Susan Yvonne Illston | |
---|---|
Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California | |
Assumed office July 1, 2013 | |
Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California | |
In office May 26,1995 –July 1,2013 | |
Appointed by | Bill Clinton |
Preceded by | Barbara A. Caulfield |
Succeeded by | Vince Chhabria |
Personal details | |
Born | Tokyo,Japan | June 24,1948
Education | Duke University (BA) Stanford University (JD) |
Susan Yvonne Illston (born June 24,1948) is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton and confirmed by the Senate in 1995. She assumed senior status in 2013.
Illston was born in Tokyo,Japan,was raised in the military and attended Fort Knox High School. She graduated Duke University,receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 1970,and she received a Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School in 1973. [1] Prior to her appointment,Illston served in private practice first as an associate,then as a partner,at Cotchett,Illston &Pitre in Burlingame,California from 1973 to 1995. [2]
On the recommendations of Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein,Illston was nominated by President Bill Clinton on January 23,1995 and confirmed by the Senate on May 25,1995 by voice vote,receiving her commission the following day. [3] [4] She took senior status on July 1,2013.
Sitting by designation of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,in 1999 Illston wrote the panel decision in DiLoreto v. Downey Unified School District Board of Education,196 F.3d 958 (9th Cir. 1999),cert. denied,529 U.S. 1067 (2000),which held that an athletic fence which a public high school made available for commercial advertising is a nonpublic forum from which religious messages could be excluded without violating the First Amendment. [5]
In February 2004,Illston ruled in 321 Studios v. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios,Inc. that the company's software,which was intended,according to the company,to allow consumers to make backup copies of DVDs by "circumventing" so-called "copy protection" methods,was illegal under Federal law. She issued an injunction at the behest of several Hollywood studios and ordered 321 Studios to stop selling their product. However,despite finding that the software violated Federal law,she ruled that copies made by consumers (of their own legally purchased DVDs) were,in fact,legal. She wrote in her opinion,"It is the technology itself at issue,not the uses to which the copyrighted material may be put...Legal downstream use of the copyrighted material by customers is not a defense to the software manufacturer's violation of the provisions [of copyright law]." [6]
In August 2006,Illston sentenced Patrick Arnold,a chemist who developed an undetectable performance-enhancing drug for BALCO,to three months in prison. [7]
In March 2009,Illston presided over a perjury case involving Barry Bonds. [8]
In April 2009,Illston ruled that two students who were threatened with suspension by their community college,the College of Alameda,could sue the school for free speech infringement. [9]
In October 2009,Illston ruled in favor of environmental groups,including the Center for Biological Diversity,that sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over a 5,000 mile expansion of off-roading trails in California's Mojave Desert. Illston found that the BLM had violated its own regulations [10] when it designated the routes in 2006 [11] without adequately analyzing the impacts on air quality,soils,plant communities and sensitive species such as the endangered Mojave fringe-toed lizard. Illston called the BLM's plan "flawed because it does not contain a reasonable range of alternatives" to limit damage to sensitive habitat and pointed out that the desert and its resources are "extremely fragile,easily scarred,and slowly healed." [12] The court also found that the BLM had failed to follow route restrictions established in the agency’s own conservation plan,resulting in the establishment of hundreds of illegal off roading routes during the past three decades. [10] Illston ruled that the plan specifically violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA) and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). [11]
Illston in 2011 was the presiding judge in Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC v. George Hotz, et al., [13] in which Sony claimed that Hotz's jailbreaking of the Sony PlayStation 3 violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. [14] She granted Sony permission to track as much information as possible about those who had seen a private YouTube video about the jailbreak and to read their comments, plus obtain access to IP addresses, accounts, and other details of visitors to sites run by Geohot. The access granted by Illston extended even to those who had not downloaded the jailbreak code. [15]
In a March 15, 2013, ruling Judge Illston granted petitioner's motion to set aside a National Security Letter (NSL), ruling that the NSL's nondisclosure and judicial review provisions suffer from significant Constitutional infirmities. [16] The petitioner argued that the nondisclosure provision of statute 18 U.S.C. § 2709(c) was an unconstitutional prior restraint and content-based restriction on speech. [17] The decision came in a lawsuit challenging a NSL on behalf of an unnamed telecommunications company represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). [18] The judge stayed her decision for 90 days to give the government the opportunity to appeal. [19] [20]
in April 2020, Illston issued an order—ultimately overturned by the US Supreme Court—denying Slack Technologies’ motion to dismiss a securities class action complaint against it following a direct listing by the company. [21] The judge held that the plaintiff did not lack standing to pursue claims under Section 11 of the Securities Act where the purchased shares were not traceable to the allegedly misleading registration statement, in the unique situation of a direct listing in which shares registered under the Securities Act become publicly tradeable on the same day that unregistered shares become publicly tradeable, even though the plaintiff could not show that the shares the plaintiff acquired were registered. [22] Illiston certified her ruling for interlocutory appeal, and the Ninth Circuit - with a divided panel - affirmed. [23] Dissenting, Judge Eric D. Miller argued that Sections 11 and 12 require a plaintiff to prove that he purchased securities registered under a materially misleading registration statement, something Pirani had not done, and cited a long line of lower court decisions that interpreted Section 11 as applying only to shares purchased pursuant to a registration statement. [23]
The United States Supreme Court ultimately reviewed the case. It noted in its unanimous June 2023 decision that lower federal courts had held since the 1960s that liability under Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933 attaches "only when a buyer can trace the shares he has purchased to a false or misleading registration statement." [23] It held that "because we think the better reading of the particular provision before us requires a plaintiff to plead and prove that he purchased shares traceable to the allegedly defective registration statement, we vacate the Ninth Circuit’s judgment holding otherwise." [23]
On 20 August 2024, Illston granted a motion to unseal a list of shareholders of X Holdings Corp. (which owns Twitter since the acquisition by Elon Musk). The unsealed document was published to the court's website. [24]
Strategic lawsuits against public participation, or strategic litigation against public participation, are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.
The Securities Act of 1933, also known as the 1933 Act, the Securities Act, the Truth in Securities Act, the Federal Securities Act, and the '33 Act, was enacted by the United States Congress on May 27, 1933, during the Great Depression and after the stock market crash of 1929. It is an integral part of United States securities regulation. It is legislated pursuant to the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
Lik Sang was a popular distributor of Asian electronics. The company sold import games, toys, figures, anime-related items, and obscure adapters and controllers for various video game platforms. Lik Sang closed as of October 24, 2006, as a result of multiple lawsuits filed against them by Sony.
Milan Dale Smith, Jr. is an American attorney and jurist serving as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Smith's brother, Gordon H. Smith, was a Republican U.S. Senator from 1997 to 2009. Milan Smith is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, and he considers himself to be a political independent.
Dennis G. Jacobs is a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., is an American legal case involving the computer printer company Lexmark, which had designed an authentication system using a microcontroller so that only authorized toner cartridges could be used. The resulting litigation has resulted in significant decisions affecting United States intellectual property and trademark law.
OtherOS is a feature of early versions of the PlayStation 3 video game console, allowing user installed software, such as Linux or FreeBSD. The feature was removed since system firmware update 3.21, released on April 1, 2010.
Bowoto v. Chevron Corp. was a lawsuit against Chevron Nigeria Ltd., a subsidiary of Chevron USA, which went to trial in 2008 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs, Nigerian citizens who had been injured during or who had survived human rights violations perpetrated by Nigerian military personnel, alleged that the Chevron subsidiary backed the military action and that the parent company thus should bear liability in US courts for the resultant fallout. The suit was decided on December 1, 2008, when nine jurors unanimously agreed Chevron was not liable for any of the numerous allegations. Judgment was entered the next day, officially exonerating Chevron.
DVD X Copy is a consumer software program that enabled novice computer users to copy any DVD movie to any blank DVD. Most commercial DVD movies include Content Scrambling System (CSS), a copy-protection technology designed to prevent DVD movies from being copied. This controversial DVD copy software program included technology that decrypts the CSS copy protection mechanism on DVD movie discs. DVD X Copy products are still being sold on the DVD X Copy website, although it was previously believed to be no longer sold or supported.
George Francis Hotz, alias geohot, is an American security hacker, entrepreneur, and software engineer. He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks, reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony. From September 2015 onwards, he has been working on his vehicle automation machine learning company comma.ai. Since November 2022, Hotz has been working on tinygrad, a deep learning framework.
Kim Anita McLane Wardlaw is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since 1998. She is the first Hispanic American woman to be appointed to a federal appeals court. Wardlaw was considered as a possible candidate to be nominated by Barack Obama to the Supreme Court of the United States.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of online services for copyright infringement by their users.
Denise Louise Cote is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
PlayStation 3 Jailbreak was the first USB chipset that allowed unauthorized execution of code, similar to homebrew, on the PlayStation 3. It works by bypassing a system security check using a memory exploit which occurs with USB devices that allows the execution of unsigned code.
Slack Technologies, LLC is an American software company founded in 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, known for its proprietary communication platform Slack. Outside its headquarters in San Francisco, California, Slack also operates offices in New York City, Denver, Toronto, London, Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, Vancouver, Pune, and Melbourne.
Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton is an American multinational law firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The firm has twenty-two offices, including U.S. offices in Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Washington State, and the District of Columbia, and has presence via international offices in Japan, Beijing, Shanghai, and Sweden. The firm is particularly known for its intellectual property practice. Clients have included Google in litigation related to its Google Print product, and Sony in its suit against 21-year-old hacker George Hotz for jailbreaking the PS3.
SCEA v. Hotz was a lawsuit in the United States by Sony Computer Entertainment of America against George Hotz and associates of the group fail0verflow. It was in regards to jailbreaking and reverse engineering the PlayStation 3.
Ronnie Abrams is a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum is the appeals lawsuit which followed the U.S. District Court case Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum, No. 07cv11446-NG.
A securities class action (SCA), or securities fraud class action, is a lawsuit filed by investors who bought or sold a company's publicly traded securities within a specific period of time and suffered economic injury as a result of violations of the securities laws.
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