What is privileged against discovery? I'm reading a "public records exception" to my state's Freedom of Access Law. One says: Public records. The term "public records" means any written, printed or graphic matter or any mechanical or electronic data compilation from which information can be obtained, directly or after translation into a form susceptible of visual or aural comprehension, that is in the possession or custody of an agency or public official of this State or any of its political subdivisions, or is in the possession or custody of an association, the membership of which is composed exclusively of one or more of any of these entities, and has been received or prepared for use in connection with the transaction of public or governmental business or contains information relating to the transaction of public or governmental business, except: ... B. Records that would be within the scope of a privilege against discovery or use as evidence recognized by the courts of this State in civil or criminal trials if the records or inspection thereof were sought in the course of a court proceeding; http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/1/title1sec402.html Can somebody explain the full meaning of what they're saying is an exception in B and how that doesn't exclude just about any record you can imagine?
The wording is a little confusing, but I interpret it as saying the following: Normally, discovery in a court case allows either party to demand documents from the other, to be used as evidence. However, our courts have exceptions; certain documents might be 'privileged against discovery', meaning they couldn't be demanded in that way. If one of those exceptions would apply to a document under court rules, then you can't request it under Freedom of Access either. To know what those privileges are, and how broadly they apply, you'll have to consult the rules of court procedure for your state.
My understanding is that &quot;the record&quot; only refers to the official record of the proceeding, e.g. the transcripts that would be kept on file and used as the basis for formal decisions. Such records are usually prepared after the fact by a court reporter based on their shorthand notes or audio recordings, so this indicates that the reporter should simply leave out the statement in question when creating those records, perhaps replacing it with a marking saying &quot;(stricken)&quot; or something of the sort. &quot;Stricken from the record&quot; doesn't indicate that the statement is to be kept secret or scrubbed from all history in some Orwellian fashion, merely that it should not be considered in any legal decision-making process (e.g. a judge's ruling). The decision should be made as if the statement had never been uttered. Anyone else in the courtroom -- lawyers, journalists, members of the public -- is free to remember it, write it down, publish it, shout it from the rooftops, or etch it into stone tablets, if they wish. No penalties exist for doing so. I also don't think there is any requirement to delete it from the court reporter's preliminary notes or audio recordings; again, only from the final official transcript. (There could be other situations where it is forbidden to record or divulge what was said: secret grand jury proceedings, material under seal, gag orders, etc. But those would all require some sort of regulation or order outside the usual meaning of the phrase &quot;strike from the record&quot;.)
I'm not convinced that there is a U.S. Supreme Court case with such a clear holding. For example: May a private entity running a public access channel ban speakers based on the content of their speech—something a government entity running the same channels could not do? Yes, the Supreme Court held in a 5-4 opinion in Manhattan Community Access Corporation v. Halleck (2019). Why? Because the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private entities in this instance. You may be looking for one of the cases discussed in Halleck which notes (in the official syllabus) that: &quot;A private entity may qualify as a state actor . . . when the entity exercises “powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State.” Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 U. S. 345, 352 [1974]. The Court has stressed that “very few” functions fall into that category. Flagg Bros., Inc. v. Brooks, 436 U. S. 149, 158 [1978]. Per the official syllabus in the link above, Jackson held that: The convergence between the actions of a state and a heavily regulated private utility company do not rise to the level of state action if the utility company has a partial monopoly in providing electrical service and uses a procedure that the state utilities commission finds to be appropriate under state law in terminating service to customers. As the linked material explains: A private entity performing a public function can be classified as a state actor, but merely being regulated and overseen by the state does not equate to performing a public function if the company is managed by private actors. In this decision, the Court placed limits on the public function doctrine, which otherwise could have grown into a massive exception permitting the inference of state action. Thus, heavy state regulation of a private entity still doesn't constitute state action which can violate a constitutional right, in this case, even though if the state has had greater control over the nominally private entity (e.g. appointing its board of directors), the private entity's actions would be state action. Per the official syllabus in the link above, the primary holding of Flagg Bros. was that: A warehouseman's proposed sale of goods entrusted to him for storage, as permitted by [New York State's Uniform Commercial Code] § 7-210, is not &quot;state action,&quot; and since the allegations of the complaint failed to establish that any violation of respondents' Fourteenth Amendment rights was committed by either the storage company or the State of New York, the District Court properly concluded that no claim for relief was stated by respondents under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. In reaching this conclusion, the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that: The challenged statute does not delegate to the storage company an exclusive prerogative of the sovereign. Other remedies for the settlement of disputes between debtors and creditors (which is not traditionally a public function) remain available to the parties. Though respondents contend that the State authorized and encouraged the storage company's action by enacting [the statute], a State's mere acquiescence in a private action does not convert such action into that of the State. In other words, enactment of a state statute authorizing private action is not state action that can violate a constitutional right.
There is a good chance that the letter in question is in the public domain. Prior to 1978, the copyright laws were very different. Also, if it was published in 1963 or earlier and there was an initial claim of copyright but the copyright was not renewed, it would also be in the public domain. A convenient table summarizing when various pertinent categories of works enter the public domain can be found here. It might be possible to construe depositing the work with the Library of Congress as either a "publication" of the work (which if it happened before 1964 would put it in the public domain), or as a relinquishment of the copyright to the public domain, although I am not a specialist familiar with the legal effect of different forms of donations to the Library of Congress and it could depend upon the facts and circumstances of that particular donation to the Library of Congress. If worse came to worse, I imagine it might be possible to seek a declaratory judgment that your use was a fair use with substituted service on the heirs, and seek a default judgment, although that would not be optimal. The general problem that you face is that the work in question is what is called an "orphan work". Many other countries have special procedures to allow the use of orphan works, but the U.S. has resisted such legislation except for a narrow exception applicable only to libraries and archives at 17 U.S.C. § 108.
No The term "sword and shield" is allegorical rather than legal and may be called up in any number of contexts. Such as ... Waiver of privilege In the particular instance, Anthem was claiming that the reports were privileged and hence protected from discovery, presumably because they were prepared in contemplation of litigation - this litigation, one supposes. However, privilege is lost or waived if the privileged information is disclosed, as it was by relying on the conclusion of the report in its defense. As such, the entire suite of reports is no longer protected. Basically, if you want to keep privilege you have to keep what is privileged secret. Note, the could have lost privilege if they had disclosed the findings of the report in any way such as by press release or by simply leaving the document in a public place. In this context, the judge is stating that they cannot use the "shield" of privilege to protect a report that they have used as a "sword" to make a attack their opponent.
A GPS trace of a car's path, on its own, is unlikely to be covered by copyright in the first place. It is primarily made up of facts (the locations of roads and lanes), and there is no creativity involved in its creation. A database of facts may be protected by copyright as a compilation if there is some amount of creativity in how it is assembled, but this does not extend any protection to the individual contents of the database (cf. Feist v. Rural).
I'm going to focus on one part of your question, because I think it is informative to the entire question: "By publishing those data in a copyrighted book are they now in the public domain?" Insofar as copyright is concerned, the "facts" are simply never copyrightable. What is copyrightable is the expression of the fact. So you publish a book and it contains many facts. You retain copyright over how you expressed the facts, meaning the word choice, format of presentation and so on. The discussion of this point always leads people to ask the following two questions: What if the "facts" are closely related to the way they are expressed? For example, a phonebook contains "facts" about phone numbers. The individual numbers are not subject to copyright. But if the way they were organized was clever (i.e. not merely alphabetical) the presentation may be copyrighted. Doesn't that line get blurred? Why doesn't "the presentation order" count as a "fact?" It does get blurred! And courts use nuanced case law and judgment to figure out which side of the line a given thing is. However, one backstop is that if AN EXPRESSION is so closely related to the IDEA BEING EXPRESSED that the IDEA cannot be otherwise expressed, then then the EXPRESSION is not subject to copyright protection. To answer your specific questions: The book is subject to copyright. The facts in the book are not. Someone else could publish a book with the same measurements so long as they are expressing the facts with sufficient difference from the original. I'm not familiar with CUSIP numbers. However, there are two things to say here. (A) it sounds like you are describing a contractual relationship between the people who have the numbers. This is not governed by copyright; it is governed by contract between the parties. If these numbers could be treated as a "trade secret" they might be protected IP in that way. But given that they are likely circulated at least a bit, they don't seem like candidates for "trade secret" protection. To your question, "what is the effect of one person leaking?" If "trade secret" law was doing any "work" here... then yes, the trade secret would be undone once the information was public. But like I said, its likely this is actually all about contracts not intellectual property protection. (B) The "facts" of "which number is associated with which instrument" is likely NOT subject to copyright at any time. The specific numbering code COULD BE copyrighted, but in reality is almost certainly TOO CLOSELY tied to the IDEA being expressed to be copyrighted. Could the number be expressed otherwise? If not, then its likely not protected by copyright. -- Big take away here: You seem to be confused about the concept of "facts" getting into the public domain. That's not exactly what copyright is about. Copyright would protect the expression of facts. An expression can become public domain if it is sufficiently old or if the creator designates it as public domain work. But simply "putting something out there" does nothing to alter the copyright status of the thing.
The relevant Maryland statute is MD. Criminal Law Code Ann. § 9-307 (2021), subsection (a): A person may not destroy, alter, conceal, or remove physical evidence that the person believes may be used in a pending or future official proceeding with the intent to impair the verity or availability of the physical evidence in the official proceeding. Note &quot;that the person believes&quot; and &quot;with the intent to.&quot; If you have no reason to think it might be necessary in an official proceeding, you aren't violating this section. If you delete the data unintentionally or for some other reason, then you also probably are not violating the section. (I say &quot;probably&quot; because I'm sure there's some sort of provision for negligence or willful disregard for the evidential value of something you should know has evidential value.) As a practical matter, no copyright lawsuit or criminal trial (and criminal trials over copyright infringement are very rare) is going to depend on the browser history of the defendant's friend. What if my computer has major software issues and the only viable solution is delete everything and reinstall from scratch; am I stuck with a worthless broken computer because reinstalling things from scratch would delete evidence of a crime? If you know of evidence on the hard drive that would be destroyed, you can copy it somewhere else before deleting and reinstalling. Federal law is similar: it requires knowledge and intent. 18 USC 1519: Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.