Free Republic

Dua Lipa scored a legal victory in a copyright lawsuit over her 2020 smash “Levitating” after a judge dismissed the case. Lipa was initially hit with a pair of “Levitating” copyright lawsuits in March 2022, one from Florida reggae group named Artikal Sound System that was dismissed in June 2023, and another from L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer. Judge Katherine Polk Failla dismissed the latter earlier today in New York court, explaining that the commonalities between songs were not protectable under copyright law. In their initial suit, Brown and Linzer accused Lipa of copying both their 1979 song “Wiggle...

A “Gun Free School Zone” case has been appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The appeal attacks the Gun Free School Zone Act (GFSZA) as being an unconstitutional infringement of rights protected by the Second Amendment. An amicus brief has been filed by the California Rifle and Pistol Association (CRPA), the Second Amendment Law Center, and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF). From January 5th to the 29th of 2023, Ahmed Allam spent several hours in the afternoon and evening parked across the street from a parochial school, St. Anthony Cathedral Basilica School in Beaumont,...

A federal judge refused on Tuesday to certify the ongoing lawsuit alleging President Donald Trump defrauded individuals in his promotion of a multi-level marketing venture as a class action. Filed in 2018, the complaint focused on ACN, which sold telecommunications products, and two other companies. The plaintiffs are represented by Roberta Kaplan, the same attorney who represented E. Jean Carroll in her successful sexual battery and defamation suit against Mr. Trump. U.S. District Judge Lorna G. Schofield ruled that putative class members lacked certain common elements in bringing the case. "Here there is no common evidence showing that putative class...

In Ciraci v. J.M. Smucker Company, (6th Cir., March 14, 2023), the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals held that employees of a company that sells food products to the federal government may not assert a 1st Amendment free-exercise claim against the company for denying them a religious exemption from a COVID vaccine mandate imposed by the company after the federal government required government contractors to do so. The court said in part: Constitutional guarantees conventionally apply only to entities that exercise sovereign power, such as federal, state, or local governments.... Smucker’s may be a big company. But it is...

Signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom last September, Assembly Bill 173 amended state firearms laws to allow California to turn over gun owners’ personal information to gun violence researchers. Finding there was no “emergency” to warrant restraining California from sharing millions of gun owners’ personal information with gun violence researchers, a federal judge Wednesday declined to block the state’s enactment of Assembly Bill 173.U.S. District Judge Larry Alan Burns heard from attorneys for Jane and John Does and Attorney General Rob Bonta regarding a constitutional challenge to Assembly Bill 173, a law which amended California firearms laws to authorize...