Samsung removed to U.S. District Court in New Orleans a complaint filed Jan. 11 in a Louisiana state court in which contractor Barrister Global Services Network alleged Samsung stiffed it by $86,600 for work it did under a January 2014 repair and warranty services agreement. Though Barrister “timely completed its work in a good and workmanlike manner,” Samsung has refused to pay what it owes despite Barrister’s “amicable demand” that it do so, said the complaint (in Pacer), filed in a state court in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, where Barrister is headquartered. “Samsung has never denied owing Barrister this money,” it said. “It simply has not paid the amount due.” The “amount in controversy exceeds the statutory minimum” of $75,000 for removing the state complaint to federal court, said Samsung in its notice of removal Thursday (in Pacer). “Plaintiff alleges that it is owed $86,643.80 under a contractual agreement between Plaintiff and Samsung, which is denied,” said Samsung. As further grounds for removal, “complete diversity” exists between Barrister, a “citizen” of Delaware and Louisiana, and Samsung, a citizen of New York and New Jersey, it said. Barrister representatives didn’t comment on the removal.

A lower court wrongly threw out consolidated complaints from sports bars and individual DirecTV subscribers suing the MVPD and NFL over DirecTV's Sunday Ticket programming (see 1707030002), 11 academia economists told the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a docket 17-56119 amicus brief (in Pacer) Monday. They said the court's separation of the vertical DirecTV/NFL agreement from the horizontal individual team owner/NFL agreement is artificial and differs from standard industrial organization concepts. They said the rights pooling by individual owners and the subsequent sale of rights to DirecTV results in output far less than what team owners could achieve in other types of broadcast contracts. Signers included Dennis Coates of University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Craig Depken of University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Rodney Fort of University of Michigan, Ira Horowitz and Roger Blair of University of Florida, Leo Kahane of Providence College, Allen Sanderson of University of Chicago and Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College. Counsel for the appellees didn't comment Wednesday.

The FCC asked federal courts to dismiss initial challenges to its net neutrality repeal, and said it won't forward them to a Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation for a venue lottery. The petitions for review are "incurably premature" because the repeal order and declaratory ruling haven't been published in the Federal Register, said similar commission motions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (here), the 1st Circuit (here) and the 9th Circuit (here) posted Monday. Seeking to protect their legal rights due to lingering uncertainty about a filing window, state attorneys general, Public Knowledge, Mozilla and New America's Open Technology Institute filed petitions in the D.C. Circuit, Free Press filed in the 1st and California's Santa Clara County filed in the 9th (see 1801160055). But parties also asked the FCC not to trigger the court lottery until the order is published (see 1801170049). The commission said such petitions aren't ripe until FR publication because the order resulted from a rulemaking and a declaratory ruling had "general applicability," not "particularly applicability," which is a form of informal adjudication subject to a quicker judicial timetable. Its motions recognized that in 2015, the agency forwarded "premature" petitions challenging its net neutrality order to the multidistrict panel, which held a lottery anyway. Given that outcome and the agency's clear-cut procedural views this time, the FCC "determined that the best course here is to await timely-filed petitions before referring any such petitions to the Judicial Panel." Petitioners can refile after publication, the commission motions said.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' affirming summary judgment on Cox Communications ineligible for Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbor protection (see 1802010026) came as the record was clear Cox took every effort to not reasonably implement its own repeat infringer policy, Stanford Law Center for Internet and Society affiliate scholar Annemarie Bridy blogged Sunday: The 4th Circuit makes clear Cox's failure was in implementation, not design, of the 13-point copyright warning system. The decision "lays to rest" any notion DMCA means adjudicated repeat infringers when it refers to repeats, Bridy said. Some amici worried the 4th Circuit would end up limiting ISP latitude in designing repeat infringer policies, but it didn't criticize the design of Cox's "relatively forgiving system," she said.

Free-market and limited-government supporters backed CTIA's Supreme Court challenge of a Berkeley, California, ordinance requiring retailers to inform prospective cellphone buyers that carrying their devices in certain ways can cause exposure to RF radiation exceeding federal limits (see 1801240050). "The right not to speak is an essential part of the liberty guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments -- and ... when someone is forced to act as a mouthpiece for particular government ideas, that warrants the most rigorous judicial review,” wrote the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute and Cause of Action Institute in case 17-976. They said the Supreme Court should “clarify that all government attempts to impose content-based speech mandates are subject to rigorous First Amendment scrutiny.” Response is due March 1, the court said.

Dismiss union workers’ challenge of AT&T Southwest layoffs, AT&T and DirecTV urged in a Friday motion (in Pacer) at U.S. District Court in Austin. "Plaintiff has failed to exhaust all contractual remedies available under the parties’ collective bargaining agreement, including but not limited to grievance and arbitration,” AT&T and DirecTV said in a separate joint answer (in Pacer). Communications Workers of America District 6, covering workers in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, seeks an injunction to reinstate jobs of laid-off employees and a jury trial (see 1801030033).

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to hear CTIA v. Berkeley at a Feb. 16 conference, the court said Wednesday in docket 17-876. CTIA is seeking review of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding an RF disclosure ordinance in Berkeley, California (see 1801170044).

The Supreme Court extended a filing deadline to March 5 for net neutrality litigants, according to the court's docket webpage for Daniel Berninger, et al. v. FCC, No. 17-498, and combined cases. After three previous extensions, the DOJ solicitor general Friday requested that a Feb. 2 deadline for responding to cert petitions be extended to March 5, and the court did so Tuesday for all respondents. Berninger and others asked the high court to review the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's affirmation of the previous commission's 2015 Title II net neutrality order. Some doubt justices will agree to review the case on the merits because they believe it has become moot under the current rollback of Title II net neutrality regulation (see 1801080036).

Multiple district courts have found that a section of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act contains a content-based speech restriction, so plaintiffs suing Charter -- as well as the DOJ as intervenor -- are wrong in trying to trying to justify those restrictions, the MVPD said in a docket 17-1361 reply (in Pacer) posted Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. The company said previous unsuccessful First Amendment challenges to TCPA didn't address content-based preferences Charter is challenging and aren't relevant. Charter also rejected Justice claims the company lacks standing to challenge the section of TCPA in question. Charter argued TCPA creates a content-based distinction between exempt calls for collection of private, government-guaranteed debts or government-owed debts like student loans and all other private calls, such as the telemarketing call to named plaintiff Steve Gallion. The department and counsel for Gallion didn't comment Tuesday.

Garmin (Europe) Ltd. said it prevailed in an intellectual property dispute over its Elevate wrist-based heart-rate monitoring technology. The High Court of Justice ruled Garmin’s technology didn't infringe two designs owned by PulseOn anywhere in the EU, it said. “We’re pleased that the Court rejected PulseOn’s allegations,” said Andrew Etkind, Garmin general counsel, saying the company is “proud and resolute to fight those who abuse the legal system falsely to take credit for Garmin’s own technology or to make unfounded claims of infringement of IP rights.”