I hadn’t heard of Gloria Allred before I read this article on PR.com.
I’m inspired by Allred’s work for the civil rights of women, and I’m amused by the author’s assertion that civil rights are, “…something that I feel I already have in spades.”
Make sure to read all the discussion about the court of public opinion at the bottom of the article wherein Allred defends the use of press conferences in winning law suits.

My favorite quote: “Male chauvinism is, according to the American Psychiatric Association, a certifiable mental illness. But the good news is that it can be cured.” – Gloria Allred.

The legal odyssey of Nano Maldonado – a Redwood City man who argued that California’s Outdoor Advertising Act is unconstitutional – ended in defeat this week at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The nation’s high court declined to hear Maldonado’s case, leaving in place lower federal court rulings that sided with the California Department of Transportation.

Maldonado has been fighting since the early 1990s for the right to lease his billboard on the roof of a Redwood City building he owns along Highway 101 to various businesses for advertising.

Caltrans has long enforced a law that restricts billboards on stretches of freeway designated “landscaped highway” to showing only non-commercial messages or commercial messages for services available where the signs are. Maldonado’s billboard sits within a “landscaped highway” stretch.

Maldonado challenged the state law, saying the distinction between commercial and non-commercial speech is so vague as to be unconstitutional. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Caltrans’ favor last February, and the Supreme Court decided Tuesday not to weigh in.

“I had to try, because if I wouldn’t have tried, I would have never known and it really would have gotten to me later,” Maldonado said this week. “I had to try the system and I felt like I’ve been let down.”

The transportation agency was “very pleased with the result” of the Supreme Court’s decision, said Ronald Beals, the

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chief counsel for Caltrans and a Redwood City native. “It affirmed the regulations we’ve had on the books.”

Maldonado and his attorney see the case’s end as a blow to free speech.

“We all as kids in school read the First Amendment and think we know what it means,” said Dennis Zell, the Millbrae attorney who represented Maldonado for the past eight years. “But when the courts start chipping away at First Amendment freedoms, it certainly makes me as a lawyer want to bring cases to see that the First Amendment freedom is returned to full stature.”

The battle began in 1993 when Maldonado bought the building at 3600 Rolison Road with a billboard on top of it, and put both up for lease.

When he began posting advertisements for businesses such as the Holiday Inn and the Stanford football team, Caltrans cited him several times and eventually took him to court for creating a nuisance. He was cited several times, including once for a Habitat for Humanity message, and was later found in contempt of court for continuing to post messages.

In 2002, he filed a federal lawsuit against the director of Caltrans, asking a court to deem the state’s Outdoor Advertising Act unconstitutional under the First Amendment because the distinction between commercial and non-commercial speech is vague.

Maldonado scored a victory in 2006, when a federal judge declared the act unconstitutional because it favors commercial speech over non-commercial speech. But the judge said the law is constitutional as long as Caltrans does not restrict non-commercial speech. State lawmakers then passed a 2007 amendment to the act barring Caltrans from regulating non-commercial speech on billboards.

When Maldonado appealed, the Ninth Circuit court agreed with the federal judge and ruled that the speech distinction is not overly vague.

Maldonado appealed a final time to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately chose not to take the case.

Beals argues that the difference between commercial and non-commercial speech was “well-established” by the 1981 case Metromedia v. City of San Diego, in which the U.S. Supreme Court said commercial speech is “speech proposing a commercial transaction.”

“Realistically, this dispute with Mr. Zell is the only one we’ve had, at least in the last 10 or 12 years that I know of,” Beals said. “In the real world, it’s not a real issue.”

But Zell said different courts have used varying legal standards for judging the difference between commercial and non-commercial speech, raising questions about which test should be used to judge the content of a billboard message.

“I would predict billboard companies are going to continue raising this point until the U.S. Supreme Court settles the law, because frankly the law makes no sense,” Zell said.

With his legal battle apparently over, Zell said Maldonado is going to “try to comply with the law” by posting non-commercial messages on his billboard.

E-mail Shaun Bishop at sbishop@dailynewsgroup.com.

I find the comment by Beals about the “real world” to be troubling. Free speech IS a real world issue.

By ETHAN SMITH and YUKARI IWATANI KANE

Apple Inc., the company that restructured the music industry around its iTunes service, is exploring an overhaul of the way it sells and stores music that is aimed at extending its influence to the Web, according to people briefed on the strategy.

The key vehicle for the move is Apple’s newly acquired music-streaming service La La Media Inc. for which Apple paid $85 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Where Apple’s iTunes requires users to download music onto a specific computer, Lala.com lets users buy and listen to music through a Web browser, meaning its customers can access purchases from anywhere, as long as they are connected to the Internet.

Apple is considering adopting that same model for songs sold on iTunes, a change that would give consumers more ways to access and manage their iTunes purchases—and wouldn’t require them to download Apple’s software or their purchases.

AM Report: A New Shift for iTunes?

8:43

The News Hub panel discusses why Apple is considering moving iTunes from a computer-based model towards internet-hosting.

LalaApple acquired music-streaming service Lala last week for $85 million.

That new business model extends Apple’s grip on the music business, giving it the ability to sell music through search engines and other Web sites and broaden its reach beyond people who come to its virtual store.

Record company executives were still digesting the proposed changes and didn’t want to discuss them publicly. Privately, they said they are optimistic about the prospect of consumers being able to buy music from more Web sites, but cautious about any development that would add to Apple’s already significant power.

As part of the move, Lala executives have been given key positions helping shape music strategy for the iTunes Store, and some iTunes executives would report to them. “It’s our understanding that the Lala guys are going to be in very significant roles,” says one person who has been briefed on Apple’s plans.

Some people familiar with Apple’s thinking cautioned the changes are in the early planning stages and could still be altered. But if the plans do go forward, these people said, Apple could start implementing them as soon as next year.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans,” said Apple spokesman Steve Dowling.

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For consumers, such changes could make it far easier to manage and access large libraries of music, which need to be stored, maintained and backed up on computer hard drives and portable devices.

Apple, which last year surpassed Wal-Mart Stores Inc. as the biggest music seller, will generate about $2 billion in iTunes revenue this year, estimates Piper Jaffray & Co. That’s about 20% higher than last year, the brokerage firm estimates, but growth has slowed over the past several years as most people now own iPods or iPhones and it is adding fewer new users.

ITunes is also facing pressure from competing services that allow users to listen to “streaming” music either cheaply or free on computers or portable, Internet-connected devices like the iPhone or iPod touch. Streaming has been at the heart of Lala’s strategy for the past two years, in the form of what the site calls “Web songs,” which cost 10 cents and are accessed via a Web browser.

For several months, Lala has been field testing a version of its service that works on the iPhone or iPod touch. The company has told people in the music industry that test users spent at least as much money every month, on average, buying the service’s 10-cent Web songs as iTunes users do paying for full-priced downloads.

Even before the acquisition closed Friday, Lala Chairman Bill Nguyen and Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president for Internet services, began making joint calls to various business partners, including record-label groups, discussing possibilities for the music service’s future.

The proposed changes would represent a fundamental redefinition of what it means to own a song, movie or other piece of media—shifting the emphasis from possession of a physical disc or digital file to the right to access content.

Journal Community

• discuss

“ Wow…this is like the exact opposite of AT&T’s strategy. When AT&T sees customers using their products, they seek to create “incentives” to reduce use. Apple tries to exploit it to make money. ”

— Anil Sunderji

Certain legal issues remain hazy: If music becomes a virtual product, it isn’t clear how Apple might be able to guarantee a buyer would retain access to a song in perpetuity if, for instance, a new owner gained control of a record label’s catalog and changed the terms of its deal with the retailer.

Thorny issues have already arisen around media sold as virtual goods. Amazon.com Inc. in June outraged consumers when it deleted two books by George Orwell from its Kindle electronic readers after a rights dispute with their publisher.

Lala has partnerships that allow it to sell songs from links embedded on sites as major as Google Inc. and as specialized as the indie-music site Pitchfork Media. Adopting that strategy would represent a major departure for Apple, which has always relied on what is known as a walled-garden approach in which its machines run on proprietary software. But that closed-system approach has limited its sales reach to people who deliberately log in to its online store.

Apple has revisited its iTunes strategy from time to time and had discussed the impact of streaming music services like Lala and Pandora Inc. in the past, but it believed that people want to own their music, according to a person familiar with Apple’s thinking.

The shift could reopen an uncomfortable topic between Apple and the music industry. Record-label executives were relieved in 2003 when Apple launched what was then called the iTunes Music Store, which appeared to be a virtual lifeline in a growing sea of illegally downloaded songs. But they have since also become frustrated that the service’s dominance of the market has made it into a gatekeeper with what they view as undue sway.

In addition to selling music, Lala’s software also scans a user’s existing music library and matches its contents with songs on its own servers, then gives the user access to that music via a Web browser. That approach, known in technology circles as cloud computing, could also be part of a revamped, Web-based iTunes, according to the people with knowledge of the talks.

It is also possible that Apple would use Lala’s streaming technology as the basis for a subscription service, for which users would pay a flat rate in exchange for unlimited access to music. Such offerings already exist but have never gained much traction with users, mainly because most don’t work with iPods or iPhones.

Write to Ethan Smith at ethan.smith@wsj.com and Yukari Iwatani Kane at yukari.iwatani@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A1

By Jeffry Bartash, MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Sometimes it’s better to fight your battles in the court of public opinion than in the courtroom.

That’s what AT&T Inc. decided to do after setbacks in its legal effort to force Verizon Wireless to cancel ads claiming it has a superior mobile network. The two companies on Wednesday agreed to drop complaints pending before federal courts in Georgia and New York.

AT&T Dead Last in Consumer Reports Survey

Consumer Reports ranks AT&T last among major U.S. wireless service providers. Plus, scientists grow pork in the lab and Facebook and MySpace purge some sex offenders (Dec. 1).

AT&T /quotes/comstock/13*!t/quotes/nls/t (T 27.40, -0.12, -0.44%) said it would not comment further on the matter. A spokesman for Verizon Wireless, which is jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!vz/quotes/nls/vz (VZ 32.63, -0.06, -0.18%) and Vodafone Group PLC /quotes/comstock/15*!vod/quotes/nls/vod (VOD 23.26, -0.72, -3.00%) , could not be reached for comment.

The legal cease-fire is really a white flag of surrender by AT&T, whose chance of winning a court battle were remote at best. What’s more, the lawsuit merely served to draw extra attention to the Verizon ads and to recent problems in AT&T’s network.

More significantly, the dispute illustrated the intensified state of competition in the wireless business. Most people in the United States already own mobile phones and it’s getting harder to find new customers, especially in the wake of the steepest recession in nearly 30 years. Discount-wireless services also are growing in popularity as consumers curb their spending habits.

But it won’t be long before there’s another spat over ads and network quality. Verizon, the nation’s largest wireless carrier, and AT&T, a close No. 2, can be expected to ratchet up their campaigns against each other in the hunt for increasingly scarce customers, since they’re both building “4G,” or fourth-generation networks for even faster Internet speeds a few years out.

AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier of the iPhone from Apple Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!aapl/quotes/nls/aapl (AAPL 195.60, -0.88, -0.45%) , has experienced increased congestion and strain on its network because customers frequently use their smartphones to surf the Internet. AT&T is bolstering its network to handle the demand, but with millions of iPhone customers, it hasn’t entirely resolved the problem.

Verizon took opportunistic aim in its ads at another perceived weakness of AT&T — its so-called 3G, or third-generation network coverage. (Companies over time introduce new generations of network technology, each of which is designed to increase capacity and data-transfer speeds. What that means for wireless consumers is fewer dropped calls and faster Internet service.)

On the face of it, Verizon’s 3G network covers most of the continental United States and easily exceeds the coverage by AT&T. So Verizon’s network is much better, right? Not exactly.

It won’t be long before there’s another spat over ads and network quality. Verizon and AT&T are both building ‘4G’ networks for even faster Internet speeds a few years out.

For one thing, most people use their wireless phones for voice calls or brief text messages. Better 3G network coverage doesn’t necessarily help a lot.

AT&T also operates a far-flung “Edge” network that’s basically a halfway step toward 3G technology in terms of speed and capacity. When AT&T customers exit areas covered by the company’s 3G network, their phones automatically switch to Edge. Most are able to get Internet service fast enough for their current needs.

Yet the distinction between 3G and Edge is lost on most consumers, prompting a federal judge in Georgia last month to call Verizon’s ad campaign “sneaky.” The same judge, however, also acknowledged that the ads were “not misleading.”

Although the judge gave AT&T another chance to present its case, the odds of winning were virtually nil. So the company has chosen to run its own ads touting the broad reach of its network, instead of spending money on lawyers to attack Verizon’s claims.

Verizon executives, for their part, are delighted by the publicity, though they won’t say this publicly. The company just released another ad in its “There’s a Map for That” campaign, starring a guy named Santa. The ad taunts AT&T again with the claim that Verizon’s “Third Generation” network is far more widely available in the United States.

Jeffry Bartash is a reporter for MarketWatch in Washington.

via marketwatch.com

By Ashby Jones

Question: When should a big, publicly-traded company refrain from filing a lawsuit? Answer: possibly when the public-relations blowback does more damage than the behavior complained about in the lawsuit.

This truism has come up across the pundit-o-sphere in the wake of the recently filed AT&T/Verizon lawsuit.

In short: earlier this month, AT&T sued Verizon Wireless in federal court in Atlanta, alleging that Verizon’s advertisements comparing the companies’ 3G wireless coverage across the country were misleading and causing “irreparable harm.”

Perhaps you’ve seen these ads. In our view — sorry AT&T — they’re really fairly arresting. The ads show two maps, one representing Verizon’s 3G coverage area and another representing AT&T’s. Nearly the entire Verizon map is shaded red, the shade used to represent where Verizon offers 3G service. The AT&T map, on the other hand, is mostly white. Click here for the WSJ story on the suit’s filing; here for the complaint.

AT&T contends the map suggests that the blank spots indicate a complete lack of coverage, and not just lack of 3G services.

“By communicating that AT&T customers have no coverage in large parts of the country, Verizon is misleading the public about an essential component of the services AT&T offers,” the lawsuit said. The suit seeks a restraining order.

Verizon Wireless said the lawsuit is without merit. “Our ads clearly explain that non-3G coverage is available elsewhere,” said Verizon spokesman Jim Gerace to the WSJ.

On Wednesday, district court judge Timothy Batten shot down AT&T’s request for a temporary restraining order, and set a Dec. 16 hearing date on AT&T’s preliminary injunction request. Click here for a report, from CNET. [McKenna Long & Aldridge is repping AT&T; King & Spalding and Skadden are working the case for Verizon.]

According to this story from Marketwatch, Judge Batten reportedly said the ads are “literally true.”

Nevertheless, AT&T is pressing on, according to CNET. “While we are disappointed with the court’s decision on our request for a temporary restraining order, we still feel strongly that Verizon’s ads mislead consumers into thinking that AT&T doesn’t offer wireless service in large portions of the country, which is clearly not the case,” Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, said in an email to CNET. Click here for more information on AT&T’s position on the suit.

And this brings us back to where we started: Should AT&T continue to press its case, given that the ads have now been highlighted in news stories all over the place?

MarketWatch’s Therese Poletti thinks not:

Did AT&T’s top public-relations people have any input before the go-ahead was given to a highly-paid law firm to file this muddled request for a temporary restraining order?

She continues:

[I]it seems ludicrous to me that AT&T is focusing so much attention on its inferior network, which is exactly what this lawsuit does. . . . Thanks to AT&T’s suit, Verizon is now getting more attention for its snarky TV ads and its plain-speaking legal response to AT&T’s lawsuit, with sentences like “AT&T may not like the message that the ads send, but this Court should reject its efforts to silence the messenger,” another turn AT&T was probably not counting on. . . . It would have been smarter to come back at Verizon with its own clever ad campaign, and put some of the millions it is paying its lawyers into further upgrading its network

Jim Haggerty, who runs a blog on law, the media and public relations, adds a little more on the lawsuit-as-business-strategy strategy, citing Cravath head Evan Chesler.

I can tell you that advice relating to the broader “court of public opinion” is often just plain ignored. A great quote on the subject comes from [Chelser], interviewed for the new edition of my book In The Court Of Public Opinion:

As trial lawyers, we are often unaware of the fact that we’re not the only brain or mouth in the room,” Chesler warned, “and what we think about the problem is not necessarily the best way for the client to view or solve the problem.

I know that’s hard for lawyers to accept. It has taken me decades and I’m not cured yet. But it is nevertheless true.”