At Last! Supreme Court Decision on Tasini Settlement Expected—in 2009
Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 12/18/2008 8:06:00 AM
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Here’s something else to look forward to in early 2009—it now appears that a decision on whether the Supreme Court will review a Second Circuit decision that quashed the Tasini settlement on jurisdictional grounds will indeed come. The Court was docketed to conference on the case on December 12—the fifth time the case appeared on the docket in 2008. While no decision from December 12 has yet been posted, the case has also not been bound over for the next conference. The Court is now recessed until January 9, 2009, after which it is expected a decision will be announced.
If the Court refuses to review the Second Circuit decision, by all accounts, the settlement, some 15 years after the case initially began, will be dead. That would open the door to potential chaos in the database world, publishers argue, as they may be forced to pull articles for which they do not have rights in the face of a potential wave of individual lawsuits from authors, or, so says the brief from petitioner Reed Elsevier, which also embodies the views of other publisher defendants. “If the panel’s ruling stands,” reads the brief, “the opportunity for a comprehensive settlement and resolution…will be irretrievably lost.”
If the Court agrees to review the ruling, there still awaits a winding legal road to approval.
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