Seventh Circuit Backs Away From Apparent Circuit Split on Three Strikes Provision of PLRA

Enacted in 1996, the Prison Litigation Reform Act raised numerous obstacles to prisoner rights lawsuits.  The “three strikes” provision of the statute, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g), is intended to bar prisoners who have a history of frivolous litigation from proceeding in forma pauperis.  IFP status results in the waiver of court filing fees that would otherwise be beyond that means of indigent litigants.  For most prisoners, in light of their limited financial resources, a denial of IFP status is the functional equivalent of a denial of access to the courts.

Last week, in Turley v. Gaetz (No. 09-3847), the Seventh Circuit backed away from dicta in earlier decisions that seemed to embrace an exceptionally and unnecessarily broad reading of the three strikes bar.  Had the court adhered to the earlier dicta, it would have opened a circuit split on a very important prisoner rights issue.

Here’s what happened. 

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What’s the Difference Between Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Postal 2?

The question about the difference between Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Postal 2 sounds like the set-up to a corny joke.  In fact, it was a subject discussed yesterday at the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices heard oral argument on a first Amendment challenge to a California statute banning the sale of violent video games to minors.  The New York Times reports on a spirited question and answer exchange between the justices and attorneys for each side in the dispute. 

According to the report, the law imposes a $1,000 fine for selling violent video games to anyone under the age of 18.  Violent video games are defined as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a “patently offensive way,” or a way that appeals to “deviant or morbid interests” while lacking “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” 

Justice Scalia’s comments and questions made it seem like he is leaning against the law, since he pointedly questioned both the definition of a “deviant violent video game,” and queried whether, since Grimm’s Fairy Tales are indeed grim, whether they, too should be banned. 

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The Most Important Supreme Court Case in Copyright Law: Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984)

[Editors’ note: This is the fifth in our series, What Is the Most Important U.S. Supreme Court Case in Your Area of the Law? The first four installments are here, here, here, and here.]

There have been several important copyright cases before the Supreme Court since the first, Wheaton v. Peters, in 1834 (over, appropriately enough, the copyright in the Supreme Court’s reports). But the most important to me personally is Sony v. Universal, also known as “the Betamax case.” The Sony case, as is widely known, held that recording a program at home in order to watch it later—”time-shifting”—is a fair use. It also devised a very influential test for determining the liability of manufacturers and service providers for infringement committed by users, one that asked only whether the product or service was “capable of substantial noninfringing uses.” Undeniably Sony is an important case, but then so are Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing, Baker v. Selden, CCNV v. Reid, Burrow-Giles v. Sarony, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose and countless others. What pushes Sony over the top is the fact that the Sony case marks the boundary between two copyright worlds: a world where copyright is solely a regulation of a particular industry sector—publishing—and a world where it regulates everyone.

Continue ReadingThe Most Important Supreme Court Case in Copyright Law: Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984)
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