, The FBI Just Issues A National Security Letter Instead
“We considered the Section 215 request for [REDACTED] discussed earlier in this report at pages 33 to 34 to be a noteworthy item. In this case, the FISA Court had twice declined to approve a Section 215 application based on First Amendment Concerns. However, the FBI subsequently issued NSLs for information [REDACTED] even though the statute authorizing the NSLs contained the same First Amendment restriction as Section 215 and the ECs authorizing the NSLs relied on the same facts contained in the Section 215 applicants…”
In other words, the FBI had a neat way to get around a rare FISA Court rejection: just issue an NSL and ignore the First Amendment concerns.