Grass roots effort versus payday loan industry money.

Last year my law partner John Campbell and I (we are two of the three attorneys at Campbell Law) donated our time and energy to serve as legal counsel to more than 118,000 Missouri citizens who sought enact a new law to cap the interest rates of payday loans (often 400% to 500% interest per year). What is it like to gather voter signatures when hundreds of thousands of dollars in industry money is pushing back? This excellent article by Propublica details the obstructionist tactic called "blocking" and the misleading ads sponsored by the payday loan industry. What else can happen as part of a hotly contest ballot initiative? Notice the article's description of the incident where someone broke into the car of a petitioner and stole 5,000 voter signatures. PayDayLoanShark Most people I know are shocked to learn that payday loans carry such high interest rates. If Missouri voters were really allowed to vote on this issue, I do believe that they would overwhelmingly cap interest rates at 36 percent. Last year's battle was between grass roots supported interest rate caps versus immense amounts of industry money funding an AstroTurf movement. The issue never came to a vote last year--the signature collection efforts barely fell short. In 2014, we are looking to try once again to cap these predatory loans that are deceptive and dangerous products for most of those who fall prey to using them.

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The lesson of the sentence Bradley Manning is about to receive

Michael Moore sets the stage. Here's the beginning of his long list:

Manning now faces a potential maximum sentence of 136 years in jail. When his sentence is announced tomorrow, we'll all get a good idea of how seriously the U.S. military takes different crimes. When you hear about how long Manning – now 25 years old – will be in prison, compare it to sentences received by other soldiers: Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib and the senior officer present the night of the murder of Iraqi prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi, received no jail time. But he was reprimanded and fined $8,000. (Pappas was heard to say about al-Jamadi, "I'm not going down for this alone.") Sgt. Sabrina Harman, the woman famously seen giving a thumbs-up next to al-Jamadi's body and in another photo smiling next to naked, hooded Iraqis stacked on each other in Abu Ghraib, was sentenced to six months for maltreating detainees...

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EFF offers copyright curriculum for high school students

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a curriculum for high school students on the topic of Copyright. I spent some time reviewing it, and it looks like an excellent resource for anyone wanting to know more about this important subject.

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The scourge of patent trolls

Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Thanks to trolls like IPNav, the Times explains, U.S. companies are forced to spend upwards of $30 billion every year on patent litigation. Most of that money goes to troll profits and legal expenses, with less than 25 percent flowing to inventors. Even Spangenberg concedes that his business uses “the courts as a marketplace, and the courts are horribly inefficient and horribly expensive as a market.” Patent trolls like IPNav are a symptom of a fundamentally broken system.
According to the NYT:
There is debate about the definition of patent trolls, but the term broadly refers to people who sue companies for infringement, often using patents of dubious value or questionable relevance, and then hold on like a terrier until they get license fees. In recent years, patent trolls — they prefer “patent assertion entities,” or P.A.E.’s — have gone from low-profile corporate migraine to mainstream scourge. This is partly because the number of patent infringement suits has more than doubled in recent years, to 4,731 cases in 2012 from 2,304 in 2009, according to that RPX report. The cost to businesses, which pass along the expense to consumers, is immense. One study found that United States companies — most of them small or medium-sized — spent $29 billion in 2011 on patent assertion cases.

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How to get your case heard

What I just learned from Harper's Index from the August 2013 issue of Harpers: The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear only 1% of all Petitions for Certiorari filed over the past three years. But, if the U.S. Chamber of Commerce files an amicus brief, there is a 32% chance that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear that case. Those attorneys for the Chamber must be excellent brief writers . . .

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