Category: Justice

So, Now Your Credibility is Shot, and the Judge Hates You

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Shellie Zimmerman, George Zimmerman’s wife, has been arrested for perjury:

Shellie Zimmerman, wife of George Zimmerman, charged with murdering Trayvon Martin, was arrested Tuesday on one count of perjury, the Seminole County, Fla., Sheriff’s Department said.

………

George Zimmerman, 28, was charged with second-degree murder in the Feb. 26 shooting of Martin. He pleaded not guilty. Police say that he claimed on the night of the shooting that he acted in self-defense.

………

His $150,000 bond was revoked after allegations that during an April 20 bail hearing he and Shellie Zimmerman misled the court about their finances, neglecting to disclose they had raised at least $135,000 in a PayPal account.

The order issued Tuesday by Assistant State Attorney John Guy charged Shellie Zimmerman with knowingly making false statements during the April hearing.

George Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O’Mara, said Tuesday evening outside his office that he had just returned from two days in court and had not heard previously of Shellie Zimmerman’s arrest. He would not comment further.

Today, I think that George Zimmerman’s lawyer has the worst job in the world.

Big Robosigning Case

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Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism is once again, all over the details.  The nickel tour is that there are forged documents, (not really news) and the trusts set up to securitize the loans are illegal under New York law (they’ve pretty much all been done under New York Law), which means that there are significant tax and ownership implications:

In a unanimous decision, the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals reversed a lower court decision on a foreclosure case, U.S. Bank v. Congress and remanded the case to trial court.

We’d flagged this case as important because to our knowledge, it was the first to argue what we call the New York trust theory, namely, that the election to use New York law in the overwhelming majority of mortgage securitizations meant that the parties to the securitization could operate only as stipulated in the pooling and servicing agreement that created that particular deal. Over 100 years of precedents in New York have produced well settled case law that deems actions outside what the trustee is specifically authorized to do as “void acts” having no legal force. The rigidity of New York trust has serious implications for mortgage securitizations. The PSAs required that the notes (the borrower IOUs) be transferred to the trust in a very specific fashion (endorsed with wet ink signatures through a particular set of parties) before a cut-off date, which typically was no later than 90 days after the trust closing. The problem is, as we’ve described in numerous posts, that there appears to have been massive disregard in the securitization for complying with the contractual requirements that they established and appear to have complied with, at least in the early years of the securitization industry. It’s difficult to know when the breakdown occurred, but it appears that well before 2004-2005, many subprime originators quit bothering with the nerdy task of endorsing notes and completing assignments as the PSAs required; they seemed to take the position they could do that right before foreclosure. Indeed, that’s kosher if the note has not been securitized, but as indicated above, it is a no-go with a New York trust. There is no legal way to remedy the problem after the fact.

The solution in the Congress case appears to have been a practice that has since become troublingly become common: a fabricated allonge. An allonge is an attachment to a note that is so firmly affixed that it can’t travel separately. The fact that a note was submitted to the court in the Congress case and an allonge that fixed all the problems appeared magically, on the eve of trial, looked highly sus. The allonge also contained signatures that looked less than legitimate: they were digitized (remember, signatures as supposed to be wet ink) and some were shrunk to fit signature lines. These issues were raised at trial by Congress’s attorneys, but the fact that the magic allonge appeared the Thursday evening before Memorial Day weekend 2011 when the trial was set for Tuesday morning meant, among other things, that defense counsel was put on the back foot (for instance, how do you find and engage a signature expert on such short notice? Answer, you can’t).

………

The lower court (in Alabama, what a surprise) ruled against the homeowner, but on appeal, it was remanded with instructions to use a more appropriate standard of evidence, and to better address her claims.

Go read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

If anyone ever decides to enforce the law, this whole corrupt mess implodes.

My take away is that something north of 50% of the home owners in the US probably do not have clear title on their homes.

It’s On Girl!

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So, now both the ACLU and the Department of Justice are suing Florida over Governor Rick Scott’s voter purge, and Florida is suing DHS for access to their immigration database:

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Florida on Friday to stop its controversial program designed to purge noncitizen voters from the rolls.

The ACLU says the program, which overwhelmingly targets minorities, needs approval from the federal government under the 1965 Voting Rights Act — a claim already made last week by the U.S. Department of Justice when it ordered Florida to cease the purge.

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, who is named as a defendant, has said Florida already received permission years ago to clean the voter rolls of noncitizens.

But the ACLU argues that the specific processes for the noncitizen-voter program — a new effort by the state — never received federal approval.

What’s more, the program is too much of a burden on, and too much of a threat to, lawful voters, who could risk being removed from the rolls due to government error, the ACLU says.

“The state of Florida is violating federal law by subjecting citizens to this new and unnecessary requirement in order to exercise their right to vote,” Julie Ebenstein, an ACLU Florida staff attorney, said in a written statement. “We are asking the court to protect the right to vote and stop this unlawful, targeted voting purge.”

Detzner’s office couldn’t immediately respond to all aspects of the suit, which was filed late Friday afternoon. But it insisted the program is fair and needed.

The program is needed of course, because, after all, it would chaos if they let sp**s and n*****s vote.

Here’s a paraphrase of Jeff Foxworthy, “If you think that people who will likely vote against you should be prevent from voting, you might not be a real American.”

It would be nice if someone went to jail over this crap.

Troof

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Writer Jamie Malanowski gets to the heart of the matter when he says that if Obama loses, his refusal to prosecute the criminals at the big banks will be a major cause of this:

This much is clear: if President Obama loses this election, the failure to hold financial titans legally, financially and morally responsible for this financial meltdown will be the factor that will have cost him re-election.

I would argue that this was is also much of the reason for the 2010 debacle.

Malanowski talks about bravery, and how Obama has the courage to take down bin Laden, but not the courage to face the banksters.

I don’t think that this is a a matter of courage, but a matter of tribalism.

I am not making a Kenyan Muslim reference here, but rather an Ivy League reference.

I think that Barack Obama (Columbia and then Harvard Law) is simply unwilling to confront the old boy network which he joined when he went to college.

Bummer of a Birthmark, George

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Bummer of a birth mark

George Zimmerman’s bail has been revoked because the judge has determined that he lied about his finances at the bail hearing:

A Florida judge on Friday revoked the bond of George Zimmerman, who has been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, after state prosecutors argued that Mr. Zimmerman, with the help of his wife, had misled the court about his finances.

During an afternoon hearing in Sanford, Fla., a Seminole County Circuit Court judge, Kenneth R. Lester Jr., ordered Mr. Zimmerman, 28, a former neighborhood watch volunteer who himself aspired to be a judge, to surrender to authorities within 48 hours.

Judge Lester made his ruling shortly after an assistant state attorney, Bernardo de la Rionda, asserted that Mr. Zimmerman and his wife, Shellie, during a bail hearing on April 20, had “lied” and “were very deceptive” about assets available to them. That hearing cleared the way for Mr. Zimmerman’s release from jail on $150,000 bond. He had to put up 10 percent, or $15,000, to make bail.

The judge determined that Mr. Zimmerman, who has been in hiding because of concerns about his safety, had engaged in “material falsehoods.” At issue is the roughly $200,000 Mr. Zimmerman raised through a legal defense Web site, money that Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyer, Mark M. O’Mara, said he learned of several days after the bond hearing.

So, now in addition to going back to jail, the judge has just called him a liar.

His defense team has to be throwing a fit right now.

Google Wins

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The judge has now ruled on whether or not the Java API is covered by coopyright, and he said no.

This must be the one of the few federal judges out there who understands programming:

Oracle’s legal battle to break itself off a chunk of the smartphone market by attacking Android looks dead in the water today, after a federal judge who recently finished presiding over the six-week Oracle v. Google trial ruled that the structure of the Java APIs that Oracle was trying to assert can’t be copyrighted at all.

It’s only the code itself—not the “how-to” instructions represented by APIs—that can be the subject of a copyright claim, ruled Judge William Alsup. “So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API,” wrote the judge.

Google had copied certain elements—names, declaration and header lines—of the Java APIs. Alsup ruled that even though Google could have rearranged “the various methods under different groupings among the various classes and packages,” the overall name tree is “a utilitarian and functional set of symbols, each to carry out a pre-assigned function… Duplication of the command structure is necessary for interoperability.”

………

Alsup compared APIs to a library, with each package as a bookshelf in the library, each class a book on the shelf, and each method a chapter out of a how-to book. “As to the 37 packages, the Java and Android libraries are organized in the same basic way but all of the chapters in Android have been written with implementations different from Java but solving the same problems and providing the same functions.” The declarations, or headers, “must be identical to carry out the given function,” wrote Alsup.

Ninety-seven percent of the source code in the API packages is different; it’s only the three percent that overlaps that formed the heart of Oracle’s copyright claim. That three percent included packages, methods, and class names. But those declarations—like starting a function with package java.lang—can only be used in certain ways. “In order to declare a particular functionality, the language demands that the method declaration take a particular form,” notes Alsup (emphasis in original).

Alsup’s ruling comes less than a month after a European court made a decision along the same lines, finding that programming APIs can’t be copyrighted because it would “monopolize ideas.”

Judge Alsup gets it.

He understands the basic concepts, and he understands computers.

I am pleasantly surprised.

Edwards Not Guilty on 1, Mistrial on 6

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Considering the fact that the judge bent over backwards for John Edwards, this is a win for Edwards.

Considering the fact that the judge was clearly in the prosecution’s pocket, allowing testimony that had nothing to do with the underlying crime for the squick factor, and forbidding the presentation of an FEC ruling which said that the expenditures were legal, the prosecution has to be thinking that this case is a loser.

Google Did Not Infringe Java Patents

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The jury has ruled that Oracle’s patents were not infringed by Android:

Google on Wednesday was cleared of charges that it had infringed Oracle’s Java patents, ending the second major phase of the trial.

“Today’s jury verdict that Android does not infringe Oracle’s patents was a victory not just for Google but the entire Android ecosystem,” a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Oracle, however, did not concede defeat. “Oracle presented overwhelming evidence at trial that Google knew it would fragment and damage Java,” an Oracle spokesperson said via email. “We plan to continue to defend and uphold Java’s core write once run anywhere principle and ensure it is protected for the nine million Java developers and the community that depend on Java compatibility.”

Oracle filed its lawsuit against Google last August and the trial began in mid-April. Oracle initially talked about $6 billion in damages. At the moment, it appears Oracle is unlikely to win enough to cover its legal costs.

All that’s left is the whether or not Java’s API, basically the standards for interoperability, are copyrightable.

The jury didn’t rule on this, they could not come to a conclusion on fair use, and they were instructed by the judge to assume that the API is copyrightable. The judge will decide these matters of law, the jury was to rule on matters of fact.)

It appears from the Slashdot discussions that the judge actually made an effort to understand the technical issues, so his ruling should be interesting.

Well, What Do You Know, The DoJ Gets One Right

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The Justice Department has vigorously defending the right of the general public to videotape police officers on duty:

As police departments around the country are increasingly caught up in tussles with members of the public who record their activities, the U.S. Justice Department has come out with a strong statement supporting the First Amendment right of individuals to record police officers in the public discharge of their duties.

In a surprising letter (.pdf) sent on Monday to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department also strongly asserted that officers who seize and destroy such recordings without a warrant or without due process are in strict violation of the individual’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The letter was sent to the police department as it prepares for meetings to discuss a settlement over a civil lawsuit brought by a citizen who sued the department after his camera was seized by police.

In the lawsuit, Christopher Sharp alleged that in May 2010, Baltimore City police officers seized, searched and deleted the contents of his mobile phone after he used it to record them as they were arresting a friend of his.

I am very surprised.

Pleased, but surprised.

I’d like to see some prosecutions of overzealous cops, but I would consider this highly unlikely.

Appeals Court Rules That Disclosure required for 501(c)4 Contributions

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The DC Circuit has refused a stay from a circuit court decision requiring that 501(c)4s disclose donors if they make political ads:

Big news from the D.C. Circuit in this order and opinion. The opinion for two of the three judges explaining the reasons for denying the stay lean heavily on how the challengers to the district court ruling are unlikely to succeed in their legal arguments on appeal. The court also stresses the values of disclosure, reaffirmed on an 8-1 vote by the Supreme Court in Citizens United. [UPDATE Bloomberg BNA reports: “Attorneys for two groups sponsoring political ads, which intervened in the case to try to preserve FEC rules allowing them to keep their donors confidential, had no immediate comment about a possible appeal of the stay ruling by the D.C. Circuit panel.”]

But this open a host of unanswered questions about how 501c4 groups and other groups which run issue ads will deal with these new disclosure requirements.(I’m talking here not about political committees such as Crossroads GPS, which masquerade as social welfare groups, but real 501c4s that occassionally get involved with issue adss.) I expect this stay request to now end up before the Supreme Court, where the outcome may be different.

If further stay attempts fail, and if there are no emergency FEC rules put in place (and the FEC’s frequent 3-3 deadlocks mean new rules are unlikely), we could well see 501c4 groups [UPDATE: and importantly 501c3 groups] creating new separate funds to run these ads, so that the groups need disclose the names of only those donors funding these ads (rather than all of their donors).

You need to remember that before Karl Rove’s super PAC used the 501(c)4 fig leaf to hide its donors, they raised a pitiful amount of money (IIRC, less than 100 Grand).

For real non-profits, if they want to participate in electioneering, it’s just a matter of separating the funds and donations. For something like Rove’s Crossroads operations, which serve primarily as a way to launder money, it really complicates things.

Why Yes, Antonin Scalia has Gone Nuts

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It appears that there is a growing consensus on this matter:

In January, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia accused the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of “high-handedness.” He was just getting warmed up.

Over the next 3 1/2 months, Scalia asked whether federal immigration policy was designed to “please Mexico,” fired off 12 questions and comments in 15 minutes at a government lawyer in a case involving overtime pay, and dismissed part of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s defense of President Barack Obama’s health-care law as “extraordinary.”

Scalia’s tone this year, particularly in cases involving the Obama administration, is raising new criticism over the temperament of a justice who has always relished the give-and- take of the Supreme Court’s public sessions. Some lawyers say Scalia, a 1986 appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, is crossing the line that separates tough scrutiny from advocacy.

“His questions have been increasingly confrontational,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who served as Reagan’s top Supreme Court advocate. While the justice has always asked “pointed” questions, in the health-care case “he came across much more like an advocate.”

Scalia’s approach is fueling the perception that the biggest cases this term, including health care, may be influenced by politics, rather than the legal principles that he and other justices say should be their guide. A Bloomberg News poll in March showed that 75 percent of Americans think the court’s decision on the 2010 law will be based more on politics than on constitutional merit.

Scalia has always been a partisan political hack, but lately, he’s not even trying to pretend that he has an open mind.

Despicable People, Heredi Edition

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Specifically, the Orthodox Jews in New York, who are shunning and harassing co-religionists who report child rape to the authorities:

The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.

Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?”

By cooperating with the police, and speaking out about his son’s abuse, Mr. Jungreis, 38, found himself at the painful forefront of an issue roiling his insular Hasidic community. There have been glimmers of change as a small number of ultra-Orthodox Jews, taking on longstanding religious and cultural norms, have begun to report child sexual abuse accusations against members of their own communities. But those who come forward often encounter intense intimidation from their neighbors and from rabbinical authorities, aimed at pressuring them to drop their cases.

Abuse victims and their families have been expelled from religious schools and synagogues, shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews and targeted for harassment intended to destroy their businesses. Some victims’ families have been offered money, ostensibly to help pay for therapy for the victims, but also to stop pursuing charges, victims and victims’ advocates said.

This behavior is profoundly and deeply evil.

Retaliating against people who report child rape to the authorities is contemptible, and I call on the Brooklyn DA to pursue anyone who does participates in these efforts at intimidation to the fullest extant of the law.

Jeebus, They Are Claiming that API’s are Copyrightable?

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That appears to be the jury ruling in the Oracle-Google lawsuit:

In what could be a major blow to Android, Google’s mobile operating system, a San Francisco jury issued a verdict today that the company broke copyright laws when it used Java APIs to design the system. The ruling is a partial victory for Oracle, which accused Google of violating copyright law.

But the jury couldn’t reach agreement on a second issue—whether Google had a valid “fair use” defense when it used the APIs. Google has asked for a mistrial based on the incomplete verdict, and that issue will be briefed later this week.

The results aren’t clear going forward. Both sides are going to write briefs arguing how to proceed from here, with Google likely arguing the verdict needs to be thrown out, while Oracle somehow tries to hang on to its win on question 1A, the fundamental question about whether Google infringed copyright.

No one knows the jury’s internal deliberations, so it’s speculative to guess at what led to the partial verdict. But one reason could be the unusual construction of this trial. Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing the case, ruled that the case would be decided by a jury of 12, which is large for a civil case and increases the possibility of having one or more “holdout” jurors. Alsup also ruled that the jury must decide unanimously, a requirement for criminal cases that’s not always imposed on civil juries.

Now let’s be clear here: The judge apparently instructed the jury to assume that APIs are copyrightable, in order for them to make decisions about the facts, but that decision will actually be rendered by the judge later. (Yeah, the law is a bitch)

Speaking as a non-lawyer and non-computer programmer, if this stands, it stands a very good chance to shut down much of the software industry in the United States, because any supplier of a platform, at any time, on the machine that you owe, could ban, or demand usurious licensing fees, for any 3rd party software.

So Microsoft could demand fees from (for example) Open Office in order to run on Windows.

In any case, the substantive ruling is the judge’s and that is clearly subject to appeal, you appeal on the law, not the adjudicated facts, so the final decision will likely be either the court of appeal of SCOTUS.

Yet another example of just how %$#ed up our IP system is.

What a Crybaby

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David Prosser is now claiming that the judicial investigation of his choking of a fellow justice is an infringement of his speech rights:

State Supreme Court Justice David Prosser said Monday that the Wisconsin Judicial Commission’s investigation into his alleged ethical violations is itself a violation of his constitutional rights, according to a court filing.

Prosser, the subject of an ethics complaint filed in March with the Supreme Court, said in his response to the complaint Monday that the commission “may not investigate or prosecute protected speech, advocacy and etiquette of Wisconsin Supreme Court justices when they are deliberating in confidential closed conferences.”

The three alleged ethics violations stem from a June 13 incident in which Prosser acknowledges putting his hands around the neck of Justice Ann Walsh Bradley “to protect himself” and a February 2010 incident in which he admits calling Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson “a total bitch.”

First, it wasn’t a closed conference, it was a discussion in Bradley’s office, and he was asked to leave, and he is alleged to have assaulted her.

Beating up on a woman is not, “deliberating in confidential closed conferences.”

As an aside, anyone want to bet that this isn’t the first time that he’s been “alleged” to have assaulted a woman?

Nino is F%$#ing Nuts

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I mean, of course, Antonin Scalia, who just compared Arizona’s “Papers Please” law to the FBI investigating bank robberies:

The debate surrounding Arizona’s immigration law is a heated one — and on Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia added to the strong sentiments swirling in the case. Questioning U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Scalia asked what’s wrong with states enforcing federal law, adding, “There is a federal law against robbing federal banks. Can it be made a state crime to rob those banks?”

Charlie pierce has concluded that fat Tony is phoning it in, (See also here.) and that he has realized that he’ll never be chief justice, and he’s bored with the court, and he’s just f%$#ing with use.

I’m inclined to agree.

Good Patent News Everyone

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For once, the generic drug manufacturers win one:

The US Supreme Court ruled that generic drug makers can challenge big-name pharmaceutical firms in court to stop them from broadening the scope of their patent descriptions.

The measure overturns a 2010 appeals court ruling and confirms an earlier decision by a federal judge that ordered the US subsidiary of Danish laboratory Novo Nordisk to narrow the description of its patent on repaglinide, an anti-diabetes drug sold under the name Prandin.

Caraco Pharmaceutical Laboratories, the US subsidiary of the Indian firm Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, is seeking to produce a generic version of Prandin.

However Novo Nordisk amended the wording of his patent to extend it, and block the Caraco’s request to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to produce a generic version of the drug.

The FDA cannot approve the sale of a drug that breaks patent protection laws.

In a unanimous decision by the nine Supreme Court justices on Tuesday, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “a generic company can employ the counterclaim to challenge a brand’s overbrand use code.”

Courts have gotten much more skeptical of what I call overbroad patent bullsh%$ over the years, so this is more of  a good trend.

Wisconsin Voter Suppression Law Won’t Be In Effect in November

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The State Supreme Court has decided not to review the court decisions at this time, so the injunction remains in place:

The state Supreme Court refused Monday to immediately take up a pair of cases that struck down the state’s new voter ID law, a decision that will likely mean citizens won’t have to show identification when they cast ballots in recall elections in May and June.

The court’s terse orders send the cases back to two different appeals panels, though the cases could eventually return to the Supreme Court.

The justices issued their orders just three weeks before the May 8 primary for Democrats to pick a candidate to run against Republican Gov. Scott Walker in the June 5 recall election.

Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan in March blocked the voter ID law for the April presidential primary, saying it likely disenfranchised voters, based on testimony that there are more than 220,000 Wisconsin residents who do not have photo IDs but who are otherwise qualified to vote.

A trial in that case began Monday, and Flanagan is expected to decide whether to lift his injunction or block the law permanently after it concludes this week. The case was brought by the Milwaukee branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera.

My guess is that one of the 4 reactionary hacks (7 members on the WI state Supreme Court) on the court looked at the political landscape, and realized that there was no benefit to jumping in line, because it would put a pall over the recall election.

And Now They Are Claiming that Hyperlinking is Infringement

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This is not about making money, This is about seizing control of how we discuss any form of media:

The Motion Picture Association of America is squaring off against a coalition of Internet giants and public interest groups over the key question of whether it’s possible to directly infringe copyright by embedding an image or video hosted by a third party.

A federal judge took that position last July, prompting a chorus of criticism. Two briefs—one by Google and Facebook, the other by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge—attacked the decision as contrary to past precedents and potentially disruptive to the Internet economy. They asked the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn it.

Last week, the MPAA joined the fray with a brief in support of Illinois federal judge John F. Grady’s ruling. It urged the Seventh Circuit not to draw a legal distinction between hosting content and embedding it. In the MPAA’s view, both actions should carry the risk of liability for direct copyright infringement.

The case arose from a dispute over Internet pornography. MyVidster is a video bookmarking site that allows users to save links to their favorite videos and share them with others. The site supports embedding, so bookmarked videos can be viewed on a myVidster page surrounded by myVidster ads.

This is technical, but there is primary and secondary infringement, and the burden of proof is lower, and the penalties are higher, for the former.

If you extend primary infringement to embedding, which is practically indistinguishable from hyperlinks, then expect a full assault on hyperlinks, and if they win on this, the internet becomes another corporate walled garden.

Adventures in Hack Journalism

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In this case it is draw by crayon libertarian Declan McCullagh with an assist by Greg Sandoval, who have decided that the way to write a story about the suit against apple Apple and the publishers who colluded with them was to show that Apple was going to win this suit by consulting with law profs who have been paid by right wing think tanks or have a long history of opposing anti-trust law.

They quote Geoffrey Manne, who works for the Hoover institute, Dominick Armentano, whose Independent Institute is funded by the Olins, the Kochs, and served as a “straw buyer” for Microsoft for the purchase of ads regarding that antitrust litigation, and Richard Epstein, who is the godfather of libertarian legal theory.

In the process, they ignore the facts of the case, as Time Magazine (of all people) documents:

So the publishers worked urgently to hatch a scheme to raise e-book prices before $9.99 became an “entrenched consumer expectation,” according to the lawsuit. Publishing executives are said to have plotted, cloak-and-dagger-style, during meetings at upscale Manhattan restaurants, and tried to conceal their communications “to avoid leaving a paper trail.” A favorite meeting spot was the Chef’s Wine Cellar, a private room at Picholene, just off Central Park West. It’s clear from the complaint that the Department of Justice went so far as to obtain the mobile-phone records of major-publishing-house CEOs.

Meanwhile, Apple was debating business models as it planned to storm onto the e-book market with the iPad. At one point, according to the lawsuit, Apple “contemplated illegally dividing the digital content world with Amazon,” with audio-video going to Apple and e-books to Amazon. Instead, Apple, led by content honcho Eddy Cue, reached out to the publishers to propose that the industry shift from a wholesale model, in which retailers set the price, to an agency model, in which the publishers set the price and Apple, as the “agent,” would receive a 30% commission.

Apple’s then CEO Steve Jobs described the talks in a now infamous quote that appeared in Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography: “We told the publishers, ‘We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.’” Apple played a special role in the plot, according to the government, acting as the “spoke” of a wheel of conspiracy by playing the major publishers off one another to ensure they all participated.

Even if Apple were not engaging in an illegal act on its own, it is engaging in an illegal conspiracy to fix prices, but the draw by crayon libertarian cannot extend his Rolodex beyond the usual suspects.

If the DoJ wanted to go RICO on their asses, it would get really ugly, but if you are a dedicated Randroid, you consult the usual suspects, and create the illusion that there is no “there” there.