Month: December 2019

Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org. (credit: Kirk Walter)

The courts have long held that laws can't be copyrighted. But if the state mixes the text of the law together with supporting information, things get trickier. In Monday oral arguments, the US Supreme Court wrestled with the copyright status of Georgia's official legal code, which includes annotations written by LexisNexis.

The defendant in the case is Public.Resource.Org (PRO), a non-profit organization that publishes public-domain legal materials. The group obtained Georgia's official version of state law, known as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, and published the code on its website. The state of Georgia sued, arguing that while the law itself is in the public domain, the accompanying annotations are copyrighted works that can't be published by anyone except LexisNexis.

Georgia won at the trial court level, but PRO won at the appeals court level. On Monday, the case reached the Supreme Court.

Fans of the MCU have been clamoring for a standalone Black Widow movie for years, but the project kept getting pushed to the back burner, since Marvel was so heavily focused on bringing the long-running Avengers story arc to a fitting conclusion with this year's Avengers: End Game. We now have the first trailer for Black Widow, and it promises to finally give the character the origin story she so richly deserves.

(Some spoilers for Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: End Game below.)

We know that the Russian-born Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) was trained as a spy/assassin in a secretive academy known as the Red Room, which disguised itself as a ballet school. All the "Black Widows" were sterilized, so Natasha is unable to bear children. Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, is sent to take her out and recruits her to S.H.I.E.L.D. instead. The two become fast friends, and both wind up joining the Avengers, giving Natasha a family of sorts. When the group splits in Captain America: Civil War, Natasha initially sides with Tony Stark/Iron Man, even though it pits her against Barton and Steve Rogers. But her loyalties remain divided, and in the battle at Leipzig Airport, she lets Rogers and Bucky Barnes escape.

Enlarge / Google's main headquarters. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Four former employees who say Google fired them in retaliation for their efforts to organize co-workers are planning legal action against the company. The workers allege the tech giant violated US labor law.

The employees—Laurence Berland, Paul Duke, Rebecca Rivers, and Sophie Waldman—jointly signed onto an open letter posted today outlining their grievances with their former employer.

"We participated in legally protected labor organizing, fighting to improve workplace conditions for all Google workers," they write. They also worked to "hold Google accountable for the impact on our workplace of its business decisions, policies, and practices on a range of topics." Those topics include protesting Google's work with US immigration enforcement agencies and the Department of Defense and protesting Google's work with the Chinese government, as well as a massive walkout of 20,000 Google employees last year to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment allegations against senior executives.

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Back in August, League of Legends maker Riot announced an out-of-court settlement to deal with a number of class-action lawsuits surrounding widespread allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination, and unequal pay at the company. A proposed settlement document filed Monday offers details of that settlement's particulars, including a $10 million fund to compensate the company's female employees.

If the mediated proposal is approved by a judge, all current and former female Riot employees who were at the company at any point since November 2014 would be eligible for compensation, amounting to approximately 1,000 women. Those employees would actually split about $6.2 million, after attorney's fees and other costs are taken into account. But that still means "no Class Member will receive less than $500 and most Class Members will receive at least $5,000," according to the court documents, with specific payouts depending on each employee's tenure and work status.

The proposed settlement document once again summarizes the case against Riot, which was accused of paying women less than similarly-situated men, placing women in lower-paying job roles, passing women up for promotions over similarly-situated men, and "creating, encouraging and maintaining a work environment that exposes its female employees to discrimination, harassment, and retaliation on the basis of their gender or sex."