Those silly Americans. Always copying great Canadian innovations, like class actions for copyright infringement by lawyers against large legal publishers. You’ll recall I put up a short post yesterday on a lawsuit along those lines that was recently certified to proceed. I’m a bit behind in my reading – apparently a similar suit was filed last week in New York, again by lawyers, and this time against Westlaw (a subsidiary of the target of the Canadian action, Thomson Reuters) and LexisNexis.
More details on the action in the Wall Street Journal (along with a copy of the claim), The Volokh Conspiracy and the ABA Journal. I’ve included the last link more for the comments, just to give a sense of opinions on the topic (which, perhaps not surprisingly, are all over the map). Volokh offers a brief analysis, plus another spirited debate in the comments.
Nice change to be first, I suppose.
