Copyright Law
Citizen Media Law Project 
Legal training and resources to protect free online speech. Advocacy for citizen participation in online media.
Post Frequency: 2.1/day Last Entry: November 19, 2009 at 09:48:09 Recent Entries: 665
By Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Center for Citizen Media
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Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists
Posted on November 19, 2009We are delighted to announce the public launch of the Berkman Center's Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono (i.e., free!) initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help...
CMLP Gets Lectured
Posted on November 18, 2009Last week, the Practicing Law Institute hosted its annual program on Communications Law in the Digital Age. Up for discussion were a lot of topics near and dear to CMLP's heart: trends in First Amendment jurisprudence (including prognostications in US v...
The MPAA Lottery: Town of Coshocton Draws the Black Spot
Posted on November 16, 2009??It isn?t fair, it isn?t right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.? - The Lottery, Shirley Jackson In The Lottery, Shirley Jackson explored the interplay of the banal and the barbaric. She described a town?s old-fashioned agrarian ritual: an individual who has drawn a slip marked with a black spot is stoned to death in order to ensure a good harvest...
Fox News DMCA-Bombs News1News on YouTube
Posted on November 13, 2009Like many former newspaper employees, I hate the 24-hour "news" networks. Be it Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN, I think they're just across-the-board awful. The only time I'll pay any attention to them is in the midst of some event that demands real-time attention, say a presidential election or a terrorist attack (and even then, I may just switch to BBC coverage instead)...
Hipcheck16 Is No Turk 182 - But Anonymous Political Speech Is Sacred
Posted on November 11, 2009This one is a little disturbing. Political Race Gets Nasty During an election in Buffalo Grove, Ill., an online debate started about a candidate for Village Trustee, Lisa Stone. During that debate, this public official's 15 year old son, Jed, got a little upset about some harsh statements lobbed at his mother, so he joined the debate -- in particular, getting into a flame war with "Hipcheck16"...
The Cartman Technique: How a Fraud Exception will Mine the ISP Safe Harbor
Posted on November 10, 2009[A]ll it takes to kill a show forever, is to get one episode pulled. If we convince the network to pull this episode for the sake of Muslims, then the Catholics can demand a show they don't like get pulled . . . and so on and so on, until Family Guy is no more - it's exactly what happened to Laverne & Shirley...
"I Know It When I See It." The View from Where?
Posted on November 09, 2009Jeffrey A. Kilbride and James Robert Schaffer are spammers. They sent millions of unsolicited e-mails advertising pornographic web sites, and were paid a fee whenever a recipient of their e-mails purchased a subscription to one of the sites, earning a total of $1...
Glenn Beck's UDRP Complaint Gets The Smack Down
Posted on November 06, 2009First Amendment juggernaut Marc Randazza is having a very good week. On Wednesday, Professor Donald Marvin Jones a/k/a the "Nutty Professor" voluntarily dismissed his invasion of privacy lawsuit against Randazza's client Above the Law. Today, word comes that WIPO Arbitration Panelist Frederick M...
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Hears Oral Argument in Anti-SLAPP Case
Posted on November 04, 2009On Monday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) heard oral argument in Fustolo v.Hollander, No. SJC-10485. As you may recall, last month the Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) joined the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLUM) and the Lawyers? Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association in submitting an amicus curiae brief urging the SJC to reverse a lower court's decision interpreting the state?s anti-SLAPP legislation...
Chamber of Commerce to the Yes Men: We Are Not Amused
Posted on November 03, 2009What do Tommy Hilfiger, MasterCard, the World Wrestling Federation, and Tom "Scopes monkey trial" Donohue, the President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have in common? Apparently, none of them has a sense of humor when it comes to their respective brands...
Senate Puts Bloggers Back in the Federal Shield Bill
Posted on November 02, 2009On Friday, Senators Arlen Specter (D-PA) and Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) released a revised version of the proposed federal shield bill (S. 448), which expands the bill's coverage to bloggers and other amateur journalists publishing on the Internet. This version departs from a previous one, announced in September, which limited protection to "salaried employee[s]" and independent contractors for established news media organizations...
A New Leistungsschutzrecht? Say It's Nicht So!
Posted on October 30, 2009It's tough being a publisher these days. Of course, no one is having much fun in the current economic downturn, but publishers were up against it even before the slowdown. Circulations have been down across the board for years now, which in turn has slashed the advertising revenues that print publications have always relied upon to survive...
You Have Questions? CMLP Has (Tools to Help You Find) Answers.
Posted on October 29, 2009"How do I get media liability insurance?" It's a question we hear a lot here at CMLP. A lot has been written about why bloggers and other citizen journalists should consider obtaining insurance to protect themselves against liability for their online activities...
It's Election Time Again: CMLP Announces Updated Guide to Newsgathering at the Polls
Posted on October 28, 2009Voters head to the polls again on November 3 to cast their ballots in mayoral, city council, and even a handful of gubernatorial elections. In addition, there are some important ballot measures up for consideration, like the referendum in Maine seeking repeal of the state's newly enacted statute legalizing same-sex marriage...
The Online Odyssey: Internet Use in the Age of HADOPI's Scylla and Holder's Charybdis
Posted on October 27, 2009Last week was a tough one for Internet users worldwide. On the foreign front, the French (as predicted) reinstituted a due-process-shattering law that allows ISPs to kick suspected file-sharers off the Internet. On the domestic side, a district court refused to lift a government gag order, preventing ISPs from discussing the FBI?s Internet snooping...
As Politicians Adopt Social Media, They Bump Into the Law
Posted on October 26, 2009As social media become more popular, it is inevitable that enterprising politicians will use it promote themselves, connect with constituents, and garner votes. The White House has a blog, several Senators and House members tweet, and elected officials and candidates at all levels of government are using social media to get out their messages...
Yet Another Plaintiff Faceplant, Thanks to Section 230
Posted on October 23, 2009I am constantly impressed with plaintiffs' hapless charges against the nearly impenetrable immunity that is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (?Section 230?). Time and time again, angry plaintiffs bring suit against websites because some unknown third party posted questionable, if not illegal, material...
Swartz v. Does: Tennessee Court Says Couple Entitled to Unmask Anonymous Blogger
Posted on October 22, 2009A Tennessee state court ruled earlier this month that plaintiffs Donald and Terry Keller Swartz are entitled to discover the identity of the anonymous blogger behind the Stop Swartz blog who published critical statements about them and encouraged readers to post information on their whereabouts and activities...
Finkel v. Facebook: Court Rejects Defamation Claim Against Facebook Premised on "Ownership" of User Content
Posted on October 21, 2009Back in February, Denise Finkel, a 2008 graduate of Oceanside High School on Long Island, sued four of her former high school classmates and their parents after the students created a private Facebook group called "90 Cents Short of a Dollar," which allegedly contained false and defamatory statements about her...
Combine One Part New Media, Two Parts Social Networking, Three Parts Activism, and Stir
Posted on October 20, 2009A lot of ink and pixels have been spilled on predictions about how technology and social media will change the world. But the new technologies still have their skeptics (with some even going so far as to compare Twitter to the Macarena). Last week in Mexico City, the Alliance of Youth Movements convened a group of international activists, government officials, academics, journalists, and representatives of new media companies for three days of discussions seeking to prove the skeptics wrong...
NEEEEEDDDD BRAAAAINNS: MPAA Resurrects Plan to Take the R Out of DVRs
Posted on October 19, 2009Between sparkling vampires and slobbering zombies, the Undead have found new life at the box office these days. So it makes sense that the MPAA, inspired by the success of the long deceased, has decided to resurrect the odorous, oft-defeated idea of ?selectable output control...
Showing Cyberbullying No Mercy in the Show Me State
Posted on October 16, 2009On the broad grade-school spectrum of the bullies and the bullied, I tended to fall closer to the bullied side of things. Fortunately, I quickly proved taller than average ? thus harder to intimidate ? and smarter than average ? thus more useful as a source for homework help than as a target for abuse ? so the bullies moved on to other targets...
Case That Upended Truth Defense in Libel Actions Ends With Jury Verdict for Defendant
Posted on October 15, 2009In a closely watched case that challenged (at least in Massachusetts) our long held understanding that truth is an absolute defense to a defamation claim, the jury has returned a verdict for the defendant, finding that it acted without actual malice when it sent an email to its employees stating -- truthfully -- that one of its salesman had been terminated because he violated the company's travel and expense policies...
Cyber-Bully Pulpit: Government Sponsored Online Shaming
Posted on October 14, 2009While a number of businesses and organizations are initiating public service campaigns to combat cyberbullying, governments are realizing the utility of online shaming. In response to a rash of recent suicides, the French Labor Minister, Xavier Darcos, has directed over two thousand French firms to craft anti-stress strategies with the aid of unions by 2010...
Ralph Lauren Gets the Skinny on DMCA Takedown Backlashes
Posted on October 09, 2009File this one under DMCA don'ts: Last month, the folks at Photoshop Disasters and Boing Boing noticed that Ralph Lauren had done some rather horrific photoshopping of a fashion model in one of its ads (on right). Both sites mocked the horribleness with brief, but clearly critical, comments...
Think Twice Before You Dust Off Those Mix Tapes
Posted on October 08, 2009Digital technologies have allowed people to share music in unprecedented ways, and earlier this week recording artists, music industry leaders, and policymakers gathered at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. for the Future of Music Policy Summit sponsored by the Future of Music Coalition to talk about their impact on the music community...
New FTC Rules Aim to Kill the Buzz on Blogs
Posted on October 08, 2009On October 5, the Federal Trade Commission issued new guidelines (large pdf) on advertising involving endorsements and testimonials. The guidelines, which are due to go into effect on December 1, have caused a stir among bloggers, journalists, and new media types because they appear to place significant requirements and restrictions on blogs and social media...
Sorry Jack Thompson, Your Comprehension of Section 230 Is in Another Castle!
Posted on October 06, 2009On this blog, I typically write about frivolous or ill-considered lawsuits. In the long, long ago, before I came to law school, I wrote about video games. So imagine my unbridled joy upon reading that Jack Thompson (think: King Richard I of the Anti-Video Game Crusade) filed a pointless, dead-end lawsuit against Facebook...
CMLP and Cyberlaw Clinic Endorse Anti-SLAPP Protection for Staff of Media and Advocacy Organizations
Posted on October 05, 2009On Thursday, the Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) joined the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLUM) and the Lawyers? Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association in submitting an amicus curiae brief urging the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to reverse a lower court?s decision interpreting the state?s anti-SLAPP legislation...
Jim Dolan Shows Why Anti-SLAPP Laws Are Good (And Why New York Needs a Better One)
Posted on October 02, 2009Now, I am not from New York. Thus, I don't know much about Jim Dolan, the owner of Cablevision, Newsday, Madison Square Garden, and the New York Knicks. But the local press offers a sense of the man. The New York Daily News said that he is "a little bit wacky, lashing out indiscriminately behind the scenes, speaking nonsense whenever he talks at all...
His Identity Revealed, Publisher of Glenn Beck Parody Site Comes Out Swinging
Posted on October 01, 2009We reported earlier this month that Glenn Beck filed a UDRP action against glennbeckrapedandmurdereda younggirlin1990.com seeking transfer of the domain name. Beck alleges that the website, which instantiates an Internet meme born on Fark.com that pokes fun at Beck's rhetorical style, is improperly using his trademarked name...
For Once, Illinois Federal Judge Lets 'Em Roll: And Gets Steamrolled
Posted on September 30, 2009UPDATE: Judge Frank Easterbrook, chief judge of the 7th Circuit, has issued an opinion chiding Federal District Judge Joe Billy McDade for allowing cameras into a consent decree hearing in a school discrimination case, saying that it violated a 1996 resolution of the 7th Circuit Judicial Council adopting the national Judicial Council's ban on cameras, discussed below...
For Once, Illinois Federal Judge Lets 'Em Roll: And Gets Bulldozed
Posted on September 30, 2009UPDATE: Federal District Judge Joe Billy McDade has issued a letter apologizing for allowing cameras into his courtroom to cover a Setp. 15 hearing on a consent decree settling a school discrimination case. The apology came after Judge Frank Easterbrook, chief judge of the 7th Circuit, issued an opinion chiding Judge McDade for allowing cameras into a consent decree hearing in a school discrimination case, saying that it violated a 1996 resolution of the 7th Circuit Judicial Council adopting the national Judicial Council's ban on cameras, discussed below...
I Can Clearly See You?re Nuts: ACORN?s Insane Civil Suit
Posted on September 29, 2009I'm pretty sure I can struggle my way out. First I'll just reach in and pull my legs out, now I'll pull my arms out with my face. ? Homer J. Simpson, The Simpsons, Bart Gets An Elephant, 1F15 Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals! ...
Senate Cuts Citizen Bloggers From Federal Shield Bill
Posted on September 28, 2009For citizen journalists, the federal shield law front was looking good for a while. Although the House of Representatives version of the bill, passed in April, only offered a shield to professional bloggers, the Senate version didn't differentiate between the pros and the amateurs...
And You Thought Today's Google Outage Was Bad...
Posted on September 24, 2009Twitter has been awash today in the typical gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes that accompanies any Gmail outage, no matter how short the duration. If yesterday's court ruling holds, however, one unlucky Gmail user may wake up one morning soon to an even worse fate...
Anthropomorphizing Intrusion: Google Street View and the Armies of Cute
Posted on September 24, 2009A basic lesson of history: a spoonful of cute helps the social medicine go down. Bert the Turtle prepared us for Global Thermo-Nuclear War. Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck helped us hate the Nazis and (briefly) like Stalin. Now Google has harnessed the power of cute to sell Google Street View...
Canadian Court Rejects Defamation Liability for Hyperlinks: Crookes v. Newton
Posted on September 23, 2009IP Osgoode alerts us to an interesting decision from the Court of Appeal for British Columbia that has important implications for online speech in Canada. In an opinion issued earlier this month, the Canadian court held that Jon Newton of p2pnet news could not be held liable for linking to allegedly defamatory articles written by others about politician Wayne Crookes...
Shameless Self-Promotion: Updating the Lanham Act for the Internet Age
Posted on September 22, 2009I have an article in the newest issue of World Trademark Review. Entitled "Updating the Lanham Act for the Internet Age," the article looks at four areas for reform of the Lanham Act: fair use, use in commerce, adoption of statutory safe harbors, and the famous marks doctrine...
Mi Casa Es Su Casa ? But I Set the Rules
Posted on September 21, 2009Paul Klocko got a surprise in the mail in April: a letter on official stationary from Weston, Wisconsin administrator Dean Zuleger, demanding that Klocko stop posting comments on the web criticizing him. The letter also asked that Klocko "come out from behind the cloak" and meet Zuleger in person...
Australia's Facebook Five and the Right to Whinge About Your Boss Online
Posted on September 18, 2009It's hard to be a prison guard in Australia, and not just because the entire country is a penal colony ? zing! Apparently you run the risk of being fired for griping about your job in a private Facebook group, even if other corrections officers are the only ones reading your complaint...
Splitting the Digital Baby: California Court Creates New Procedure for Uncovering Anonymous Commenters
Posted on September 16, 2009It's amazing how many times you can hear a phrase without really understanding it. Take "splitting the baby" for instance. Excuse my ignorance, but I'd always thought it had a more-or-less neutral connotation, suggesting a pragmatic compromise to a question or problem...
Weight Watchers from Hell ? Iran?s New Method for Slimming Tortured Bloggers
Posted on September 15, 2009A little while back, I wrote about the Iranian persecution of bloggers and opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There is so much evidence of this systematic assault on liberty that it was difficult to pick just one Exhibit A. I finally settled on the before and after pictures of Mohmmad Ali Abtahi, which showcased the effects of torture on a former vice president and leading cleric-blogger...
Citing Anti-SLAPP Law, New York Court Dismisses Libel Case Against Unmasked Commenter
Posted on September 14, 2009Long before Liskula Cohen's case brought online anonymity into the mainstream press, New York courts were already struggling with the law surrounding the outing of anonymous Internet speakers. For example, back in October 2007, a court in New York County denied a school board member's request to unmask "Orthomom," an anonymous blogger who had published critical comments about her...
Will Glenn Beck Sue a Defamatory Website in 2009?
Posted on September 11, 2009Even though Glenn Beck has a prime spot on cable television to offer up his beliefs, it's sometimes quite hard to understand what his beliefs actually are. For example, as Jon Stewart has pointed out, he believes we have the best healthcare in the world, except when he says it's a nightmare...
Beverly Stayart Supports Seals, Not Cialis: Section 230, Search Engines, and Vanity Queries
Posted on September 10, 2009Search engines have become the new deep pockets in this age of cyber-litigation. Despite the fact that they do not control the content of the sites they index in any way, people still routinely seek to hold them liable for unsavory or objectionable things that appear in search results...
Cybernetic Cain: In the Eyes of the Internet Law, You Are Your Brother?s Keeper
Posted on September 09, 2009Let?s review the two basics of modern criminal law: The law punishes you for your individual crimes, not the crimes of your ethnic, religious, or kin group. If your father kills someone, you don?t follow him to jail. (Usually.) The law does not take away your freedom or valuable property without giving you some sort of reasonable pre-deprivation hearing...
"But We're Just An Innocent Web Host" Ain't Gonna Cut It
Posted on September 08, 2009Akanoc Solutions Inc., Managed Solutions Group Inc., and Steven Chen, the owner of the two companies learned the hard way that being a web host doesn't make you automatically free from liability for copyright and trademark infringement committed by your customers...
The Judge Would Like to Be Your "Friend"
Posted on September 04, 2009I'm always pleased to see judges embracing new technology. And it's not just because, as an aspiring lawyer and a Webby, techie guy, my ability to find a job in this economy may depend on it. I really do believe that technology can help judges do their jobs better...
We're Looking for a Few Good Interns
Posted on September 03, 2009It's that time of year again. After a productive summer (thanks, summer interns!), things are starting to pick up around CMLP world headquarters. After several days of dodging overstuffed minivans and new students wandering lost around campus, we're moving full steam ahead into a new school year...
Florida Nukes the Fridge: Facebook, the Bar, and the Latest Entry in the Social Network Hijacking Saga
Posted on September 02, 2009It?s rarely a good sign when a series grows beyond a trilogy. You end up with pod racing, fridge nuking, and Winona Ryder. So I was happy to stop writing about privacy on social networks after the cyber-possession trilogy: the Facebook snatching government employers in Bozeman, the MySpace lurking managers of Houston?s, and the Twitter brandjacking PR Firms...
All That Glitters Isn't Gold
Posted on September 01, 2009If you've spent any time in front of a television screen during the last year, you've seen the ads. Even Ed McMahon and MC Hammer got in on the act. Since 2007, the recession phenomena Cash4Gold has spurred a cottage industry of Internet-age pawnshops, poping up on television screens and in mall kiosks across the land...
Judge Issues Opinion Overturning Lori Drew's Conviction
Posted on August 31, 2009As originally reported by Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy, a federal district judge in California issued an opinion on Friday overturning the jury verdict finding Lori Drew guilty of a misdemeanor violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)...
Federal Courts OK Use of RECAP
Posted on August 28, 2009We blogged last week about RECAP, a Firefox plugin that lets PACER users share federal court documents through a repository hosted by the Internet Archive. There was some rumbling late last week when Paul Levy and the folks at RECAP noted that the federal courts had posted statements warning lawyers about security concerns associated with the plugin...
Southeastern Conference Sacks Social Media, Then Recovers
Posted on August 26, 2009Responding to a storm of criticism, the 12-university Southeastern Conference was forced to back away from proposed rules which would have prohibited fans from blogging, Twittering, instant messaging, or otherwise disseminating "any material or information about [its sports competitions], including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event...
'Skanky' Blogging, Anonymity and What's Right
Posted on August 26, 2009Here we go again -- a new attack on anonymous speech, misusing the facts ripped from the current headlines about a case of one person's slimy online attacks on another. So, as what Maureen Dowd today called the "Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger" gains publicity steam, Dowd and too many other commentators seem to be missing some key points and drawing the wrong lessons...
Wikipedia's New Review Process: Closing the Libeler?s Playground
Posted on August 25, 2009Wikipedia is growing up and exercising more control over its content. In years past, the free encyclopedia provided me with such jewels as an exegesis of Smurf Communism (long since removed). More importantly, Wikipedia helped keep us at CMLP busy, by serving as the equivalent of a libeler?s attractive nuisance, providing an easily accessible platform for defamers the world over...
Courtney Love Fires Back in Twitter Libel Suit
Posted on August 24, 2009Last week, Courtney Love filed a motion to strike the lawsuit brought against her by Austin-based fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir (a/k/a the "Boudoir Queen"). In her m0tion, Love invokes California's anti-SLAPP statute (Cal. Code Civ. Proc...
Italian Bloggers On Strike!
Posted on August 21, 2009Did you know that Italian bloggers are on strike? It's true! Since July 14, Italy's bloggers have been under self-imposed silence, in protest of a proposed law (called the Alfano decree) that would grant a right of reply to those who feel their reputations have been besmirched by something posted on the Web, writes the BBC...
Out of the Frying Pan and into the Mildly Uncomfortable Sauna: The Not-So-Bad-But-Still-Unconstitutional Social Networking Ban
Posted on August 20, 2009The memory of pain can be one of the best painkillers. Anyone who has had the misfortune of enduring acute physical agony has later repurposed that nightmare as a psychic analgesic. ?This needle might hurt, but it's nothing compared to that time I broke my arm...
Lego® My Video: "Clearance Culture" Becomes a Parody of Itself
Posted on August 19, 2009Much has been written on the proliferation of the so-called "clearance culture" and the threat that overly aggressive intellectual property enforcement poses to creativity. Last week brought news of the clearance culture's most recent victim: Spinal Tap...
Opening Up the Federal Court System, One Filing at a Time
Posted on August 18, 2009Anyone who has spent even a few minutes looking for case documents in the federal courts knows what a crusty old system the federal government provides for searching and accessing filings in U.S. district courts and some federal circuit courts. While these court records are ostensibly public, the sheer hassle of getting to them renders the documents largely inaccessible...
D.C. High Court Joins Consensus Protecting the Anonymity of Online Speakers
Posted on August 17, 2009Last Thursday, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals weighed in on what procedural safeguards are necessary to protect the rights of Internet users to engage in anonymous speech. In Solers, Inc. v. Doe, the D.C. high court set out a stringent standard for its lower courts to follow and emphasized that a plaintiff "must do more than simply plead his case" to unmask an anonymous speaker claimed to have violated the law...
Yes We Cannabis: Another Obama Photo Sparks Fair Use Controversy
Posted on August 14, 2009Is it fair use to recast an iconic photograph of President Obama to send a political message? You've got to hand it to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) for adding a humorous dimension to this now-familiar question: The Washington Post reported earlier this month that photographer Lisa Jack is peeved over NORML's use of her photograph of Obama, taken in 1980 when he was a freshman at Occidental College, where Jack was also a student...
The New Intellectual Arms Trade: Amazon and B&N as Literary God-Emperors
Posted on August 13, 2009When we were kids, we couldn?t wait for the future to hurry up and get here. Flying cars, pills for food, conveyor belts, the works. What we didn?t understand was that the future would arrive in pieces: the everywhere computer (iPhone), the million channel TV (YouTube), the all-knowing answer machine (Wikipedia), and the hive mind (Twitter)...
?Crass and Uncouth? MySpace Posting not Grounds for Expulsion
Posted on August 12, 2009Once again, the powers that be are all in a tizzy because of content on a social network. Joining the ranks of city officials, private employers, and high school administrators in sanctioning speech online is the dean of a nursing school. As in the Houston?s Restaurant case, however, her non-proportional response has been corrected by a court of law...
The Internet is Keeping Employment Lawyers Busy
Posted on August 11, 2009The recent economic downturn has been hard on lawyers. Inhouse legal departments are downsizing. Firms are conducting layoffs and cancelling summer programs. Even law schools are getting in on the act, encouraging incoming 1Ls to defer admission for a year (or more)...
Employers Are Freaking Out About Twitter and Facebook, Study Shows
Posted on August 10, 2009There has been no shortage of anecdotal evidence suggesting that using social media like Facebook or Twitter can sometimes jeopardize your job. Back in March, a Philadelphia Eagles employee lost his job when he posted a Facebook status update lamenting free agent Brian Dawkins' signing with the Denver Broncos...
Internet Amputation and Digital Death: Are Decade-Long Internet Bans Constitutional?
Posted on August 07, 2009Quick rule of thumb: when a judge is looking to perform an experimental legal amputation, that judge will vivisect a child molester. It?s easy to take away the rights of someone who has acted in such a bestial, inhumane manner. One of the problems with this practice is that these restrictions are later visited on less horrible people...
Florida Sees Gangs in Social Networks, and Prosecutes
Posted on August 06, 2009In what appears to be the first use of a new Florida law that criminalizes the promotion of gangs on the Internet, the Lee County Sheriff?s Office arrested 15 men over the contents of their MySpace pages, which prosecutors claim advertised and promoted gang membership...
Another One Bites the Dust: Roommates as a Hail Mary for Frivolous Lawsuits
Posted on August 05, 2009Yet another lawsuit that probably should never have been brought has been dismissed due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("Section 230"), despite the court?s earlier indulgence in allowing the plaintiff to amend her complaint and get a second bite at the apple...
Twitter, WordPress, Ning, and GoDaddy Dragged Into Defamation Lawsuit Over Condo Building
Posted on August 04, 2009Daniel Neiditch, President of the Board for Atelier Condos on West 42nd Street in New York City, filed a lawsuit last Wednesday against two condo owners and three former employees, alleging that they published defamatory statements on various websites and blogs (defunct), as well as on Twitter (also defunct)...
The Show Must Go On: Iran?s Mass Trial and its Losing War on Bloggers
Posted on August 03, 2009Iran?s campaign to protect the results of the June 12 double-plus democratic election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shifted into a new gear on Saturday when the regime began the mass trial of more than 100 individuals arrested for their alleged involvement in protests and post-election violence...
Rhode Island Judge Pokes Free Speech on Facebook
Posted on July 30, 2009Restraints on speech prior to publication are almost never OK. It wasn't OK in the 1930s when Minnesota tried to enjoin the publication of an anti-Semitic newspaper. It wasn't even OK in the 1970s when the U.S. government tried to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the top-secret Pentagon Papers...
The AP of Oz: Associated Press Prohibits Reporters from Peeking Behind its False DRM Curtain
Posted on July 29, 2009Last Friday, the Associated Press briefly became the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz. It announced, in a booming press release, an ?initiative to protect news content from unauthorized use online.? To accomplish this feat, the AP will use an informational ?wrapper? embedded in its product...
Educators Reprimand Student for Private Facebook Messages
Posted on July 28, 2009The Supreme Court once famously said that public school students do not ?shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.? Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503, 506 (1969). Implicit in this quote is the understanding that outside the schoolhouse gate, students are entitled to full First Amendment rights...
Management Company Sues Renter Over Twitter Post
Posted on July 28, 2009Horizon Realty Group, an apartment leasing and management company in Chicago, filed a defamation lawsuit last week against a former tenant, Amanda Bonnen, over a tweet she posted about the company on Twitter. According to the complaint, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, Bonnen posted the following tweet on May 12, 2009: @JessB123 You should just come anyway...
CMLP Releases Second Newsgathering and Privacy Video for YouTube Reporters' Center
Posted on July 27, 2009We are proud to announce the release of Newsgathering and Privacy Part 2 - Stay on the Story, Don't Become the Story!, the second of two short videos addressing the legal issues people are likely to face as they head out with camera in hand to cover the news...
New York Attorneys Want Devices in Federal Court, But Only for Themselves
Posted on July 27, 2009Attorneys in New York are hot and heavy (or should that be a-Twitter?) over rules being drafted by the Southern District of New York's Ad Hoc Committee on Cell Phones that may place severe restrictions on bringing electronic devices into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U...
British Court Clears Google of 'Defamatory' Search Results, But It Still Sucks to be a Web Host in Britain
Posted on July 24, 2009As nearly every American lawyer knows, London is the libel capital of the world. There are a bunch of reasons why, of course: defendants have the burden of proving the truth of their statements; neither negligence nor actual malice is required for liability; there's no distinction between public and private figures; etc...
The Future of Digital Book Burning: Why Remote Line-Item Retraction is Scarier than Remote Volume Deletion
Posted on July 23, 2009Amazon did its best impersonation of Big Brother last week, when it reached into Kindles the world over and remotely deleted copies of Orwell?s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Witty title writers thanked their lucky stars and began stamping out stories comparing Amazon to the Ministry of Truth...
News Flash: Watching the Erin Andrews Video Is Perverted, Not Illegal
Posted on July 22, 2009CBS News is reporting that downloading or watching the peephole video of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews walking around naked in a hotel room is a crime: "The Early Show" spoke with CBS News Legal Analyst Lisa Bloom, who said downloading or watching the nude Erin Andrews video is illegal...
An Inter-Newspaper Cease-and-Desist Letter: My Trip to the Buffet of Wrong
Posted on July 21, 2009Buffets are monuments to the tyranny of choice. When presented with a plethora of options, many people just freeze up -- stopping somewhere between the crab claws and the gelato bar. Today I found myself in a similar overwhelmed position as I read Platinum Equity?s cease-and-desist letter to the San Diego Reader...
Fight at the Museum: London's National Portrait Gallery Takes Aim at U.S. Wikipedia User
Posted on July 20, 2009The National Portrait Gallery in London has threatened to take legal action against a U.S. citizen who posted images of the gallery's paintings of rich, white, and dead British people onto Wikimedia Commons. The NPG sent a detailed letter to Wikimedia contributor Derrick Coetzee claiming that his actions constitute copyright infringement, database infringement, and breach of contract under U...
Warning: UK Libel Law May be Hazardous to Your Health
Posted on July 17, 2009It seems that the American Congress is not the only group enraged by England?s plaintiff-friendly libel laws. Sense About Science, a British charity that promotes public understanding of science, is lobbying the British Parliament to amend its libel laws in a campaign called Keep Libel Laws Out of Science...
First Amendment Protects TechCrunch's Publication of (Some) Hacked Twitter Documents
Posted on July 16, 2009There's an interesting debate afoot about TechCrunch's decision to publish selected documents it received from someone who hacked into the email accounts of Twitter CEO Evan Williams and other Twitter employees. There's already been some good coverage of the journalism ethics side of the debate, but I wanted to weigh in with some detail on what U...
Brandjacking on Social Networks: Twitter, Malicious Ghost Writing, and Corporate Sabotage
Posted on July 15, 2009It seems all I can write about these days is digital doppelgangers. I?ve written about employers engaged in Facebook hijacking and MySpace lurking. Today, a story of brandjacking through Twitter sabotage rounds out the cyber-possession trilogy. Ghost writing on Twitter is nothing new...
The Guinness World Record for Trademark Fail
Posted on July 14, 2009As if anyone needed more proof that shooting off an ill-conceived cease-and-desist letter is a bad PR move, Techdirt points us to a recent gem. The hilarious FAIL Blog publishes user-submitted photos and videos documenting various mishaps, incongruous images, and other examples of human fallibility, which it refers to as "fails...
Who Put the "World" in "World Wide Web," Anyway?
Posted on July 13, 2009(And was it the same person who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp?) Back in May, Eric Robinson explained why it's always a good idea to know your audience before setting pen to paper. But in the networked online world, how do you determine who your audience is? As Jonathan Zittrain has noted, the history of the Internet is riddled with examples of content gone viral, spreading to the four corners of the Internet in the blink of an eye...
Feeding the Hand that Bites: Statutory Misinterpretation in the Name of Good
Posted on July 10, 2009One common criticism lodged by constructionist judges against some of their judicial brethren is that, in their quest for ?fair? results, they often misinterpret or outright ignore the plain text of a statute. The majority of a Tenth Circuit panel seems to have fallen into this trap in a recent case involving section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (?Section 230?), despite the admonitions of a fellow panel member in a carefully constructed concurrence...
Complaints at Teatime! The Shaw-Skinner Lawsuit and the Futility of Legal Duels
Posted on July 09, 2009?Pistols at Dawn!? has become ?Subpoenas at Noon!? or ?Complaints at Teatime!? Today?s legal duelists, armed with dubious lawsuits charging defamation, are B.F. Shaw Printing, the parent company of the Northwest Herald, and Cal Skinner, a blogger. That?s right, a newspaper (the Jeffersonian protectors of democracy) and a blogger (saving the world one lolcat at a time) are duking it out, each trying to out chill the other?s speech...
New Jersey Court Says Blogger Shellee Hale Not Protected By Shield Law
Posted on July 09, 2009In a June 30 decision, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Louis Locascio ruled that Shellee Hale, a blogger, private investigator, and "life coach," could not invoke New Jersey's journalist shield law to protect the identity of her sources in connection with postings she made to an Internet message board...
Visit Our Discussion Forums to Get More Out of CMLP
Posted on July 08, 2009If you haven't checked out CMLP's newly launched forums, you're missing out on one of our site's most interactive resources. In the forums, you can post your own legal questions and receive unofficial feedback from CMLP staff and others. (For an example, see our response to a recent question about videotaping in New Jersey)...
Michigan High Court Sends Message to Tweeters
Posted on July 07, 2009I blogged several weeks ago about recent cases in which jurors have caused a stir by using social media such as Twitter to communicate about their jury service. Taking the issue on proactively, the Michigan Supreme Court has adopted a new rule requiring judges to admonish jurors to not use electronic communication devices during trial, and not to use them during breaks to comment or conduct research on the case...
Palin Threatens to Sue Blogger for Publishing Rumors of Investigation, Ensures Rumors Will Get Wide Attention
Posted on July 06, 2009Exercising one of the freedoms Americans celebrate on Independence Day -- the freedom to threaten an ill-conceived lawsuit -- Alaska Governor Sarah Palin directed her lawyer to publish an open letter to Shannyn Moore, an Alaska blogger, radio personality, Huffington Post contributor, and frequent guest on MSNBC, threatening to file a defamation lawsuit against her...
Drew (Tentatively) Acquitted in MySpace Suicide Case
Posted on July 03, 2009A federal judge yesterday tentatively acquitted Lori Drew, the Missouri woman convicted for her involvement in a MySpace ?cyberbullying? hoax that allegedly resulted in a young girl?s suicide. If it sticks, the acquittal will help reverse the momentous change in online liability that Drew?s earlier guilty verdict threatened to set in motion...
Employee Privacy and Social Networks: The Case for a New Don?t Ask Don?t Tell
Posted on July 02, 2009?Three can keep a secret, if two are dead.? ? Benjamin Franklin Private thoughts are a dying breed. You may recall the story of the city government of Bozeman, Montana, which mandated that job applicants turn over their social networking passwords...
News Websites in Texas and Kentucky Invoke Shield Laws for Online Commenters
Posted on July 01, 2009This week brings word of two new cases testing whether state shield laws apply to user comments posted on news websites. In Texas, a Taylor County District Court judge ruled that the Abilene Reporter-News may refrain from disclosing the identities of commenters who posted comments to articles about a murder victim and the teenager charged in connection with his death...
House Passes "Libel Tourism" Bill
Posted on June 30, 2009Earlier this month, the United States House of Representatives passed H.R. 2765, an amendment to Title 28 of the US Code that would ?prohibit recognition and enforcement of foreign defamation judgments.? The bill goes beyond H.R. 6146, which passed through the House last year in a number of ways (elucidated below)...
Blog Buzzer Sounds; FTC Calls Foul
Posted on June 29, 2009What do Harry Potter books, The Blair Witch Project, Razor scooters, the Ford Focus and Hebrew National hot dogs have in common? In the late 1990s and 2000s, these brands -- or, more precisely, the marketers behind them -- were at the cutting edge of a new advertising technique: "buzz marketing...
CMLP Partners with YouTube to Help Launch Reporters' Center
Posted on June 29, 2009As part of today's launch of YouTube's Reporters' Center, which features how-to videos on news reporting, the Citizen Media Law Project created a short video addressing some of the newsgathering and privacy issues people are likely to face as they head out with camera in hand to cover the news...
Who's in Control of Your Online Content?
Posted on June 26, 2009Meet the Smiths: They've just been chosen to be the poster family for a Prague grocery store's advertising campaign. But the Smiths are not models or even contest winners -- they're just an ordinary family from O'Fallon, Missouri, whose photo was lifted from the mother's blog, Extraordinary Mommy, for use in a life-size advertisement half a world away...
Fool's Gold - Athletes, Sports Associations, and Citizen Speech
Posted on June 25, 2009The Iranian government has been busy in its efforts to smother free expression. The regime has raided school meetings, newsrooms, political offices, blocked social networks, and slowed the Internet to a crawl. Yesterday, the regime added the soccer pitch to the list of areas that have been soiled in defense of the double plus good democratic "election" results...
Ninth Circuit Amends Barnes v. Yahoo! Decision, Addresses Concerns Raised by Yahoo! and Amici
Posted on June 24, 2009Back in May, the CMLP joined Public Citizen, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in submitting an amicus curiae brief in support of Yahoo!'s petition for rehearing in the Barnes v. Yahoo! case. On Monday, we got some good news when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order amending its previous decision...
Berkman's Cyberlaw Clinic Submits Amicus Brief in Case Involving Prior Restraint and Reporter's Privilege
Posted on June 23, 2009Today, Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic submitted an amicus curiae brief urging the New Hampshire Supreme Court to defend the First Amendment rights of a website that covers news about the mortgage industry. The Cyberlaw Clinic, with the assistance of local counsel Paul Apple of Drummond Woodsum & MacMahon in Portsmouth, NH, filed the friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Citizen Media Law Project and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) in the case of The Mortgage Specialists, Inc...
The Facebook Snatchers: Could your Employer Hijack your Account?
Posted on June 22, 2009Let's assume you are employed, use Facebook, have a decent grasp of privacy settings, and want to occassionally express your opinion. Welcome to Facebook Club. The first rule of Facebook Club is ?Do not friend your employers.? The second rule of Facebook Club is ?DO NOT friend your employers...
Liberte, Egalite, Technologie: The French Resistance and the Anti-Piracy Campaign
Posted on June 19, 2009The music and motion picture industries suffered a setback in their global anti-piracy carpet-bombing campaign on June 10, when the French Conseil Constitutionnel struck down the internet-banning portions of the HADOPI law. The court held that "free access to public communication services online" was a fundamental human right and could not be stripped from users (read: merely accused illegal downloaders/ pirates ? arrr) without case-by-case judicial approval...
Principal Censors School Paper: Claims "Old English" Font Promotes Gang Activity
Posted on June 18, 2009Another week, another restriction of student speech. S.K. Johnson, the principal of Orange High School in (where else?) Orange, California, has confiscated copies of a student magazine prior to publication. His main complaint about the latest issue of PULP concerns the cover, which features a faux full-back tattoo with the publication?s name and a picture of a panther, the school mascot...
Crash Diet: Text-Only Browsers as Tonic for Iranian Internet Throttling
Posted on June 17, 2009For years, the Iranian government has had to deal with the pesky problem of citizens trying to use the Internet to access information from the outside world. The powers that be usually go about solving this problem in a hamfisted way, banning huge swaths of the internet or shutting down access entirely...
Bring Me his Head and Hands: Unconstitutional Internet Proscription
Posted on June 16, 2009Dear friends, let?s begin with a little story about the death of liberty at Rome. When Mark Antony had the chance, he proscribed (read: murdered) the orator Cicero. To emphasize the effective silencing of his largest critic, the triumvir had Cicero?s head and hands put on public display...
Crime Online May Mean More Time
Posted on June 15, 2009In Hawaii, a 22-year-old former hospital worker was recently sentenced to one year in jail, five years probation and 200 hours of community service on a felony charge of "unauthorized computer access to confidential records" (apparently under Haw...
Tenth Circuit Upholds Restrictions on Student Speech
Posted on June 12, 2009In a recent decision, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Colorado District Court?s rejection of a student?s First Amendment and Equal Protection claims over a forced apology resulting from her valedictory address. The case, Corder v. Lewis Palmer School District No...
Thou Shalt Not Use Multimedia in Vain
Posted on June 11, 2009This week, PBS MediaShift's Mark Glaser laid out his ten commandments for local newspapers that want to survive in the digital age. Sixth on his list of ten tweets was "smart multimedia." "Don't do it just to do it," Glaser says. "Use the right medium to tell the right story...
Dull: Ockham's Razor in the age of Twitter
Posted on June 10, 2009The raging villagers of the twitterverse were busy in April. The cruelest month gave witness to #savejon and #amazonfail, campaigns against corporate bullying and intolerance, respectively. However, both movements likely put the black hat on the wrong party...
Don't Believe the Twitter Anti-Hype: Innovative Platforms Allow for Failure
Posted on June 09, 2009Don't believe the anti-hype around Twitter (cross-posted from Legal Tags). Twitter hype punctured by study, reports the BBC on a recent Harvard B school finding: The median user has written only one tweet, and "the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets...
On the Web, Everyone Can Hear You Sue...
Posted on June 08, 2009Tony La Russa's lawsuit against Twitter, which we first published in the Legal Threats Database back on May 29, seems to have hit the mainstream over the past week. Following the path of the case through the Internet and into the mainstream media provides a fascinating case study in the the possibilities of Twitter and other social media platforms for disseminating and amplifying a message...
Search Warrant Quashed in Boston College "Hacker" Case
Posted on June 05, 2009On May 21, 2009, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court quashed a search warrant for the computers, electronic equipment, and digital storage devices of a Boston College computer science student and ordered the seized items returned. Riccardo Calixte?s ordeal has received quite a bit of coverage, likely in part because of the involvement of the EFF, but there are a couple of interesting points in the Court?s order that are worth highlighting here...
Tourist Video Casts Complex Light on Florida Defamation Lawsuit
Posted on June 04, 2009A story mixing the absurd and the tragic comes to us from Florida, where Christopher Comins, an Orlando businessman, recently filed a defamation lawsuit against Matthew Frederick VanVoorhis, who publishes a wordpress blog called Public Intellectual...
Signal to Noise
Posted on June 03, 2009Since my Wikipedia post on Monday, I've been giving more thought to the question of who gets to be heard on the Internet, especially with the rising ubiquity of different social networking platforms. These thoughts were sparked in large part by two occurrences around the Harvard-verse yesterday: the release by the Harvard Business School of a recent study of Twitter usage, and yesterday's installment of the Berkman Luncheon Series, presented by Berkman Fellow Lokman Tsui...
Journalism Graduates: It's Time to Reinvent Journalism
Posted on June 02, 2009Spring is upon us and with it comes commencement season at universities across the country (Harvard's 358th commencement is this Thursday, FYI). This is a tough time for graduates in almost every discipline, but especially so for journalism grads. At least that is the conventional wisdom...
Scientology Suffers Another Setback -- This Time in Wiki Court
Posted on June 01, 2009The Blogosphere and the MSM have been abuzz recently with news of a decision handed down last week by Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee. Already the subject of law review articles and deep thoughts by Berkmanite Jonathan Zittrain, Wikipedia finds itself again in the spotlight for a decision that, on the surface, seems contrary to the Wikipedian ethos: Wikipedia, the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," has declared edits by the Church of Scientology to be unwelcome, permanently blocking contributions originating from IP addresses owned or operated by the Church or its associates...
A View of Judge Sonia Sotomayor From Cyberspace
Posted on May 29, 2009With Obama's pick of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, the press has been snuffling through her record to find out where she stands on all sorts of hot-button topics. Little has been written in the popular press about what she might mean for areas of interest to our readers, such as copyright and online speech (the RCFP just put out a great report summarizing her First Amendment and freedom of information opinions)...
Inventor of Vibrating Toilet Seat Sues Google Over Allegedly Defamatory Search Results
Posted on May 28, 2009From the we-aren't-making-this-up-department: Johnny I. Henry, an inventor of the vibrating toilet seat, filed a lawsuit last week against Google, Inc. and AOL, claiming that search results delivered by Google and hosted by AOL are defamatory. In his pro se complaint, Henry, who is African-American, asserts that Google's search results include links to, and snippets of text from, sites that contain pictures of him with captions containing a racial epithet...
It's Time to Update the Lanham Act for the 21st Century
Posted on May 27, 2009So this comment to my latest blog post got me thinking. Congress has (admirably) made an effort to clarify the legal liability faced by Internet service providers for content posted by users in some areas (see, e.g., Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act)...
NY Legislature Proactively Considering Whether Shield Law Applies to Bloggers? How Novel!
Posted on May 26, 2009As anyone who's been faithfully reading the CMLP blog knows, the law hasn't been particularly good at dealing with the intersection of media shield laws and bloggers. Although there seems to be a modest trend towards application of shield laws to anonymous commenters on news stories, the judiciary's application of shield laws to bloggers specifically has been pretty hit and miss (and sometimes avoided all together)...
Web of Justice?: Jurors' Use of Social Media
Posted on May 22, 2009At the start of a trial, the judge usually reads to jurors general instructions about how the trial will proceed. The instructions also tell jurors how they should behave during the trial, including the admonition that they should not discuss the case with others, including both trial participants and outsiders...
South Carolina Attorney General Agrees to Temporary Restraining Order in Craigslist Suit
Posted on May 22, 2009Today, a federal district court in South Carolina issued a consent order temporarily restraining South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster from "initiating or pursuing any prosecution against craigslist or its officers and employees in relation to content posted by third parties on craigslist's website...
Yahoo! Petitions for Rehearing in Barnes v. Yahoo!, CMLP Joins Amicus Coalition in Support
Posted on May 22, 2009Yesterday, Yahoo! filed a petition for rehearing in Barnes v. Yahoo!, a case in which the Ninth Circuit recently held that Cecilia Barnes could pursue a promissory estoppel claim against Yahoo! based on an employee's promise to take down a false profile, notwithstanding the immunity for interactive computer services in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act...
Top Conservative on Twitter Takes Critic to Court
Posted on May 21, 2009Shortly after the election last November, a call went out within the conservative blogosphere to use Twitter to organize conservatives online. Not long thereafter, Michael Patrick Leahy and Rob Neppell started the website Top Conservatives on Twitter and pushed like-minded conservatives to use the Twitter hashtag #TCOT (the # allows twitterers to tag their tweets so others can easily search for the term on Twitter), which quickly caught on with the Tax Day Tea Party crowd...
Craigslist Sues South Carolina AG Over Threats of Criminal Prosecution
Posted on May 20, 2009Tired of being bullied by South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, craigslist is going on the offensive. CEO Jim Buckmaster announced on the craigslist blog today that that craigslist is suing McMaster in South Carolina federal court, seeking "declaratory relief and a restraining order with respect to criminal charges he has repeatedly threatened against craigslist and its executives...
How to Make Your Client Look Bad, in Three Easy Steps
Posted on May 19, 2009Courtesy of counsel for Newt Gingrich and Saul Anuzis. 1. Demonstrate a complete failure to understand how the relevant technology works. The whole dustup started when a Twitter user going by the handle EFCANOW tweeted the following tweet: "Join @newtgingrich @sanuzis in signing the EFCA Freedom Not Fear petition at http://action...
Employee Surveillance: How Big Brother Could Be Your Boss
Posted on May 18, 2009When it comes to employee surveillance, will your electronic communications be spared from your employer's watchful eye? The United States District Court for the District of New Jersey will soon consider this question in the context of social networks...
IOC: All Your Blog Are Belong to Us
Posted on May 15, 2009The Sports Journalists' Association is reporting that the International Olympic Committee has issued guidelines for athlete bloggers at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games. For those of you that have been following this space, many of the restrictions on athletes' speech will seem familiar from the IOC's previous guidelines, issued during the 2008 Games in Beijing...
Merrill Lynch to Financial Blogger: Don't Quote Our Bearish Reports
Posted on May 14, 2009Felix Salmon of Reuters reports that the pseudonymous lead blogger behind the financial blog Zero Hedge received DMCA takedown notices for six posts that cited or excerpted from Merrill Lynch reports authored by Merrill's former chief economist, David Rosenberg...
Craigslist Dropping 'Erotic Services' Section, No Word On Whether State AGs Will Drop Their Bullhorns
Posted on May 13, 2009The Associated Press is reporting that Craigslist has decided to replace the "erotic services" section of its site with a new adult category that will be reviewed by Craigslist staff (Craigslist just issued a statement confirming the change)...
White House Drops License Restrictions on Photos, Flickr Stream Now in Public Domain
Posted on May 12, 2009Wired/Epicenter reported yesterday that popular photo-sharing site Flickr, in collaboration with the Obama administration, has changed the licensing designation on photos in the Official White House Photostream to reflect that, as U.S. government works, they are in the public domain...
News Links
Posted on May 11, 2009I sent this list out to the CMLP's team of intrepid bloggers to pique their interest, but with things being a bit slow around the office today, I figured I'd avoid the middleman. Things that caught my eye this past week: Who owns the facts? The AP and the "hot news" controversy - We aren't likely to see this issue go away any time soon...
The Future of Journalism and How to Start It
Posted on May 08, 2009"Where do we go from here?" In the wake of the demise of local papers like the Rocky Mountain News and the well-publicized battle between the New York Times Co. and the Boston Globe's unions, this question has increasingly been on the lips of media professionals and those interested in the future of journalism in the Internet age...
Barnes v. Yahoo: Section 230 Does Not Insulate Online Service Provider From Contractual Liability
Posted on May 07, 2009This is an interesting Section 230 decision from the Ninth Circuit that shows where the line is between Section 230 immunity and Section 230 liability. It should also serve as a cautionary tale for online service providers including bloggers who allow comments...
Introducing Kim Isbell, CMLP's New Staff Attorney
Posted on May 07, 2009I'm excited to welcome Kimberley Isbell, the Citizen Media Law Project's new staff attorney. Kimberley is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (where the CMLP is based). She received her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 2000, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Record and President of the HLS Civil Liberties Union...
YouTube Restores National Organization for Marriage Video Outside DMCA Parameters, Cites Fair Use
Posted on May 07, 2009Ben Sheffner reports that YouTube has restored the National Organization for Marriage ("NOM")'s "No Offense" video without waiting for the expiration of the DMCA's 10-14 business day counter-notification window: In what I believe is an unprecedented development, YouTube has conducted its own legal analysis of a National Organization for Marriage video that was subject to a DMCA takedown notice, and has re-posted the video prior to the expiration of the 10-14 business day counternotice window after determining that the inclusion of a 3-second clip of Perez Hilton calling Miss California USA Carrie Prejean a "dumb [beep]" was a non-infringing fair use...
Lesson of "Communist" Libel Cases in Vietnamese Community: Know Your Audience
Posted on May 06, 2009In the United States after the Cold War, saying that someone is a Communist may not have the same sting that it did during the the decades of tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. But within the past three years, courts in California, Minnesota and Washington have held that calling someone a Communist can be the basis of a valid libel claim when the audience is the Vietnamese-American community, which consists mostly of refugees who fled the Communist regime in their native land after the Vietnam War...
South Carolina Attorney General Threatens Craigslist With Criminal Prosecution Over User Content
Posted on May 05, 2009A new sortie in the battle over craigslist's "erotic services" section came today when South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster sent a letter to craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster threatening company management with "criminal investigation and prosecution" over the website's alleged facilitation of prostitution and -- more unexpectedly -- its hosting of "graphic pornographic pictures" posted by craigslist users...
Perez Hilton Sends DMCA Takedown Over Anti-Gay-Marriage Ad
Posted on May 04, 2009The blogosphere is buzzing about Perez Hilton's recent foray into copyright bullying. Last week, the celebrity blogger, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, claiming that a new advocacy ad from the National Organization for Marriage ("NOM") which was posted on the video-sharing site violated his copyright...
FCC v. Fox: Rethinking the Regulation of Indecent Speech in a Time of Pervasive Media
Posted on May 01, 2009Earlier this week the Supreme Court handed down its eagerly awaited decision in FCC v. Fox. In a 5-4 vote, the Court rejected Fox's argument that the Federal Communication Commission had violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by failing to give sufficient justification for its new policy banning "fleeting expletives" on broadcast radio and television...
CMLP Launches New Page Devoted to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
Posted on April 30, 2009The Citizen Media Law Project today launched a cool new page that aggregates everything on our site relating to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("Section 230"), the important federal statute that protects operators of websites and other interactive computer services from liability for publishing the statements of third-parties...
Blogger Wins $225,000 Settlement Over Public Records Delay
Posted on April 29, 2009In a nice cautionary tale for government agents who refuse to take public records requests seriously, Washington state political blogger Stefan Sharkansky won a $225,000 settlement last week from a county government that took two years to comply with his request for information...
Blogger Threatened Over Ballot Photo As 19th Century Laws Meet 21st Century Technology, Sensibility
Posted on April 28, 2009As noted in the Documenting Your Vote section of CMLP's Legal Guide, several states have laws prohibiting voters from displaying their ballots to someone else. In Missouri, an anonymous blogger who sponsored a fake campaign for St. Louis Blues hockey player T...
Orlando Police Chief v. The First Amendment
Posted on April 28, 2009There aren't too many elected officials in Flori-duh that I respect. Orlando Police Chief Val Demings, used to be one of the select few. She hasn't done a perfect job, and had a particularly embarrassing incident in which her gun was stolen. Nevertheless, my general impression of her has been that she is competent and ethical...
If The Speech Can't Be Taken Seriously, It Can't Support A Claim For Defamation
Posted on April 27, 2009In Gardner v. Martino, the 9th Circuit handed down an important ruling that should be required reading for any opportunist looking to turn mere hurt feelings into a defamation suit payday. Tom Martino is a talk radio host who is prone to make the kinds of statements we expect from talk radio...
Restaurant Girl Parody Leads to Twitter Trademark Tussle
Posted on April 24, 2009Celebrities and popular artists, like other public figures, face a tough road if they want to sue someone for making fun of them. Many know that fair use places a high legal burden on authors and artists who bring copyright claims against those who parody them or their work...
Blogger Invokes New Jersey Shield Law To Protect Sources
Posted on April 23, 2009NJ.com reports that blogger Shellee Hale is asking a Monmouth County Superior Court judge to protect the identity of her anonymous sources, claiming that she is entitled to the same protection as a professional journalist. Hale was sued for defamation by New Jersey-based Too Much Media, LLC, a software company that services the online adult entertainment business...
$12.5 Million Jury Verdict in Texas Internet Defamation Case
Posted on April 22, 2009In February, a Texas jury awarded Orix Capital Markets, LLC $12.5 million in damages in a defamation case involving statements published on the cleverly named "gripe site" Predatorix.com. (The site is now disabled, but the curious can check it out on Internet Archive...
StubHub Unsuccesfully Invokes Section 230 Defense in Lawsuit by New England Patriots
Posted on April 21, 2009Back in November 2006, the New England Patriots went on the offense and filed a lawsuit against StubHub Inc., one of the largest online ticket resellers, claiming that the company encourages fans to violate Massachusetts' anti-scalping laws and the team's prohibition against reselling tickets...
Whatever Happened to Playing Fair?
Posted on April 20, 2009A few recent intellectual property disputes have highlighted the fact that the decision to pursue legal action is both a legal and a moral choice. While concepts such as "fair use" help to ensure protection of both intellectual property rights while promoting creative expression, they can't replace a simple concept we all learned in kindergarten: "treat others the way you?d like them to treat you...
Speed Skater's Mom Sues Google Over Dead Blogger's Post
Posted on April 16, 2009Earlier this month, Cherie Davis, mother of 2006 gold medal winner Shani Davis, the first African American speed skater to make the U.S. Olympic team, sued Google, Inc. in Illinois state court, seeking an injunction requiring the company to take down a blog post written by deceased sports blogger Sean Healy...
Tennessee Judge Refuses to Ban Anonymous Comments About Murder Case
Posted on April 15, 2009A judge in Knox County, Tennessee has refused to order news organizations to disable online comments on their stories related to a murder case or to police the comments by requiring posters to provide verifiable identifying information. Defense attorneys representing four suspects in a 2007 fatal carjacking had filed a motion in February asking the judge to restrict media coverage in order to prevent jurors from learning about the case...
Goldman Sachs Tries To Bully Blogger
Posted on April 14, 2009Michael Morgan is a Florida blogger who is a little bit upset with Goldman Sachs and its business practices. To voice his displeasure, he registered the domain name goldmansachs666.com and goldmansachs13.com and forwarded them to his blog on the financial giant...
South Carolina Court Awards $1.8 Million Libel Judgment Against Blogger
Posted on April 14, 2009The Sun News reports that a South Carolina state court has awarded Scott Brandon $1.8 million in damages for defamation arising out of statements published on the Myrtle Beach Insider blog. Brandon, who is the head of an ad agency with offices in Charleston and Myrtle Beach, sued local businessman Donald Wizeman in April 2008, claiming that Wizeman was the author of Myrtle Beach Insider and that Wizeman had defamed him by publishing a June 2007 post calling him a "failed lawyer" and criticizing one of his ad agency's campaigns...
First Circuit Webcasting Argument Stems From Long History of Rules on Cameras in Courts
Posted on April 13, 2009On Wednesday, April 8, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston heard oral argument (mp3) on whether a trial of a Boston University student sued for music downloading, Sony BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, should be allowed to be webcast live. Federal district judge Nancy Gertner had agreed to allow the webcast, but the recording industry plaintiffs appealed...
Introducing Guest Blogger Eric Robinson
Posted on April 13, 2009I'm excited to welcome Eric Robinson, a noted media and First Amendment lawyer, as a guest blogger. Eric is a Staff Attorney at the Media Law Resource Center, a nonprofit information clearinghouse which monitors and promotes First Amendment rights in libel, privacy, and related fields of law...
FOIA Ombudsman Moves One Step Closer to Reality
Posted on April 10, 2009Last month, we reported that President Obama had begun making good on his promise of reinvigorating the federal Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA"). One of the first tangible steps involved Attorney General Eric Holder instructing government agencies to favor release of documents to the public...
Phoenix Police Raid Local Blogger Who Runs "Bad Phoenix Cops" Blog
Posted on April 09, 2009Last month, Phoenix police raided the home of Jeff Pataky, a blogger who runs Bad Phoenix Cops, a blog that, not surprisingly, has been highly critical of the Phoenix Police Department. According to The Arizona Republic, Pataky's home was raided by ten Phoenix police officers who handcuffed his girlfriend for three hours while they conducted the raid...
New Hampshire Court Tramples on Constitution, Reporter's Privilege, Section 230, What Have You
Posted on April 08, 2009A reader recently tipped us off to a troubling ruling from a trial court in New Hampshire: The Mortgage Specialists, Inc. v. Implode-Explode Heavy Industries, Inc., No. 08-E-0572 (N.H. Super. Ct. Mar. 11, 2009). In the decision, Justice McHugh of the Superior Court for Rockingham County ordered the publishers of the popular mortgage watchdog website, The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter ("ML-Implode"), to turn over the identity of an anonymous source who provided ML-Implode with a copy of a financial document prepared by The Mortgage Specialists, Inc...
AP Tells Google and Other News Aggregators to Pay Up or Face Lawsuits
Posted on April 07, 2009The Associated Press has announced that it is willing to fight over the question of who owns the content its member newspapers produce, even if it means no longer playing nice with the giants of the Web like Google. On Monday, the AP announced that it would no longer allow news aggregators -- neither the big ones like Google and Yahoo!, nor the smaller, specialized sites -- to use its content without paying up...
California Court Rules That MySpace Postings Aren't Private
Posted on April 06, 2009A California appellate court ruled last week that a young woman could not recover for invasion of privacy based on re-publication of material she posted on her MySpace page. The case involves Cynthia Moreno, a UC Berkeley student who grew up in Coalinga, CA...
Texas Moves Closer to Shielding Journalists, Bloggers' Protection Unclear
Posted on April 03, 2009Bloggers in the Lone Star State are being left out of a law that would give journalists limited protection against subpoenas. The Texas House has passed overwhelmingly a bill that would let Texas join some 36 other states in erecting a shield for journalists who want to keep confidential information secret, even in the face of a subpoena...
Woman Files Lawsuit Against Debt Collector Over Posting on MySpace
Posted on April 02, 2009In what appears to be the first lawsuit related to debt collection activities on a social network, a Michigan woman is suing two debt collection agencies and their principals for violating the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act for, among other things, posting information about her indebtedness on her MySpace page...
House Passes Federal Shield Bill
Posted on April 01, 2009Dave Aeikens at SPJ and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press report that last night the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 985, the House version of a federal shield law that would provide journalists a qualified privilege against disclosing the identity of sources and turning over information obtained or created in the course of newsgathering...
Yes, You Should Have Hired a Trademark Attorney...
Posted on March 31, 2009Another day, another cautionary tale about how staying at a Holiday Inn Express doesn?t qualify you to practice law. Enter Jamil Ezzo, an enterprising Internet maven, who runs the website at www.LocatePlasticSurgeon.com. Mr. Ezzo decided that he should file for a federal trademark registration on his incredibly creative and original business name, ?Locate Plastic Surgeon,? and in an effort to give his fledgling new business venture a leg up over the wasteful spenders that were his cutthroat competition, he figured that he should forego hiring a lawyer to do it for him...
First Twitter Libel Suit, Starring Courtney Love
Posted on March 30, 2009Twitter gets a lot of attention these days. In recent weeks, we've seen jurors twittering from the jury box, lawmakers twittering during Obama's first address to Congress, and celebrity ghost twitterers, to name just a few examples of the growing visibility of the micro-blogging platform...
China Blocks YouTube, Shoots Self In Foot
Posted on March 27, 2009Everyone knows that China's not fond of the Tibetan protestors. As a result, sad as it is to say, the world's press just doesn't pay much attention when China does something to smack the Tibetans down. So long as China's actions aren't too violent or otherwise noteworthy, the press won't invest more than a sentence or two on the topic...
What We Often Take For Granted: Robust Protections for Speech
Posted on March 26, 2009Over the past few weeks everyone at the CMLP and Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic (with whom we share an office) has been focused on the question of what legal protections courts should apply to anonymous speech (see this post about our amicus participation in the Maxon v...
Citizen Media Law Project and Berkman Cyberlaw Clinic Lead Amicus Effort to Protect Anonymous Online Speech in Illinois
Posted on March 25, 2009Yesterday, CMLP and a number of media and advocacy organizations asked an Illinois appellate court for permission to file an amicus curiae brief in Maxon v. Ottawa Publishing. The brief urges the Illinois Appellate Court for the Third District to protect the rights of anonymous Internet speakers by imposing important procedural safeguards before ordering disclosure of their identities...
Senator Cardin Introduces Bill to Allow Newspapers to Operate as Nonprofits
Posted on March 24, 2009United States Senator Benjamin Cardin today introduced legislation that would allow newspapers to become nonprofit organizations in what he described as "an effort to help the faltering [newspaper] industry survive." The proposed Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow "newspapers for general circulation" to operate as nonprofits under section 501(c)(3) of the U...
Attorney General Holder Puts Freedom Back In FOIA
Posted on March 23, 2009Making good on President Obama's early prioritizing of the Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA"), Attorney General Eric Holder officially instructed government agencies to favor release of documents to the public. CBS News reports that Mr. Holder's memo announcing the new FOIA policy reverses the policies of President Bush's former attorney general, John Ashcroft, who had ordered a presumption in favor of withholding documents...
Huffington Post: Web Pirate or Prophet?
Posted on March 20, 2009I write a blog at my home newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, and when I get 10 or 20 comments on a post, I am feeling pretty good about myself. Arianna Huffington? Her site, Huffington Post, draws around a million comments a month. I struggle with math, but I think that's a new comment every two and a half seconds...
Peter Needed a Jew... Bourne Co Needed a Lesson in Fair Use
Posted on March 19, 2009Congress derives its power to enact copyright laws from the copyright clause, U.S. Const. Art. I § 8. which reads: Congress shall have the power ? To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries...
Breaking News: First Circuit Denies Rehearing in Noonan v. Staples
Posted on March 18, 2009The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit issued an order today denying Staples' petition for rehearing en banc in Noonan v. Staples, a decision in which a panel of the First Circuit held that chapter 231, section 92 of the Massachusetts General Laws permits a private figure plaintiff to recover for defamation based on truthful statements made with "actual malevolent intent or ill will," at least if the statements relate to matters of purely private concern...
Mistrial by iPhone, New Technologies Present Challenges in the Courtroom
Posted on March 17, 2009While we are generally in favor of allowing new technologies into the courtroom (e.g., live blogging, webcasts, Twitter, etc.) in order to make it easier for the public to monitor the functioning of our court systems, sometimes technology can be taken too far...
Swartz v. Does: Tennessee Court Protects Anonymous Speech Online
Posted on March 16, 2009Last Friday, a circuit judge in Nashville, Tennessee ruled from the bench that the First Amendment protects anoynymous Internet speech and adopted the Dendrite International v. Doe standard for balancing the speaker's First Amendment right against the would-be plaintiff's right to legal redress for actionable speech...
Wisconsin Athletic Association Fumbles with Lawsuit Over Paper's High School Football Webcast
Posted on March 13, 2009High school athletics tend to be held out as an important tool for teaching youth important skills: teamwork, fair play, and hard work. The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association ("WIAA") is adding one more lesson to the lesson plan: disrespect for freedom of the press...
Anonymous Blogging Guide
Posted on March 12, 2009Thinking about launching an anonymous blog? There are lots of reasons you might want to publish your blog or website anonymously. For example, publishing anonymously may protect you from retaliation by those who don't like what you write. We've seen plenty of bloggers harassed or fired from their jobs for what they've written...
Coalition of Media Organizations Urges First Circuit to Reverse Dangerous Defamation Decision
Posted on March 11, 2009Today, the Citizen Media Law Project joined numerous other media organizations and media law advocacy groups in filing an amici curiae brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to grant rehearing en banc in Noonan v. Staples. In Noonan, a three-judge panel of the First Circuit held that an outdated Massachusetts statute allowed a former Staples employee to hold the company liable for defamation based on a truthful email sent to employees explaining the reason for his termination, so long as he could prove that the email was sent with "actual malevolent intent or ill will...
Cook County Sheriff Sues Craigslist for Creating a "Public Nuisance"
Posted on March 10, 2009Last Thursday, Thomas Dart, the Sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, filed a lawsuit against online classified site Craigslist, claiming that the site is a "public nuisance" because its users post ads in the "erotic services" category that facilitate prostitution...
Virginia Blogger Invokes Reporter's Privilege to Challenge Subpoena Seeking Anonymous Commenters
Posted on March 09, 2009Waldo Jacquith, the Virginia blogger targeted with an outrageously broad subpoena back in January (see my previous post), filed a brief last week arguing that he should not be required to turn over the IP addresses of those who viewed and commented on an article posted to his blog, as well as his email correspondence relating to the article...
Do No Harm (But Don't Let Anyone Talk About You)
Posted on March 06, 2009The online community reviews everything these days. Be it via stars, thumbs up or down, or free-form comments, the denizens of the Internet are keen to offer their assessments of books, movies, restaurants, and all else out for public consumption and aggregation...
John Palfrey and Adam Thierer on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
Posted on March 06, 2009Today, Ars Technica published a fascinating exchange between Berkman Center faculty co-director John Palfrey and Adam Thierer (Progress & Freedom Foundation, Technology Liberation Front) on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal statute that shields website operators and other online service providers from liability for information posted or published by users of their sites or systems...
Maryland High Court Joins Growing Consensus Protecting Anonymous Speech Online
Posted on March 04, 2009Hot News Case - The Dialogue Continues
Posted on February 26, 2009The purpose of copyright is to "promote progress." We achieve this promotion by giving authors a limited monopoly over their works so that they may profit from them. This is what is known as "the incentive theory." If we give authors the incentive to create works, they will create more of them, thus adding ideas and expression to the marketplace...
Officials in Deltona, Florida Seek to Use Taxpayer Money to Fund Libel Lawsuits
Posted on February 25, 2009Reacting to online criticism of its elected officials, the city of Deltona, Florida has authorized city employees to file libel lawsuits at taxpayers' expense. On February 16, City commissioners voted 4-3 to pass this resolution: After discussion, the Commission voted 4 to 3 (Commissioner Denizac, Commissioner McFall-Conte, and Commissioner Zischkau voted against the motion) for the City to provide reimbursement and expenditures of legal fees to protect both proactively and reactively the City as a government including its employees and its Mayor and those members who wish to be represented in the this motion, Commissioner Treusch, Commissioner Deyette, Vice Mayor Carmolingo and Mayor Mulder where needed from material damages, slanderous or libelous comments or claims and unsubstantiated allegations past, present and future where the Mayor feels is needed and that a report of fees expended be made available to the public so they may see the extent of damage that has been caused...
Thoughts on the Jones Day-BlockShopper Settlement
Posted on February 24, 2009Over at the Consumer Law & Policy Blog, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen has an excellent post on the recent settlement of Jones Day's trademark lawsuit against real estate news site BlockShopper.com. In the lawsuit, Jones Day alleged that BlockShopper infringed and/or diluted its trademark by using the name "Jones Day" to identify two of its associates who purchased homes in Chicago and by using anchor text in hyperlinks from each associate's name back to their lawyer bios on Jones Day's own website (here, here)...
Federal Shield Bills Offer Rival Takes On Who's A Journalist; Bloggers Could Be Left Unprotected
Posted on February 23, 2009The question of what makes a journalist is due for yet another round of debate, now that Congress is weighing two competing versions of a federal shield law for reporters. Last Friday, the Senate introduced its own version of the Free Flow of Information Act, a follow-up to the House's action two days before...
Congressional Efforts to Stymie "Libel Tourism" Rev Up
Posted on February 20, 2009After several false starts, it looks like Congress is finally going to address the issue of "libel tourism," an unfortunate practice where foreign plaintiffs pick the jurisdiction with the most draconian libel laws in which to sue. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press writes that the anti-"libel tourism" bill introduced last year by Senators Arlen Specter, Joseph Lieberman, and Charles Schumer is back under consideration in the Senate...
Hey Douchebag! Your Chicks' Case is Outta Here!
Posted on February 19, 2009Yvette Gorzelany, Joanna Obiedzinski, and Paulina Pakos are the latest plaintiffs to seek a big payday from Simon & Schuster over the book Hot Chicks with Douchebags. (Michael Minelli, a 27-year old ?club promoter," still has a pending suit in Nevada against Simon & Schuster)...
Another Reminder to Choose Your Hosting Service Carefully
Posted on February 18, 2009My colleague Ethan Zuckerman just put up a disturbing post about Kubatana, a prominent Zimbabwean NGO, which saw its site taken down because its hosting provider, Bluehost, got cold feet after it discovered the site contained content from (gasp!) Zimbabwe...
First Circuit Upends Accepted Understanding of Truth Defense in Defamation Cases
Posted on February 17, 2009Last Friday, the First Circuit Court of Appeals upended the generally accepted notion that U.S. defamation law does not impose liability for truthful statements. In Noonan v. Staples, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Boston held that Alan Noonan, a former Staples employee, may hold the company liable for defamation based on a truthful email a superior sent to employees explaining the reason for Noonan's termination, so long as he can prove that the email was sent with "actual malevolent intent or ill will...
UC Berkeley Website on Evolution Sued for Violating Establishment Clause
Posted on February 16, 2009In celebration of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth (you knew he was born on the same day in 1809 as Abraham Lincoln, right?), I bring you news of our first legal threat directed at an online publisher asserting that a website violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment...
Texas Judge Orders 178 Anonymous "John Does" Who Posted on Topix Be Revealed
Posted on February 13, 2009Once again, the right to anonymous speech is being tested, this time in Texas, where a judge has ordered news portal Topix.com to reveal the identities of 178 forum posters accused of defaming a Texas attorney and his wife. The Clarksville Times reports that Mark and Rhonda Lesher were charged in April 2008 with the aggravated sexual assault of a former client of Mark's legal services...
Pennsylvania Student Sent to Jail For Lampooning Assistant Principal on MySpace
Posted on February 12, 2009The Associated Press is reporting that two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers. For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses...
Neuwirth v. Silverstein: California Appellate Court Reverses Ruling Granting Motion to Strike
Posted on February 12, 2009On Monday, a California appellate court reversed a trial court that had granted Richard Silverstein and Joel Beinin's motion to strike Rachel Neuwirth's defamation lawsuit against them under the California anti-SLAPP statute (Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 425...
Juicy Campus Dies - Holmes' Posse Rejoices
Posted on February 11, 2009Juicy Campus -- often the target of anti-free-speech types in higher education has died. And I am glad. Juicy Campus was a cesspool with virtually no redeeming qualities. (But that isn't why I am glad it is dead) Compare to AutoAdmit, which actually had (and still has) some worthwhile discussions...
Citizen Journalist's Guide to Open Government
Posted on February 10, 2009J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University's School of Communication, just announced the launch of "The Citizen Journalist?s Guide to Open Government," an extensive multimedia module to help citizen media creators understand how to obtain public records and gain access to public meetings...
Citizen Media Law Project is Hiring a Staff Attorney
Posted on February 09, 2009Are you a lawyer interested in dealing with emerging legal issues relating to the intersection of law, journalism, and new media on the Internet? Would you like to help online journalism and new media ventures meet their legal needs? Do you want a stimulating yet laid back work environment? The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society is looking to hire a Staff Attorney/Resident Fellow to assist with the development of a pro bono network of media lawyers and law school clinics to support online journalism and new media startups...
Egyptian Security Police Detain Blogger and Graduate Student Philip Rizk
Posted on February 09, 2009Reuters, the LA Times, and the International Herald Tribune report that Egyptian state security police detained blogger Philip Rizk on Friday night, when he was returning to Cairo after a march to raise awareness about conditions in the Gaza Strip. Rizk is a graduate student in the Middle East Studies program at the American University in Cairo, a political activist, and documentary filmmaker, and he blogs about Palestinian issues on his blog tabula gaza...
Juicy No More
Posted on February 06, 2009You know the economy's bad when even college rumor-mongering isn't making a profit any more. That's right, JuicyCampus.com, the website dedicated to anonymously posted collegiate gossip, has closed up shop. In a post announcing the shutdown, Matt Ivester, the founder and CEO, put the blame on "these historically difficult economic times," in which "online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved...
Chicago Developer Shovels Out Subpoenas by the Bucketful Over Wilson Yard Redevelopment
Posted on February 05, 2009We are still trying to get to the bottom of this one, but it appears that a real estate developer in Chicago has subpoenaed information from four websites that have criticized efforts to redevelop Wilson Yard in downtown Chicago. The redevelopment work is the subject of a lawsuit filed in December 2008 by community group Fix Wilson Yard against Peter Holsten's development company and the City of Chicago...
CMLP Seeking Law Student Interns
Posted on February 05, 2009Are you a law student interested in working on challenging legal issues relating to online speech and non-traditional journalism? Are you looking for media and cyberlaw experience? Do you want to get involved with the Berkman Center community? The Citizen Media Law Project is seeking paid interns for part-time work during the the spring semester and for full-time work over the summer...
Live-blogging journalism? You betcha. It's just not always good journalism.
Posted on February 04, 2009As a young journalist, I remember listening with interest to colleagues recounting long-ago fights for the right to bring cameras into the court room. And while that battle hasn't been won everywhere, it appears nevertheless to be giving way to a new wave of concerns...
Live Blogging in the Courtroom, Is It Journalism?
Posted on February 03, 2009One of the recurring themes I've discovered in my reading assignments for law school is that judges are, by and large, not technologically savvy. Far from it, in fact. Thus, it was of great interest to me to find an ABA Journal article about U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett, who recently allowed a journalist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette to blog live during the a tax fraud trial in his Sioux City, Iowa, court...
Progress Illinois' YouTube Channel Reinstated After Fox Declines to Sue
Posted on February 02, 2009Late last week, YouTube reinstated Progress Illinois' YouTube channel after Fox Television declined to sue for copyright infringement within the 10 day window prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). As we noted in a previous post, the dispute began back in November 2008, when Fox sent a letter to YouTube demanding the takedown of a video, Beavers On Back-Door Pay Raises, that Progress Illinois, an online news site focused on progressive issues, had uploaded to YouTube and embedded in a blog post examining how some Cook County commissioners were using their expense accounts for personal gain...
California Anti-SLAPP Project Takes Up Case for Yelp and Parents Sued Over Negative Dentist Review
Posted on February 01, 2009On January 21, the California Anti-SLAPP Project (CASP) filed a special motion to strike the complaint of Yvonne Wong, a pediatric dentist who sued Yelp! Inc. and two parents based on a negative review of her services the parents posted on Yelp. Dr...
Virginia Blogger Targeted With Outrageous Subpoena
Posted on January 30, 2009In perhaps the most blatant misuse of the subpoena power we've seen since the subpoena served on Kathleen Seidel of Neurodiversity last March, a lawyer for Thomas Garrett of Virginia has served a patently overbroad subpoena on blogger Waldo Jaquith, who publishes cvillenews...
Breaking News: Virgin America Sues Blog Over Parody Ad
Posted on January 29, 2009Earlier this week, California-based airline Virgin America filed a six-count complaint against the publisher and editors of Adrants, a blog focused on the advertising industry, after it published a post that was paired with a fake ad containing the Virgin logo and the statement, "The Hudson Crash: Just One More Reason to Fly Virgin...
Another Victory for the "Douchebags"
Posted on January 29, 2009A federal district court in Connecticut has granted qualified immunity to the high school principal and the school district superintendent who punished a student for calling school administrators "douchebags" on her blog. Doninger v. Niehoff, No...
Thoughts on the Value of Journalism in the Wake of GateHouse v. New York Times Settlement
Posted on January 28, 2009The fallout from the GateHouse v. New York Times settlement, anticlimactic as it was, has been fascinating, and deliciously exhaustive in the way that only Internet-based discussions of Internet-related issues can be. But in rereading a large sample of those discussions, I came away with two questions that are still bouncing around inside my own head...
Introducing Guest Blogger Michael Lindenberger
Posted on January 28, 2009I'm excited to welcome Michael A. Lindenberger, a veteran news reporter, as a guest blogger. Michael writes about the policy and politics of transportation for The Dallas Morning News and about national legal affairs for TIME.com. He also teaches Mass Communication Law to journalism majors at the University of North Texas...
Judge Orders Google to Notify "Skanks in NYC" Blogger of Discovery Request
Posted on January 27, 2009Wendy Davis of MediaPost reports that the blogger behind the Skanks in NYC blog will keep his/her identity secret for another four weeks. In a hearing yesterday in New York Supreme Court, Judge Joan Madden refused to rule on model Liskula Cohen's request for discovery from Google regarding the blogger's identity until after Google notified the blogger, providing him/her an opportunity to object...
GateHouse Media v. New York Times Settles
Posted on January 26, 2009Zach Seward, assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab, reports that the parties in GateHouse Media v. New York Times Company have settled. The case was scheduled to go to trial today in United States District Court in Boston. Zach, who has been filing Twitter updates from the courthouse, is reporting that a Court officer told him the case settled over the weekend...
Dixie Chicks Face Defamation Lawsuit After Using Court Records
Posted on January 22, 2009The defamation lawsuit against Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines and her band mates over an open letter published on the band's website has recently garnered the attention of legal bloggers (On.Point, THR, Esq.), who are asking whether Maines and her co-defendants can assert the fair report privilege as an affirmative defense despite their not being members of the traditional media...
Obama Moves Quickly to Increase Government Transparency
Posted on January 22, 2009Well, that was quick. Just a day into his new administration, President Obama issued a pair of memos and an executive order all aimed at increasing government openness. The Washington Post reports: Obama reversed George W. Bush's restrictions on access to records of former presidents...
Kentucky Court of Appeals Rules in Gambling Domains Case
Posted on January 21, 2009The Kentucky Court of appeals has ruled that the Commonwealth can not seize 141 domain names due to their alleged affiliation with online gambling. The Commonwealth initially filed an in rem (against the item, not against a person) action against the domain names -- seeking to seize the domains as "gambling devices...
Judge Gertner Postpones Webcast of Hearing in P2P File Sharing Case
Posted on January 21, 2009United States District Court Judge Nancy Gertner has postponed what would have been the first live webcast of a federal court hearing scheduled for tomorrow in order to give the plaintiffs in the case an opportunity to seek appellate review of her decision allowing video cameras into her Boston courtroom...
WhiteHouse.gov: Glimmerings of a New Transparency
Posted on January 20, 2009Jason Kottke notes the new robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov ? down to a single ?disallow? from more than 2,400 yesterday. (Cross-posted from the Center for Citizen Media Blog.)
New York Times Calls on Inauguration Attendees to Submit Their Photos
Posted on January 19, 2009In much the same spirit as its Polling Place Photo Project, the New York Times is calling on attendees of this week's inaugural events to submit their photos for publication: NYTimes.com wants to publish your photos related to the inauguration of President-elect Obama, from the preparations through the main event and after-parties...
South Carolina Legislator Seeks to Criminalize Profanity in Public
Posted on January 16, 2009South Carolina state senator Robert Ford has proposed a bill that would make it a felony for a person in a public forum or place of public accommodation wilfully and knowingly to publish orally or in writing, exhibit, or otherwise make available material containing words, language, or actions of a profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, or indecent nature...
One Yelp Review Case Settles as a Second Gets Underway in California
Posted on January 15, 2009We may be seeing the start of a trend in California, as one lawsuit regarding a review posted on the website Yelp.com settled last week just as a second case got underway. San Francisco-based chiropractor Steven Biegel and his former patient, Christopher Norberg, have reportedly settled a lawsuit relating to a critical review that Norberg posted on Yelp...
Anonymous Gripe Site Wins Legal Battle With Ohio Homebuilder Powermark Homes
Posted on January 15, 2009Last month, an anonymous website dedicated to criticizing Ohio homebuilder Powermark Homes succeeded in maintaining its anonymity in the face of a lawsuit brought by the company and two of its principals, Mark and Lisa Powers, who had sued the anonymous operator of Powermark Homes Alert...
Federal Judge in Boston Orders Groundbreaking Webcast of Hearing
Posted on January 14, 2009United States District Court Judge Nancy Gertner agreed today to allow video cameras into her Boston courtroom to provide live Internet coverage of a hearing next Thursday in the lawsuit against Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum, who allegedly downloaded seven songs illegally over a peer-to-peer network...
The Unspoken Peril for "Citizen Journalists" Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax!
Posted on January 14, 2009StinkyJournalism.org: The Unspoken Peril for "Citizen Journalists" Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax! Is the ?donation? of a citizen?s content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the IRS guidelines, the answer is ?yes...
CMLP Publishes Guide to Covering the 2009 Presidential Inauguration
Posted on January 13, 2009Heading to Washington, D.C., to attend the Presidential Inauguration? You're bringing your camera with you, right? Well it shouldn't come as any surprise that heightened security measures across the Washington area will affect where you can go, what you can bring with you, and what you can do to document the inaugural events...
Lessig and Colbert Mix It Up Over Remix Culture
Posted on January 12, 2009Last Thursday, cyberlaw luminary and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig appeared on the Colbert Report to discuss his new book Remix. There are some great exchanges as Colbert baits Lessig with exaggerated pro-copyright views and Lessig holds his own with varying degrees of success...
Subscribe to the Citizen Media Law Brief
Posted on January 09, 2009Looking to catch up on the latest legal happenings in the world of online and citizen media? Or perhaps you just need something to fill your dreary Friday afternoons? Now is the time to subscribe to the Citizen Media Law Project's weekly newsletter, the Citizen Media Law Brief...
Anonymity of 'Skanks in NYC' Blogger Could Hinge On Fact-Opinion Divide
Posted on January 08, 2009Since the story broke in the New York Daily News on Tuesday, there has been a deluge of articles and posts (for example here, here, here, and here) on supermodel Liskula Cohen and her quest for a court order requiring Google/Blogger.com to reveal the identity of the anonymous publisher of the Skanks in NYC blog...
Web Security Standard Compromised by Security Researchers Using Sony PlayStations
Posted on January 07, 2009The following post was submitted by one our loyal readers, Theo Karantalis. MIAMI -- The familiar closed padlock icon that indicates a Web site is secure has been picked. A Web security standard compromised by security researchers exposed a weak link in the system that could give hackers access to PCs...
Fox Television Forces Shutdown of Progress Illinois' YouTube Channel
Posted on January 06, 2009Progress Illinois, which "provides online news and commentary on issues important to Illinois working families and the progressive movement at large," has had its YouTube channel terminated after receiving three notices of copyright infringement from Fox Television Stations, Inc...
GateHouse Media v. New York Times Trial Set for Late January
Posted on January 05, 2009Things are moving quickly in the GateHouse Media v. New York Times Company lawsuit we posted about (here, here) before the holidays. Judge Young of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts decided to combine GateHouse's motion for a preliminary injunction with a full trial on the merits and initially set the hearing for today...
Clueless Authors: Government Censorship Better than Corporate
Posted on December 31, 2008LA Observed has a post about how KRON TV in San Francisco disinvited the authors of a new book from a talk-show appearance after discovering that the book, No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle, takes shots at the crappy state of local TV news...
Authors: Government Censorship Better than Corporate
Posted on December 31, 2008LA Observed has a post about how KRON TV in San Francisco disinvited the authors of a new book from a talk-show appearance after discovering that the book, No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle, takes shots at the crappy state of local TV news...
Preliminary Thoughts on GateHouse Media v. New York Times Company
Posted on December 23, 2008Like a storm coming over the horizon, the recent lawsuit filed by GateHouse Media against the New York Times Company, which operates Boston.com, has thrown the CMLP into disarray just as we were preparing to depart to warmer climes for the holidays. For those who haven't yet heard about this case, here is a bit of background...
GateHouse v NY Times Co.: Not So Simple After All
Posted on December 23, 2008One of the most intriguing current media legal cases pits GateHouse Media, which owns a pile of newspapers in New England (and elsewhere) against the New York Times Co., owner of the Boston Globe and Boston.com. I?ve been looking at this from both sides? perspectives, and this is not as simple as it looks on first glance...
You Aren't as Free as You Think - Your Private Emails Can Land You in Jail
Posted on December 23, 2008In the latest case involving the absurd and unconstitutional obscenity statutes, the Fourth Circuit has upheld a conviction of a man for mere private possession of allegedly obscene material. See United States v. Whorley, __F.3d__ (4th Cir. 2008). While the facts may not fit any conduct in which you might engage, the logic could very well ensnare you one day...
Huffington Post Criticized For Copying Content
Posted on December 22, 2008p a href="http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/huffpo-slammed.html" target="_blank"Wired/Epicenter/a alerts us to the controversy swirling around the a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/" target="_blank"Huffington Post/a's a href="http://www.huffingtonpost...
News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age
Posted on December 18, 2008p After a year of study, countless meetings, and at least two conferences, a team of researchers at the a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/" target="_blank"Berkman Center/a have released a a href="http://www.mediarepublic.org" target="_blank"series of papers/a exploring the potential and challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment (inote: I played a small role in this work/i)...
Cybersquatter Makes Good
Posted on December 17, 2008p The Bush library team seems as incompetent as . . . well, as incompetent as you would imagine anyone involved with such a project would be. They procured the domain name www.GeorgeWBushLibrary.com, then they forgot to renew the registration. It got picked up by a cybersquatter, Illuminati Karate...
Patriot Act???s National Security Letter Gag Provisions Choke on First Amendment Grounds
Posted on December 17, 2008The Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down one of the most constitutionally repugnant provisions of the PATRIOT Act -- the portions of the Act that place recipients of so-called "national security letters" (NSLs) under a permanent, unreviewed, lifetime gag order...
Blogger Pleads Guilty to Copyright Infringement for Leaking Songs from Guns N' Roses Album
Posted on December 16, 2008Kevin Cogill, a blogger on Antiquiet, which provides "uncensored music reviews and interviews," pled guilty yesterday in federal court in Los Angeles to one count of misdemeanor criminal copyright infringement after he allegedly posted nine songs from the then unreleased Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy...
Patriot Act?s National Security Letter Gag Provisions Choke on First Amendment Grounds
Posted on December 16, 2008p The Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down one of the most constitutionally repugnant provisions of the PATRIOT Act -- the portions of the Act that place recipients of so-called quot;national security lettersquot; (NSLs) under a permanent, unreviewed, lifetime gag order...
Carl Malamud Goes Green, Launches PACER Recycling Program
Posted on December 15, 2008In addition to his many other noble and forward-thinking projects (here, here, here), information pioneer Carl Malamud has taken up the issue of public access to federal court documents. The federal judiciary makes most documents filed in federal court litigation available through its search platform known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER)...
N.H. Supreme Court Rules that Porn is not Prostitution
Posted on December 12, 2008The Supreme Court in the state where "Live Free or Die" adorns the license plates has answered the question "why can't producers of adult films be charged with prostitution?" The short answer -- because it would violate the First Amendment (or at least the New Hampshire Constitution's equivalent thereof)...
Federal Appeals Court Examines Two MySpace Student Speech Cases
Posted on December 12, 2008The Wall Street Journal Law Blog and the Legal Intelligencer report that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has before it two appeals testing the limits of school authority to punish student speech on the Internet. The two cases have remarkably similar facts, but the trial courts that decided them came to completely opposite conclusions...
Maryland High Court Hears Argument on Internet Anonymity
Posted on December 11, 2008On Monday, the Maryland Court of Appeals heard oral argument in a case requiring it to decide what showing an aggrieved plaintiff must make before a court will order a website operator to reveal the identity of an anonymous commenter. Paul Levy of Public Citizen argued the case for Independent Newspapers, Inc...
Internet and Politics 2008
Posted on December 10, 2008Today and tomorrow, Sam and I will be participating in the Internet & Politics 2008 conference at Harvard which is focused on examining how digital technologies reshape the practice of campaigning and the movement of political information. It's a rather exceptional group of participants (both on the dais and off), including campaign strategists from the Obama and McCain campaigns, political activists and organizers, political analysts, members of the media, and academics...
Florida Student Sues Principal Over Suspension for Facebook Postings
Posted on December 09, 2008Katherine Evans, a former student at Pembroke Pines Charter High School in Florida, filed a federal lawsuit on Monday against the school's principal, alleging that he violated her First Amendment rights by suspending her for creating a Facebook group in which she criticized one of her teachers...
RDR Books Withdraws Appeal, Prepares To Publish Revised Lexicon
Posted on December 08, 2008Last week, RDR Books withdrew its appeal of Judge Patterson's ruling that The Harry Potter Lexicon infringed J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros.'s copyrights in the Harry Potter books and movies. RDR Books also announced that it will soon publish a revised version of The Lexicon, which author Steve Vander Ark has revamped to ameliorate concerns expressed by J...
More Online Journalists Jailed Than Any Other Media Group
Posted on December 05, 2008Online speakers are attracting more attention than ever from governments across the world, for good or for ill. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), more online journalists are currently imprisoned for their speech than journalists in print, broadcast, or other media...
Mystery Blogger Caught Up in First Amendment Flap
Posted on December 03, 2008On Monday, the blog-hosting service Blogger took down a blog called "Jeffrey Denner's ineffective assistance of counsel" after Jeffrey Denner notified Blogger that a Massachusetts court had issued a restraining order prohibiting one Derrick Gillenwater from using the words "Jeffrey" or "Denner" or "Jeffrey Denner" in any blog postings...
Colorado Man Charged With Criminal Libel For Comments on Craigslist
Posted on December 02, 2008The Loveland Connection is reporting that a Colorado man has been charged with two counts of criminal libel after allegedly posting comments about a former girlfriend and her lawyer on Craigslist.com's "Rants and Raves" section: The case in Loveland began when a woman approached the Loveland Police Department in December 2007 about multiple postings made about her between November and December 2007...
Opening the Government, Starting with the Transition
Posted on December 02, 2008I?m a signer of a letter on a new site called ?An Open Transition,? where a group of folks led by Larry Lessig: celebrates the incoming administration?s decision to put a Creative Commons license on its Change.Gov transition website, thereby allowing anyone to share, remix and otherwise reuse and copy the material there; and asks that this philosophy be extended widely in the new administration, and around the government in general...
The Role of Internet Intermediaries in Censoring Online Speech
Posted on December 01, 2008Today I came across two excellent pieces touching on the role of intermediaries in censorship/regulation of online speech internationally: The first is Rebecca MacKinnon's detailed blog post on her research on censorship of Chinese blogs. She looked at Chinese blog-hosting services, including foreign brands offering services inside China, and tried to determine how much variation exists in terms of "what gets censored and how it gets censored...
Jury Finds Lori Drew Not Guilty on Felony Charges
Posted on November 26, 2008Wired/Threat Level reports: Lori Drew, the 49-year-old woman charged in the first federal cyberbullying case, was cleared of felony computer-hacking charges by a jury Wednesday morning, but convicted of three misdemeanors. The jury deadlocked on a remaining felony charge of conspiracy...
News Links
Posted on November 25, 2008I usually send this out to the CMLP's team of intrepid bloggers to pique their interest, but with the Thanksgiving holiday upon us, I figured I'd avoid the middleman. Things that caught my eye this week... BlockShopper Brings in the Big Guns - It's nice to see Blockshopper...
California Real Estate Companies Pursue Bogus Lanham Act Claim Against Tenants
Posted on November 24, 2008Paul Levy of Public Citizen recently tipped us off to a new John Doe case in federal court in California. In this case, two real estate companies, Parkmerced Investors Properties LLC and Stellar Larkspur Partners LLC, have sued eighteen unknown defendants for violation of the Lanham Act (15 U...
Lori Drew Trial Ongoing, Legal Issues Still Unclear
Posted on November 21, 2008Lori Drew's trial for allegedly violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) began this week. There has been some great coverage of the proceedings, including the following highlights: Wired/Threat Level: Dead Teen's Mother Testifies about Daughter's Vulnerability in MySpace Suicide Case Washington Post: Witness recalls last message in MySpace hoax case Concurring Opinions: The Lori Drew Case - Does the CFAA Require Knowledge? Wired/Threat Level: Prosecutor - Lori Drew Intended to 'Prey' on Girl's Psyche A couple of noteworthy points: First, the prosecution's star witness Ashley Grill, Drew's former employee, admitted that it was her idea to set up the fake MySpace account for "Josh Evans" and that she sent the last message from "Josh" to Megan Meier in October 2006 saying that the world would be a better place without Megan...
Jones Day v. BlockShopper: Court Chooses Legal Formality Over Common Sense
Posted on November 20, 2008Last Thursday, a federal district judge denied BlockShopper.com's motion to dismiss Jones Day's complaint alleging trademark infringement and dilution. The lawsuit arose out of BlockShopper's reports on two condominium purchases by Jones Day associates Dan Malone Jr...
Douchetastic Defamation Suit Filed
Posted on November 19, 2008Michael Minelli, a 27-year old "club promoter," is spewing vinegar at Simon and Schuster, publisher of the book Hot Chicks with Douchebags. Apparently, Mr. Minelli finds the description "douchebag" to be inaccurate, and to say the least, neither sweet nor fresh...
Workshop on Managing Online Reader Contributions and Comments
Posted on November 18, 2008This Thursday I'll be participating in a "collaborative workshop" involving newspaper editors and media lawyers addressing the challenges associated with managing online reader contributions and comments. The half-day workshop is sponsored by the New England Newspaper Association, New England Press Association, and Prince, Lobel, Glovsky & Tye...
Nude Bike Riding Protected by the First Amendment
Posted on November 18, 2008Michael "Bobby" Hammond, 21, inspired by his recent participation in the annual World Naked Bike Ride -- an event that protests against car culture, decided to take his vintage 10-speed bicycle for a spin through the streets of Portland, Oregon while wearing nothing but a bicycle helmet...
Two New Ripoff Report Cases Filed
Posted on November 17, 2008Eric Goldman reminds us (here, here) that angry companies and individuals are still suing Xcentric Ventures, LLC and Ed Magedson left and right over reports submitted to Ripoff Report. Ripoff Report is a website that allows users to post reports about individuals and companies that they believe have "ripped them off" or treated them unfairly...
Schools Lack Authority to Punish Online Student Speech
Posted on November 13, 2008One of the major issues facing schools is whether they have authority to discipline their students for speech on the Internet. In an article I wrote that will appear in the December 2008 issue of the Florida Law Review, I argue that public secondary schools have virtually no authority under the First Amendment to punish students for online speech...
Lori Drew Trial To Start Next Week
Posted on November 12, 2008Believe it or not, the criminal case against Lori Drew heads to trial next Tuesday. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles indicted Drew last May for her alleged role in a hoax on MySpace directed at Megan Meier, a 13-year-old neighbor of Drew's who committed suicide in October 2006...
Court Rejects Bid to Silence Mortgage Watchdog Website
Posted on November 11, 2008The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter, a mortgage watchdog website, announced on Friday that a federal judge denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against it filed by Global Direct Sales, LLC, the Penobscot Indian Nation, Christopher Russell, and Ryan Hill...
These Anonymous Critics ARE Cowards
Posted on November 10, 2008The AP reports, "Palin derides anonymous critics on Fox as cowards," a reference to a recent Fox News segment in which a correspondent relayed a variety of negative attacks from, he said, members of the McCain campaign staff against Sarah Palin. No matter what you think about Palin in general, she's right in this case...
CMLP and Leading Online News Organizations File Amici Curiae Brief in Cape Cod Defamation Case
Posted on November 10, 2008On Friday, the Citizen Media Law Project joined with the Online News Association, Media Bloggers Association, New England Press Association, and Globe Newspaper Company, publisher of The Boston Globe and Boston.com, to submit an amici curiae brief that argues that the Massachusetts anti-SLAPP statute applies to all parties, including members of the news media and professional bloggers, who engage in petitioning activities...
Charges Filed Against Google Executives in Italy Over User Video
Posted on November 07, 2008Our intern Arthur Bright wrote an excellent post this summer on the prospect of criminal defamation charges being filed against Google executives in Italy over Google Video's hosting of a clip featuring the abuse of a teenager who has Down syndrome. Ars Technica reports that Italian authorities have now filed charges: When Internet video hosts get dragged into the court room, chances are good they're getting sued for something related to copyrighted material...
Don't Blame The Messenger: Political News Site Faces Defamation Lawsuit By G.O.P. Official
Posted on November 05, 2008Just because the election is over, it doesn't mean that some of this season's political fights won't continue on in the courts. Here's one from our legal threats database, Carabelli v. The Michigan Messenger: James Carabelli, chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, sued The Michigan Messenger, a news site owned by the Center for Independent Media, for defamation in Michigan state court in October 2008...
Get Out And Vote: Election Day Resources
Posted on November 04, 2008I am about to head out and vote, but before I do I want to exhort all of our readers who haven't yet voted to GO OUT AND VOTE! Don't know where to vote? Go here to find out. Once you've voted, do your part and upload the details of your experience to one (or all) of the organizations seeking to collect information about this election...
Documenting Your Vote: Massachusetts Election Laws
Posted on November 03, 2008Massachusetts has no statutory provision that specifically prohibits the use of photographic or video equipment inside a polling place while you are voting. There is, however, a Massachusetts statute that makes it a crime to "hinder[], delay[] or interfere[] with ...
Georgia Law Prohibits Recording Inside Polling Places
Posted on October 31, 2008Georgia is one of the states that explicitly prohibits photography inside polling places. Section 21-2-413(e) of the Georgia Code states: No elector shall use photographic or other electronic monitoring or recording devices or cellular telephones while such elector is within the enclosed space in a polling place...
The Role of Citizen Media in Ensuring Fair Elections
Posted on October 30, 2008Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times describing the fears some voters in Duval County, Florida have that their early votes will be lost and never counted. I found the article deeply disturbing. It wasn't because it surprised me that people fear their votes won't be counted (that fear has some precedent in Duval County, where 26,000 ballots were discarded in the 2000 election), but because it brought into focus for me the apprehensive feelings I've been having about the upcoming election...
Michigan Secretary of State Warns Voters Not To Use Cameras Inside The Polls
Posted on October 29, 2008Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land issued a press release today warning voters that Michigan law prohibits the use of video cameras, still cameras, and other recording devices inside Michigan polling places on Election Day. The release mentioned the Video Your Vote project by name, saying that the project "urging [voters] to record their Election Day experiences cannot be conducted in Michigan polling places...
Marking the Ten Year Anniversary of the DMCA
Posted on October 28, 2008Today marks the ten year anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which President Clinton signed into law on October 28, 1998. For background on the DMCA, see our legal guide here and here. Now that we've had a decade to get to know the DMCA, it's time to reflect on the changes this important law has engendered...
Documenting Your Vote: North Carolina Election Laws
Posted on October 27, 2008Although you wouldn't guess from the photograph on the right and others available online (here, here, and here), North Carolina law places heavy restrictions on photography and videography inside polling places on Election Day. Luckily, North Carolina also provides some helpful guidelines on permissible newsgathering activities at the polls...
Rapp v. Jews for Jesus, Rehnquist in Brennan's Robes
Posted on October 24, 2008In Jews for Jesus v. Rapp, No. SC06-2491, 2008 WL 4659374 (Fla. Oct. 23, 2008), the Florida Supreme Court appears to do the First Amendment a great service by declining to recognize the false light invasion of privacy tort. However, this is a case of the ghost of William Rehnquist haunting Florida after stealing William Brennan's robes...
U.K. Man Sued for Libel over Feedback on eBay
Posted on October 24, 2008The Telegraph is reporting that a U.K. man has filed a libel lawsuit over negative feedback he received from a buyer on eBay: Chris Read used the auction website's feedback facility to claim that the device he was sold by Joel Jones, a 26-year-old businessman from Suffolk, did not live up to its billing...
Law School Classmates Fight Over Hog on Ice
Posted on October 23, 2008Those of you who are regular readers of this blog know that we maintain a database of legal threats (lawsuits, subpoenas, C&D letters, etc.) directed at online and citizen media (BTW, if you know of a threat that we've missed, please add it). One of the things we try to collect for every entry is whether a party is represented by a lawyer...
Documenting Your Vote: Pennsylvania Election Laws
Posted on October 22, 2008Although Pennsylvania no longer looks like much of a swing state, today I'll discuss the Pennsylvania laws that impact your ability to document your own voting experience through video and still photography, as well as your ability to carry out other newsgathering functions, such as interviewing other voters outside of polling places...
Copyright, Politics, and McCain's Request for Special Treatment
Posted on October 21, 2008Last week we reported that the McCain campaign had sent a letter to YouTube complaining that its campaign videos were being removed from YouTube as a result of unjustified DMCA takedown requests sent by news organizations whose footage was included in the videos...
Hustler Spread of Murder Victim: Arguably Tasteless, but Certainly First Amendment Protected
Posted on October 20, 2008In June 2007, professional wrestling promotrix, Nancy Benoit and her son, Daniel, were the victims of a double murder-suicide committed by her husband, WWE wrestler, Chris Benoit.Approximately 20 years earlier, Ms. Benoit (then Nancy Daus) posed nude for photographer Mark Samansky...
German Courts Say Nein to Google Image Search
Posted on October 17, 2008Google appears to be learning the hard way that there's "kein fairer Gebrauch" (no fair use) in Germany. The Internet search giant lost two German copyright decisions Monday, as the courts ruled that the thumbnail images that appear in Google Image Search violate German copyright law...
Documenting Your Vote: Virginia Election Laws
Posted on October 16, 2008In the wake of the final presidential debate last night, polls suggest that Virginia is poised to be a key state come November 4. If you're a Virginia voter thinking about documenting the big day, Virginia election law may affect your ability to use video or still photography in and around your polling place, as well as your ability to interview other voters at the polls...
CMLP Joins with YouTube and PBS to Help Citizens Video Their Vote
Posted on October 15, 2008As part of a new project spearheaded by YouTube and PBS called "Video Your Vote," the Citizen Media Law Project is researching the laws regulating recording activities at polling places. Our specific focus is on the laws that impact voters' ability to document their own voting experiences through video and still photography, as well as their ability to carry out other newsgathering functions, such as interviewing other voters outside of polling places...
McCain's YouTube Takedowns Inspire Fair Use Fervor
Posted on October 15, 2008There's nothing like a misfired copyright claim to make a presidential campaign see the value of fair use. After finding several of its campaign videos removed from YouTube for copyright claims, the McCain-Palin campaign has fired off an eloquent defense of fair use -- and another illustration of where the DMCA's counter-notification process falls short...
Celebrating Open Access Day
Posted on October 14, 2008I am sitting in the Berkman Center's conference room listening to Stephen Schultze give an impassioned appeal to increase public access to government information, especially federal court records. You can listen to his talk through a live webcast feed...
Lessig on Remix Culture, Piracy, and Copyright Reform
Posted on October 13, 2008Lawrence Lessig took time out from new projects to publish a thought-provoking essay in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. He examines how the "war" on copyright piracy has collaterally damaged remix culture and even undermined the rule of law...
Documenting Your Vote: Ohio Election Laws
Posted on October 10, 2008Continuing our focus on swing states, I'll look today at the laws regulating polling place activities in Ohio. These laws may impact your ability to document your own voting experience through video and still photography, as well as your ability to carry out other newsgathering functions, such as interviewing other voters outside of polling places...
Will Your ISP Stand Up for Your Free Speech Rights?
Posted on October 09, 2008There are a lot of things to consider when making the decision to launch a blog or website, including questions of cost, ease of use, and ownership of content. Understanding how these considerations impact your legal rights and potential liability can help you make an intelligent choice as to what platform to use and what precautions to take when you speak online (we've got a whole section on these concerns, and others, in our legal guide)...
Oregon Shield Law Protects Anonymous Commenter
Posted on October 08, 2008Last week, an Oregon state judge ruled that Oregon's media shield law, found at Or. Rev. Stat. §§ 44.510 to 44.540, protected the identity of an anonymous commenter who posted allegedly defamatory statements on the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week websites...
Documenting Your Vote: Florida Election Laws
Posted on October 07, 2008This post is another in our series looking at state election laws that regulate activities at polling places on Election Day. These laws, which we cover from a general standpoint in the Documenting Your Vote section of our legal guide, may impact your ability to document your own voting experience through video and still photography, as well as your ability to carry out other newsgathering functions, such as interviewing other voters outside of polling places...
Introducing Guest Blogger Marc Randazza
Posted on October 06, 2008I'm excited to welcome Marc Randazza, a noted First Amendment lawyer, as a guest blogger. Regular readers of this blog will recognize Marc as the often irreverent author behind The Legal Satyricon, a blog focused on law, technology, and politics. For his ?day job,? Marc practices with the law firm of Weston, Garrou, Walters & Mooney, where he focuses on First Amendment, intellectual property, Internet, and gaming law...
Documenting Your Vote: California Election Laws
Posted on October 03, 2008As part of a new project spearheaded by YouTube and PBS called "Video Your Vote," the CMLP is doing research on the state laws regulating activities at polling places on Election Day. Our specific focus is on laws that impact voters' ability to document their own voting experiences through video and still photography, as well as their ability to carry out other newsgathering functions, such as interviewing other voters outside of polling places...
Skype Cannot be Trusted, Period
Posted on October 02, 2008As Salon notes in "Skype sells out to China," the eBay-owned service has collaborated with a Chinese company to enable spying on the allegedly encrypted messages that Skype users send each other to and from, and within, China. This disgusting sellout should surprise no one...
Big Media Challenges Constitutionality of Minnesota Polling Restriction
Posted on October 01, 2008ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and the Associated Press have joined forces to challenge a Minnesota statute that forbids non-voters to stand within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place on election day. In their complaint, the media companies allege that this restriction, as applied to their planned exit polling activities, violates the First Amendment...
Trademark Filings as Economic Indicators?
Posted on September 30, 2008Now this is interesting. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports in an article entitled "What trademarks say about economy," that [w]hen trademark filings are up, it's a good sign that the economy is humming along. But if they go up too fast, you may have a bubble on your hands...
Car Dealership Appeals ConsumerAffair's CDA 230 Win
Posted on September 29, 2008New York-based Nemet Chevrolet filed a notice of appeal to the Fourth Circuit last week, challenging a district court's dismissal of its amended complaint against ConsumerAffairs.com based on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230). The appeal presents some interesting questions about whether a website loses CDA 230 immunity by encouraging negative consumer commentary and using drop-down boxes to enable users to categorize their submissions...
Aerosmith's Steven Tyler Sues Cyber-Impersonators
Posted on September 26, 2008Aerosmith singer and generally-uber-famous-person Steven Tyler filed a lawsuit Wednesday against anonymous bloggers who allegedly impersonated him and his girlfriend Erin Brady. Tyler's complaint includes claims for false light invasion of privacy, publication of private facts, and misappropriation of likeness (a...
YouTube Anti-Scientology Takedowns and Putbacks
Posted on September 25, 2008The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports on some good news, and bit of bad news, regarding the blizzard of DMCA takedown notices sent to YouTube on behalf of the Church of Scientology. Back in early September, the American Rights Counsel, Schaper Company, and Media House Enterprises, among others, sent hundreds of takedown notices to YouTube demanding the removal of videos critical of the Church of Scientology...
Marc Randazza: First Amendment Juggernaut
Posted on September 24, 2008My good friend Marc Randazza has given me the green light on an exciting piece of news. On September 11, 2008, Florida Circuit Court Judge George Sprinkle entered a default judgment in favor of Randazza's client Larry Giles, operator of the Veranda Park News, an online newspaper offering observations and commentary on events and aesthetic issues in Giles's development community...
New Insurance Program for Bloggers Offered by the Media Bloggers Association
Posted on September 23, 2008Here is a simple, but often ignored, truth: if you publish online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video, or even a user comment, you open yourself up to potential legal liability. It doesn't matter whether you are a professional journalist, hockey-mom, or an obscure blogger, if you post it, you'll need to be prepared for the legal consequences...
CMLP Joins Amicus Brief in Support of BlockShopper.com
Posted on September 22, 2008Last Friday, the Citizen Media Law Project joined Public Citizen, EFF, and Public Knowledge in filing an amici curiae brief in support of BlockShopper.com's motion to dismiss Jones Day's bogus trademark claims against it. The brief argues that Jones Day has failed to state a cause of action for trademark infringement because exhibits to the complaint clearly dispel any likelihood of confusion, because the First Amendment protects Blockshopper's noncommercial speech, and because using Jones Day's name to describe the activities of its associates is a nominative fair use...
CMLP Teams Up With NewsU to Launch Online Media Law Course
Posted on September 19, 2008We're pleased to announce that News University launched its Online Media Law course today. The course is specifically designed for individuals and journalists engaged in online publishing, and it covers three important areas of media law -- defamation, privacy, and copyright...
Virginia Supreme Court: State Anti-Spam Law is Unconstitutional
Posted on September 18, 2008It looks like Jeremy Jaynes, the first person in the United States to be convicted of a felony for spamming, is going to get a free pass, thanks to a decision handed down by the Virginia Supreme Court last week striking down Virginia's anti-spam law, Va...
YouTube Changes Guidelines, Senator Lieberman Gets Partial Victory on Terrorist Videos
Posted on September 17, 2008Taking full advantage of the seventh anniversary of 9/11, YouTube announced changes to its community guidelines last week, prohibiting the upload of videos inciting others to commit violent acts. The change comes several months after Senator Joe Lieberman pressured YouTube to remove videos not only inciting violence, but also content "that can be readily identified as produced by Al-Qaeda or another [Foreign Terrorist Organization]," through logos such as these: Senator Lieberman issued a press release praising the move and claiming it as a "direct response to the Senator?s complaints about violent Islamist videos that have been posted on the popular website...
Libel Tourism: A First Amendment Holiday
Posted on September 16, 2008Over the past few months, I've blogged several times (see here and here) about the proposed federal Free Speech Protection Act of 2008, which would allow a federal court to enjoin the enforcement in the United States of a foreign libel judgment if the speech at issue would not constitute defamation under U...
Jones Day Gets Trademark Law Wrong, Squelches Legitimate Reporting
Posted on September 15, 2008Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen published a fantastic post on Friday about big law firm Jones Day's lawsuit against BlockShopper.com, an online real estate news website covering Chicago, South Florida, Las Vegas, and St. Louis. The website reports on what's happening in the local real estate markets -- who's buying, who's selling, where, what price, etc...
Citizen Media Law Project Joins the Right to Write Fund In Protecting Creative Artists From Legal Threats
Posted on September 12, 2008Earlier this week, we announced that the CMLP will work closely with the Right to Write Fund, a newly launched nonprofit which will act as an educational repository and clearinghouse for free speech and copyright fair use issues that writers, filmmakers, professors, recording artists, and publishers encounter when moving among the worlds of print, Internet, film, the fine arts, and new media...
Print-on-Demand Service BookSurge Deemed Not To Be a "Publisher"
Posted on September 11, 2008Back in July, a federal court in Maine ruled that BookSurge, a print-on-demand service owned by Amazon.com, was not liable for defamatory statements contained in a book it "published" on behalf of one of its clients. Sandler v. Calcagni, 2008 WL 2761892 (D...
Boston City Council: What Are They Hiding?
Posted on September 10, 2008Journalism professor Dan Kennedy has a great post today at Media Nation about the Boston City Council's review of an 80-page report that it commissioned urging the state legislature to exempt it from the Massachusetts open meetings laws. He takes issue with statements made by councilors complaining that the law is "confusing" and creates a "chilling effect...
Judge Rejects Fair Use Defense in Harry Potter Lexicon Case, J.K. Rowling Recovers Her Plums
Posted on September 09, 2008In a long-awaited decision in the case of Rowling v. RDR Books, a federal judge in New York has ruled in favor of J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. in the copyright infringement lawsuit they filed against RDR Books, the publisher of the Harry Potter Lexicon, an unofficial encyclopedic companion to the popular Harry Potter series of books...
Publishing Personal and Private Information: Understanding Your Legal Risks
Posted on September 08, 2008When you publish information about someone without permission, especially personal or private information, you potentially expose yourself to legal liability even if your portrayal is factually accurate. While you should keep this potential liability in mind, the law generally gives online publishers quite a bit of breathing space to report and comment on matters of legitimate public concern, even when the person being discussed objects to the coverage...
Montana Shield Law Protects Anonymous Commenters
Posted on September 05, 2008Judge Todd Baugh of Montana's 13th Judicial District ruled on Wednesday that Montana's shield law protects an online newspaper from having to disclose the identities of anonymous commenters. The ruling treats anonymous commenters like other confidential sources, whose identities are commonly protected by state shield laws...
Cape Cod Blogger Peter Robbins Sued For Libel Over Comments About Local Dredging Dispute
Posted on September 04, 2008Peter Robbins, author of the Robbins Report, a blog that appears on the popular community website Cape Cod Today, and an anonymous commenter have been sued over statements they made criticizing a group of Barnstable, MA residents who opposed the dredging of Barnstable Harbor...
Copyright Challenge in New Push for Open Government Data
Posted on September 03, 2008Carl Malamud, a hero in providing access to information, has posted online the 38-volume California Code of Regulations, over which the state claims copyright ownership. He's been doing things like this for a while, but the California code is a big deal in every respect...
New York Lawyer Sues Law Blogger for Reporting on Malpractice Lawsuit
Posted on September 02, 2008Brooklyn attorney Marina Tylo filed a lawsuit against Andrew Lavoott Bluestone of the New York Attorney Malpractice Blog last week. According to the Summons with Notice, Tylo seeks $10,000,000 in damages for libel, negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and tortious interference with prospective contractual relations, all arising out of the following statement on Bluestone's blog: Here is the full text cite for a legal malpractice case in which plaintiff's attorney served a summons before buying the index number...
Analysis of the MBTA's Lawsuit Against Three MIT Students Who Discovered Flaws in the T's Fare System
Posted on September 01, 2008Our very own Tuna Chatterjee is featured this week on the award-winning legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer. Tuna discusses the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's (MBTA) recent lawsuit against three MIT students who discovered significant security flaws in the MBTA's fare system...
Dog Track Drops Lawsuit, Leaving Blogger Relieved But Rattled
Posted on August 29, 2008The Arizona Star reports that the Tucson Greyhound Park has dropped its defamation lawsuit against blogger Karyn Zoldan of the End Tucson Greyhound Racing website and blog. Both parties agreed to dismissal of the suit, but Zoldan did not pay anything in return for the settlement...
Blogger Arrested for Leaking Songs from Unreleased Guns N' Roses Album
Posted on August 28, 2008Kevin Cogill, a blogger on Antiquiet, a site that provides "uncensored music reviews and interviews," was arrested yesterday at his home near Los Angeles on suspicion of violating federal copyright law after he allegedly posted nine songs from the unreleased -- and highly-anticipated -- Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy...
Turkish Court Ends Latest YouTube Ban
Posted on August 27, 2008The Guardian reports that a Turkish court has lifted the ban on YouTube in that country, imposed by an Ankara court in May 2008 after it determined that certain videos posted on the popular video-sharing site insulted Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey...
Wisconsin Website Operator Files Lawsuit Over Frivolous Demand to Take Down Link to Local Police Department
Posted on August 26, 2008I just updated one of the more frivolous entries in our legal threats database, which has now spurred a federal lawsuit. While it is barely worth blogging about, I thought it might be valuable as a cautionary tale for those who believe sending cease-and-desist letters is a no-lose proposition...
Metallica's Management Suppresses Reviews, Metallica Puts Them Back Up
Posted on June 13, 2008In an interesting counterpoint to Prince?s latest takedown exploits ? see Sam?s recent posts ? rock band Metallica recently ?ear spanked? its management for demanding that websites take down reviews of unreleased Metallica songs. While the reviews are back online after the short downtime, the dispute raises copyright issues worth further discussion...
The Future of Civic Media at MIT
Posted on June 12, 2008I'll be at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the next two days at a conference for the winners of the Knight News Challenge. CMLP was a lucky recipient of a Knight News Challenge award in 2007. The conference, which Knight plans to make an annual event, is being hosted by MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (which, incidentally, also won a News Challenge award last year)...
More on Prince, Bootlegging, and Copyright Protection for Live Performances
Posted on June 11, 2008All right copyright geeks, it's time to do some more hypothesizing on the Prince/Radiohead/YouTube flap I blogged about in my previous post, Prince, Radiohead, and the Bootlegging Provision of the Copyright Act. Readers posted great comments that merit some elaboration in this post...
Sandra Day O'Connor's Foray into Online Gaming
Posted on June 10, 2008Last Wednesday, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gave the keynote speech at the annual Games for Change convention at the Parsons The New School For Design in New York City. In her speech, O'Connor announced her project Our Courts, which she is developing with Arizona State University (ASU) and Georgetown University Law Center...
Appeals Court Rejects Trademark Claims Against Parody Website
Posted on June 09, 2008In late May, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issued an opinion in Utah Lighthouse Ministry v. Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, 2008 WL 22043807 (10th Cir. May 29, 2008). With this decision, the Tenth Circuit joins an expanding group of federal appeals courts holding that federal trademark law does not prohibit a noncommercial website's use of a trademark for purposes of commenting on or criticising the trademark owner...
DMCA "Repeat Infringers": Scientology Critic?s Account Reinstated after Counter-Notification
Posted on June 06, 2008The Scientology critic known as ?Wise Beard Man? returned to YouTube this week after successfully filing counter-notifications to copyright claims that had earlier been made against his account. The takedown and delayed return illuminate another of the lesser-known shoals of the DMCA safe harbor, the 512(i)(1)(A) ?repeat infringers? consideration...
The (Proposed) Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act Is Crazy
Posted on June 06, 2008In a twist on the old adage "hard cases make bad law," Representatives Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Kenny Hulshof (R-MO) introduced a bill (H.R. 6123) in the House on May 22 which, if passed, would be known as the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act...
EFF Asks Court to Protect Anonymity of Fake-Profile Creator
Posted on June 05, 2008Larry Dominick, the Town President of Cicero, Illinois, is seeking information from MySpace about an anonymous user who set up fake profiles for him on the social networking site. He filed a petition in Illinois state court, seeking permission to issue interrogatories and document requests to MySpace about the user's identity...
Journalism that Matters Conference in Minneapolis
Posted on June 03, 2008Over the next two days, I'll be participating in and speaking at the Journalism that Matters: Minnesota conference organized by the Media Giraffe Project, Minnesota Journalism Center, and Minnesota News Council. It's the third in a series of Journalism that Matters gatherings...
Prince, Radiohead, and the Bootlegging Provision of the Copyright Act
Posted on June 02, 2008Prince is at it again. We've covered his legal antics before -- his lawyers went after a number of fan sites last November, and Universal Music sent a takedown notice to YouTube last June over a video of a toddler dancing with "Let's Go Crazy" playing in the background...
Bill Will Revamp Tennessee Open Records Law
Posted on May 30, 2008Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen is expected to sign into law a recently passed bill that would provide a much-needed overhaul of the state's open records practices. The bill, SB3280, corrects a number of deficiencies in the current Tennessee Open Records Act...
Singaporean Company Claims Patent to Image-Based Linking: Patent Busting Needed!
Posted on May 29, 2008Vuestar, a patent-holding company from Singapore that describes itself as "the Pioneer of visual search," is asserting patent rights in the technology that enables websites to link to other webpages using an image rather than text. According to Ars Technica, the firm recently has been sending invoices to companies that it believes are using its patented technology...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: An Overview of Trade Secrets
Posted on May 28, 2008This is the tenth in a series of posts calling attention to topics we cover in the Citizen Media Legal Guide. In this post, we highlight the section on trade secrets, which describes the limitations imposed on publishers who rely on or publish certain confidential business information and offers practical advice to citizen media creators on how to avoid liability for publishing trade secrets...
Consumer Advocate's Free Speech Rights Upheld in UDRP Trademark Proceeding
Posted on May 27, 2008Back in 2006, Robert Arkow, a self-styled consumer advocate who played a role in establishing the California (and then federal) Do Not Call lists, created a website at "metrolinkriders.com." The site hosts a forum for users and employees of Metrolink, the local commuter railway service in southern California, to comment upon Metrolink's services and policies...
YouTube Announces New Citizen News Channel
Posted on May 22, 2008Earlier this week, YouTube announced that it had designated a news manager for the site and created a Citizen News channel. Olivia M. (strangely, she didn't include her last name), YouTube's new News Manager, announced the initiative on YouTube's blog: Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe...
Senator Lieberman Asks YouTube to Take Down Radical Islamist Videos
Posted on May 22, 2008On Monday, Senator Joe Lieberman wrote to Google's CEO Eric Schmidt, asking the company to remove content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations from YouTube. The May 19 letter pointed out that many videos posted by radical groups violate YouTube's own terms of service because they contain "graphic or gratiuitious violence...
A&P v. D'Avella Update: "Produce Paradise" Lawsuit Settles
Posted on May 21, 2008David's post yesterday got us thinking about one of our favorite cases, A&P v. D'Avella. As some of you will recall, the case involved two brothers who worked at an A&P supermarket in New Jersey and created parodic rap songs with supermarket themes under the name "Fresh Beets...
CMLP Celebrates Its First Year of Blogging
Posted on May 20, 2008Today marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's blog. Back on May 20, 2007, we didn't have much in the way of staff (it was just me) and we didn't have a whole lot to say (again, it was just me), but we knew we had to start somewhere...
MySpace Wins Important CDA 230 Case in Fifth Circuit
Posted on May 19, 2008Last Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of negligence claims brought against MySpace by the family of a teenage girl who used the popular social networking site to communicate with and arrange to meet a nineteen-year-0ld boy who sexually assaulted her...
Lori Drew Indicted For Misuse of MySpace in Megan Meier Suicide Case
Posted on May 16, 2008Lori Drew was indicted on Thursday for her alleged role in a hoax on MySpace directed at Megan Meier, a 13-year-old neighbor of Drew's who committed suicide in October 2006 after a "boy" she met on MySpace abruptly turned on her and ended their relationship...
Case Testing Illinois' New Anti-SLAPP Law Settles Before Court Can Clarify Reach of Citizen Participation Act
Posted on May 15, 2008In what would have been the first case to test Illinois' newly enacted Citizen Participation Act, which provides immunity for speech related to certain matters of government and public concern, the parties settled before a court could interpret this important addition to the growing list of state anti-SLAPP laws...
Berkman@10 Conference
Posted on May 15, 2008We are all at the Berkman@10 Conference at Harvard Law School today and tomorrow, so postings will be a bit light. The conference, subtitled "The Future of the Internet" (based on Jonathan Zittrain's engaging new book of the same title), includes a number of Internet luminaries such as Jimmy Wales, Esther Dyson, Joshua Micah Marshall, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Michael Fricklas, and Reed Hundt...
Update on Oregon Statutes Copyright Spat
Posted on May 14, 2008Ars Technica reminds us that the copyright squabble between the Legislative Counsel Committee of the State of Oregon (the "Committee") and Justia and Public.Resource.Org is still going on, and it may erupt into a full-on legal battle soon. That would be fine, in my view, because we could use a strong court decision putting to rest the argument that the "arrangement and display" of state statutes are copyrightable...
Evans v. Evans: Appellate Court Throws Out Prior Restraint
Posted on May 13, 2008Yesterday, a California appellate court struck down a brazenly unconstitutional preliminary injunction prohibiting two defendants from making "false and defamatory statements" about, or publishing the "confidential personal information" of, Thomas Evans, a deputy sheriff in San Diego...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: An Overview of Copyright
Posted on May 09, 2008This is the ninth in a series of posts calling attention to topics we cover in the Citizen Media Legal Guide. In this post, we highlight the section on copyright, which provides an overview of this important area of law and offers practical advice to citizen media creators on how to use the copyrighted works of others and protect their own work from exploitation...
Copyright and the Demise of Newspapers
Posted on May 08, 2008Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create...
Crazy Legal Battle Between Newspapers Settles, But Leaves Worrisome Fair Use Decision Intact
Posted on May 07, 2008Many readers are probably familiar with the meltdown of the Santa Barbara News-Press, a local daily newspaper in Santa Barbara, California. Starting in 2006, reporters and editors of the newspaper clashed with now-infamous Wendy McCaw, controlling shareholder of Ampersand Publishing LLC, which owns the paper...
CMLP Talk Today at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Posted on May 06, 2008We will be giving a talk today at the Berkman Center at 12:30pm about the Citizen Media Law Project. We'll discuss the project?s accomplishments over its first year, including the creation of a legal guide for citizen media creators, the development of a database of legal threats directed at online expression, and recent litigation efforts on behalf of Wikileaks...
Proposed Reform of Massachusetts Open Meetings Law Disappoints
Posted on May 05, 2008This weekend, the Boston Globe published a thoughtful op-ed by Robert Ambrogi on efforts to reform the Massachusetts open meetings law. Ambrogi points out that the current open meetings law does not provide for civil or criminal penalties against government officials who violate the law...
CMLP Launches New Legal Guide Section on Intellectual Property
Posted on May 02, 2008Back in January, we began rolling out the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide. So far, we've published major sections of the guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online, Dealing with Online Legal Risks, Newsgathering and Privacy, and Access to Government Information...
Hawaii Legislature Passes Shield Bill
Posted on May 01, 2008The Hawaii legislature passed a reporters' shield bill Tuesday that will protect both traditional and non-traditional journalists from compelled disclosure of their confidential sources and information and materials obtained or prepared during the newsgathering process...
English Libel Law's Pernicious Impact on First Amendment Speech
Posted on April 30, 2008Floyd Abrams published an op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal that highlights the impact of foreign law, especially English libel law, on speech in the United States. Abrams notes: English libel law has come to have a disturbing impact on the right of Americans to speak out...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: Access to Courts and Court Records
Posted on April 29, 2008This is the eighth in a series of posts calling attention to topics we cover in the Citizen Media Legal Guide. In this post, we highlight the section on Access to Courts and Court Records, which provides an overview of federal and state laws that grant you the right to access federal and state court records and court proceedings...
Saudi Blogger Fouad Ahmad Al-Farhan Released
Posted on April 28, 2008After four months, the Saudi Arabian government has released popular Saudi blogger Fouad Ahmad Al-Farhan without charge. Authorities arrested Fouad in December after warning him about posts supporting an activist group on his blog at ???? ???? ???????...
Eclipse Aviation Uses Subpoena to Uncover Identities of Anonymous Critics
Posted on April 25, 2008Eclipse Aviation, a manufacturer of "affordable" jets, recently sent a subpoena to Google seeking to uncover the identities of 28 users who posted on Eclipse Aviation Critic NG, a blog that Google hosts on its Blogger service. The subpoena, which includes a colorful list of pseudonyms such as "Turn-and-Burn," "Bill E...
How Trademark Law Casts A Dark Cloud Over Free Speech
Posted on April 24, 2008Bill McGeveran, a University of Minnesota law professor and friend of the CMLP, has published his article, "Four Free Speech Goals for Trademark Law" in the Media & Entertainment Law Journal, volume 18 (available at SSRN). The article makes a compelling case that, while courts in trademark cases ultimately tend to reach results that protect free speech against trademark overreaching, they do so in a muddled way that makes it hard to resolve cases quickly and cheaply and leaves speakers vulnerable to bullying through cease-and-desist letters...
Judge Quashes Subpoena to Blogger Kathleen Seidel, Orders Lawyer to Explain Justification for Subpoena
Posted on April 23, 2008A federal magistrate judge in New Hampshire has quashed the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v...
Check Out The SPJ Citizen Journalism Academy
Posted on April 21, 2008The Society for Professional Journalists is hosting a series of one-day "Citizen Journalism Academy" workshops in Chicago (May 17), Greensboro, North Carolina (June 7), and Los Angeles (June 28). The idea is to provide training and information for citizen media creators on topics ranging from media ethics, to standard journalistic practices, to law...
Oregon Claims Copyright in Its Statutes -- Well, Sort Of
Posted on April 17, 2008Just last week, I was ruminating on the viability of state claims of copyright in government records. At the time, I was pretty confident that a state wouldn't be crazy enough to claim copyright in its own statutes, both because caselaw suggests this would be legally invalid and because it would be shoddy public policy...
The Smoking Gun Does the Dirty Work, Finds the Gems Others Miss
Posted on April 16, 2008The New York Times just ran a fascinating article on The Smoking Gun, a website dedicated to providing "documents--cool, confidential, quirky--that can't be found elsewhere on the Web." The three-person investigative shop in mid-town Manhattan consistently finds -- and publishes -- court documents, government records, and other esoterica that it finds through Freedom of Information requests, court files, and good old-fashioned investigative journalism...
Church of Scientology Threatens Wikileaks Over Publication of Church "Bibles"
Posted on April 15, 2008Wikileaks, which purports to provide an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis," is back in the news as it faces a new legal threat from the Church of Scientology. On March 26, Wikileaks published what it describes as a full unedited version of the Church of Scientology's Operating Thetan documents...
Rowling v. RDR Books: Harry Potter Lexicon Trial Starts Today
Posted on April 14, 2008The trial in Rowling v. RDR Books starts today in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The New York Times reports that Rowling herself will take the witness stand. At issue, of course, is whether Steven Vander Ark's print version of the Harry Potter Lexicon website infringes Rowling's copyrights in her enormously popular books...
Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation
Posted on April 11, 2008We've been following the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel in the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Threats Database, but thought it was time to throw our support behind Seidel and post about this egregious attempt to chill online speech. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues...
Perez Hilton Sues Fellow Gossip-Blogger For Defamation Over Alleged Sex Tapes
Posted on April 10, 2008Earlier this week, Perez Hilton sued fellow gossip-blogger Jonathan Jaxson for libel, slander, invasion of privacy, harassment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Jaxson, the former publicist for the Backstreet Boys whose real name is Jonathan Wayne Lewandowski, operates a blog called JJ's Dirt that feeds the public's apparently unlimited hunger for celebrity gossip...
Internet Solutions v. Marshall: Internet Defamation Case Dismissed for Lack of Personal Jurisdiction
Posted on April 09, 2008A quick update on the Internet Solutions v. Marshall case, which I've blogged about at length previously. This case is significant to us because Tabatha Marshall, the defendant, was the first user of our website to submit information about her case through our threat entry form...
What Were They Thinking?
Posted on April 08, 2008As reported by the Trademark Blog, Woody Allen is suing American Apparel for misappropriation of his name and likeness. Admittedly, it's not the heartland of citizen media, but it is a simple lesson on exactly what not to do with celebrity images...
B.C. Government Claims Copyright in FOI Records
Posted on April 08, 2008Michael Geist points the way to an interesting Vancouver Sun article, reporting on the B.C. provincial government's inclusion of copyright notices in packets of documents turned over to journalists under B.C.'s Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection Act, a Canadian analog of our state FOI laws...
Roommates.com - Just How Big A Hole Did the Ninth Circuit Poke in CDA 230?
Posted on April 04, 2008By now you've heard that the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, reaffirmed the previous Roommates.com decision. There's lots of excellent coverage out there -- some notable examples include the Online Liability Blog, Info/Law, Internet Cases, and Eric Goldman's Law & Technology Blog...
T-Mobile Asks Engadget to Stop Using the Color Magenta
Posted on April 03, 2008I was sure that this was an April Fool's joke. But alas, it's true. Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile, sent Engadget a letter a few weeks ago, requesting that the popular tech blog stop using the color magenta in the logo for its Engadget Mobile news blog...
CMLP Launches New Legal Guide Section on Access to Government Information
Posted on April 02, 2008Back in January, we began rolling out the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide. So far, we've published major sections of the guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online, Dealing with Online Legal Risks, and Newsgathering and Privacy. This week we published the section on Access to Government Information, which highlights the extensive amount of information available through government sources and explains how both traditional and non-traditional journalists can use various public access laws to gather and make effective use of this information...
TechCrunch Sues Facebook for $25 Million!!
Posted on April 01, 2008Breaking news -- TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is suing Facebook for unauthorized use of his name and likeness. In apparent disregard of the tech blogger's publicity rights, the social networking giant has been allowing advertisers to post ads on user profiles using Arrington's picture and name to endorse their products without permission...
Berkman@10 Conference: The Future of the Internet
Posted on March 31, 2008Save the date! On May 15-16, 2008, the Berkman Center will cap off its 10th anniversary celebration with a conference on ?The Future of the Internet.? The Center has been in full celebratory mode for the 2007-08 academic year and has hosted many events including a distinguished speaker series and book releases by Berkman projects and people...
N.H. Court Holds Right of Publicity Claim Not Barred by Communications Decency Act
Posted on March 28, 2008In what appears to be the first case of its kind, a federal court in New Hampshire has ruled that the immunity provisions in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) do not bar a state law claim for a violation of a person's "right of publicity...
A Tale of Two Prisoners
Posted on March 27, 2008This week, a judge ruled that Allan Parmelee, an inmate at the McNeil Island Corrections Center in Washington state, can continue to request public records under the state Public Records Act. According to the Associated Press, Parmelee has requested hundreds of public records about the state troopers, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, and others who incarcerated him for firebombing two cars...
Heading to L.A. for Media Re:public Forum
Posted on March 26, 2008I'll be quiet for a few days because I'm off to Los Angeles for a forum organized by Media Re:public, a Berkman Center project that examines the current and potential impact of participatory news media. The forum, which kicks off Thursday night and goes all day on Friday, will feature talks, panel discussions, and small group breakout sessions on a wide variety of topics and issues relating to participatory media, including "Parsing the Political Blogosphere," "Supporting the Emerging Media Ecology," "Finding Viable Models," and (the catchiest) "It's 2013: Do You Know Where Your News Is?" It should be great -- see the agenda for a full list of topics, speakers, and panelists...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: Liability for the Use of Recording Devices
Posted on March 25, 2008This is the seventh in a series of posts calling attention to topics we cover in the Citizen Media Legal Guide. In this post, we highlight the section on Recording Phone Calls, Conversations, Meetings and Hearings, which discusses federal and state laws relating to the use of recording equipment in specific private and semi-public settings...
Court Rejects Wal-Mart's Bid to Silence Criticism Through Trademark Law
Posted on March 24, 2008Last Thursday, a federal court in Georgia handed down a big win for free speech when it ruled that Wal-Mart could not use trademark law to stop a critic from disseminating his virulently anti-Wal-Mart views over the Internet. From Public Citizen's press release: In rejecting the company?s claim of trademark infringement, the U...
New Jersey Prosecutors Set Sights on JuicyCampus
Posted on March 21, 2008New Jersey prosecutors have subpoenaed the controversial gossip site JuicyCampus as part of an investigation into whether the site is violating the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act. Reports (here, here, and here) indicate that prosecutors believe that the website may be running afoul of the law by suggesting in its Terms & Conditions that it does not allow the posting of offensive material but providing no enforcement of that rule or way for users to report objectionable content...
iBrattleboro Victorious, Court Dismisses Libel Lawsuit Under Section 230 of Communications Decency Act
Posted on March 20, 2008A Vermont judge has dismissed the libel lawsuit filed against Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, a widely acclaimed community journalism site based in Brattleboro, Vermont, ruling that Grotke and LePage are immune from liability under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("CDA 230")...
It's Sunshine Week!
Posted on March 19, 2008It?s March and it?s Sunshine Week. This year, from March 16 - 22, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is holding its annual national initiative to raise public consciousness on the need for open government. The name ?Sunshine Week? is derived from the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis?s admonition that ?[s]unlight is the best disinfectant,? describing his belief that an open government is more accountable to its people and thus less easily corrupted...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: Protecting Sources and Source Material
Posted on March 18, 2008This is the sixth in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Legal Guide we began publishing in January. This past month, we rolled out the sections on Newsgathering and Privacy, which address the legal and practical issues you may encounter as you gather documents, take photographs or video, and collect other information...
Rowling v. RDR Books: Fair Use Is Like Gumbo
Posted on March 17, 2008Derek Bambauer at Info/Law has an excellent post on the Harry Potter Lexicon lawsuit, Rowling v. RDR Books. Bambauer analyzes Rowling's copyright claim and RDR Book's fair use defense and concludes that the celebrity author will likely prevail. While reasonable minds differ on this point (see, e...
Oklahoma Curtails Online Access to Court Records
Posted on March 14, 2008Earlier this week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court adopted new rules governing public access to court records, cutting off all public access to court records via the Internet and limiting public access to other information that has been available in the past...
PreCYdent: Another Useful Resource for Free Online Judicial Decisions
Posted on March 13, 2008Below is a video explaining how to use PreCYdent, a new resource for free online court opinions. The coverage of the database is quite impressive -- Supreme Court cases going back to 1759, federal appellate cases going back to 1950, and a good number of federal district court cases since 2004...
CMLP Joins Other Media Organizations to Oppose Contempt Order Against Journalist in Anthrax Case
Posted on March 12, 2008Earlier this week, the Citizen Media Law Project joined 28 of the country's leading news organizations, press associations, and nonprofits dedicated to preserving free speech rights in filing a brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit opposing the contempt citation issued against Toni Locy, a former reporter for USA Today...
Kentucky Legislator Introduces Bill to Stop Anonymous Posting
Posted on March 11, 2008Last week, Republican Tim Couch of Kentucky introduced a bill in the state legislature that would impose criminal fines on Kentucky-based website operators who fail to collect "a legal name, address, and electronic mail address" before allowing a user to post a comment...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: Gathering Private Information
Posted on March 10, 2008This is the fifth in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Legal Guide we began publishing in January. This past month we rolled out the sections on Newsgathering and Privacy, which address the legal and practical issues you may encounter as you gather documents, take photographs or video, and collect other information...
Air Force DMCA-Bombs YouTubed Ad
Posted on March 08, 2008Over at Wired's Threat Level blog, Kevin Poulsen reports on a new DMCA overreach: the U.S. Air Force complained (via outside counsel) about his posting of their recruiting video. The post, Poulsen says, was initially made at the Air Force's invitation...
New Major League Baseball Restrictions on Press Credentials Hamstring Online Coverage
Posted on March 06, 2008As an avid baseball fan, I should have been paying closer attention to the recent dispute over Major League Baseball's new restrictions on credentialing journalists who cover MLB games. A nice summary of the dispute on the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press' Sidebar Blog awoke me from my slumber...
Banks in Wikileaks Case Back Down, Seek to Dismiss Case After Losing Fight Over Injunctions
Posted on March 05, 2008As if the order by Judge White vacating the injunctions in the Wikileaks case weren't enough, the Banks that brought the case have now filed a notice of dismissal seeking to voluntarily dismiss the entire case. It's a short filing, so I've quoted it in its entirety below: PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that Plaintiffs BANK JULIUS BAER & CO...
Anthony Ciolli, former AutoAdmit Defendant, Sues Everyone
Posted on March 05, 2008Breaking news from Above the Law: Anthony Ciolli, former defendant in the controversial AutoAdmit case, has filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court against the two plaintiffs in that case, their lawyers, ReputationDefender and one of its employees, and the shadowy "T14 Talent...
Lawyer Preemptively Threatens Sports Blogger with Lawsuit
Posted on March 05, 2008The preemptive legal threat, while not as worrisome as preemptive war, is a pretty unsavory tactic. Don't know what I mean by "preemptive legal threat" ? Not to worry, here is an example. The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog reports that a lawyer for Denver Nuggets coach George Karl has threatened blogger Andrew Feinstein with legal action (well, sort of)...
Lifestyle Lift v. Real Self -- Using Trademark Law to Silence Critical Reviews?
Posted on March 04, 2008Eric Goldman published an interesting post yesterday about a new case, Lifestyle Lift Holding, Inc. v. Real Self, Inc., which is a trademark dispute involving RealSelf.com, an interactive website with forums that let consumers discuss their experiences with cosmetic and plastic surgery procedures and vote on whether a procedure was "worth it" or "not worth it...
Citizen Media Law Project Publishes Newsgathering Section of Legal Guide
Posted on March 03, 2008Back in January, we announced the launch of the first two major sections of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online and Dealing with Online Legal Risks. This past month we began rolling out the section on Newsgathering and Privacy, which addresses the legal and practical issues you may encounter as you gather documents, take photographs or video, and collect other information...
Judge in Wikileaks Case Reverses Course, Wikileaks.org is Back Online
Posted on February 29, 2008We've just received word that the judge in the Wikileaks case, Jeffrey White, has vacated the Permanent Injunction that ordered Wikileaks' domain name registrar, Dynadot, to disable the entire Wikileaks.org domain name and remove all DNS hosting records...
YouTube Removes ?Shred? Parody Videos; WIRED Puts Them Back Up
Posted on February 29, 2008Earlier this month, some of the most creative and entertaining parody videos on the Web were pulled from YouTube over dubious copyright claims. The disputed works, known as the ?shred? videos, are a series of parodies in which Finnish media artist Santeri Ojala overdubs performances of legendary guitarists such as Steve Vai, Carlos Santana, and Eric Clapton...
"AK47" Files Motion to Quash in AutoAdmit Case
Posted on February 28, 2008The AutoAdmit case (formerly Doe v. Ciolli) never fails to satisfy. If the whole situation were not absurd enough already, one of the pseudonymous posters going by the handle "AK47" has filed a motion to quash a subpoena issued by the plaintiffs to AT&T seeking information about his identity...
Coalition of Media Organizations Challenges Prior Restraints in Wikileaks Case
Posted on February 27, 2008Yesterday, a coalition of organizations dedicated to preserving free speech rights on the Internet, including the Citizen Media Law Project, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Los Angeles Times, Gannett, Associated Press, and Society of Professional Journalists, filed a "friend of the court" brief in the Wikileaks case...
The Net Remembers, for Good and Bad
Posted on February 27, 2008I have a column running on the Guardian?s website. It?s entitled ?Freedom of information? ? and is reprinted below: What does a Swiss bank that does business in the Cayman Islands have in common with a Hong Kong actor who jets around the globe? They are object lessons this month in a reality that anyone handling information needs to understand...
MySpace Sued Over Teen Suicide
Posted on February 26, 2008No, this isn't about the Megan Meier suicide debacle. It's about another, older but equally tragic episode. The family of a fifteen-year-old girl who committed suicide in 2006 after a sexual relationship with a twenty-seven-year-old man she met on MySpace is suing the popular social networking site for negligence and violation of products liability law (i...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: Are Your Online Activities Covered by Insurance?
Posted on February 25, 2008This is the fourth in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Legal Guide we published in January. As we roll out new sections of the guide each month, we will highlight some of the more important topics in blog posts...
Eric Menhart Rethinks Trademark Application; Internet Lawyers Still Laughing
Posted on February 22, 2008The curtain appears to be closing on a what has been a humorous episode in the anals of "cyberlaw." Ron Coleman and Eric Goldman report that Eric Menhart has amended his application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which previously sought to trademark the term "CyberLaw" in connection with legal services...
Pennsylvania Reforms Open Records Law, Loses Distinction as Worst in the Country
Posted on February 21, 2008Now that the Wikileaks storm has started to subside, it's time for us to catch up on some items that deserve attention (but haven't been getting it from the CMLP lately). Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell signed a bill that significantly reforms the state's open records law, previously regarded as one of the worst in the country...
International Olympic Committee Thinks Blogging Is Not About Journalism
Posted on February 19, 2008Ars Technica reports that the International Olympic Committee has lifted its ban on blogging. Athletes competing in Beijing 2008 will be allowed to blog about the Olympics, so long as they follow some, well, restrictive guidelines. Most notably, athletes will not be permitted to report on the overall competition or relay information from third parties; instead, the guidelines require that they focus on their own personal experiences...
Making Sense of the Wikileaks Fiasco: Prior Restraints in the Internet Age
Posted on February 19, 2008Yesterday, I reported that a federal judge in San Francisco had issued a stunningly broad injunction that brought down Wikileaks.org, a site that is developing what it describes as an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis...
Court Orders Wikileaks.org Shutdown, Then Grants Limited Reprieve
Posted on February 18, 2008Last Friday, a federal district court judge in San Francisco issued a stunningly broad injunction that brought down Wikileaks, a site that is developing what it describes as an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: Deciding Whether and How to be Anonymous
Posted on February 18, 2008This is the third in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Legal Guide we published in January. As we roll out new sections of the guide each month, we will highlight some of the more important topics in blog posts...
Some Thoughts on the New Net Neutrality Bill
Posted on February 14, 2008Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced a new net neutrality bill before the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday. Net neutrality refers to the (surprisingly) controversial idea that all Internet traffic should be treated equally...
Swartz v. Does: Tennessee Couple Sues Anonymous Author(s) of Local Blog for Defamation and Invasion of Privacy
Posted on February 13, 2008On Monday, a prominent couple from Old Hickory, Tennessee sued three anonymous defendants for defamation and invasion of privacy over statements appearing on the Stop Swartz blog and craigslist. The plaintiffs, Donald and Terry Keller Swartz, buy and sell a lot of real estate in Old Hickory, and a bit of local political maneuvering on their part seems to have earned them some enemies...
Federal Case Law Archive Now Online and Free
Posted on February 12, 2008Public.Resource.Org and Creative Commons announced that they've released the first batch of case material in their free case law archive. Yesterday's release encompases over 1.8 million volumes of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: Getting Your Words and Other Content Out to the World
Posted on February 11, 2008This is the second in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the recently launched Citizen Media Law Project Legal Guide. The first topic we took up was choosing a business form for your online publishing activities. In this post we discuss the various issues, both legal and practical, that arise when you select a platform for your online speech...
Judge Reduces Verdict in Snyder v. Phelps, Westboro Baptist Church Still on the Hook for $5 Million
Posted on February 08, 2008Earlier this week, a federal District Court judge in Maryland more than halved a $10.9 million jury verdict against the Westboro Baptist Church, a fundamentalist Christian church in Kansas, and three of its leading members. Among other things, the church publishes a website at "www...
Bush Refuses to Fund New FOIA Ombudsman, Takes the Heart Out of Open Government Reform Law
Posted on February 07, 2008Well, that was quick. Mere weeks after signing the "OPEN Government Act of 2007" on December 31, 2007, which significantly reformed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), President Bush is now attempting to cut out the heart of the OPEN Government Act by refusing to fund the newly created FOIA ombudsman's office...
Krinsky v. Doe 6: New Decision from California Provides Strong Protection for Anonymous Speech
Posted on February 07, 2008A California appellate court issued a new anonymity decision yesterday in Krinsky v. Doe 6, H030767 (Cal. Ct. App. Feb. 6, 2008). (For background on the facts of the case, see the CMLP database entry, Krinsky v. Doe 6.) In line with the recent trend towards increased protection for anonymous speech online, the California court came out with a test that puts a significant evidentiary burden on a plaintiff before allowing disclosure of an anonymous Internet speaker's identity...
Highlights from the Legal Guide: Choosing a Business Form
Posted on February 05, 2008This is the first in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the recently launched Citizen Media Law Project Legal Guide. The first topic we'll take up is choosing a business form for online publishing activities. There is increasing awareness that, especially if you publish content in collaboration with others, it may not be smart to simply leave the relationship "natural" or informal...
Goodale TV on CDA 230 and AutoAdmit
Posted on February 04, 2008Sam Bayard blogged previously about James Goodale's article on CDA 230 and the highly publicized AutoAdmit case. In the article, Goodale argues that CDA 230, the federal law that shields providers of "interactive computer service[s]" from liability for defamation and other torts for publishing the statements of third parties, should be amended to impose liability in cases where a website operator "knowingly causes defamation by refusing to take down libelous posts...
Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Guide
Posted on January 31, 2008Today we are launching the first sections of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues, and addresses the legal issues that you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work online...
Savage v. CAIR: The Council for American-Islamic Relations Asks Court to Dismiss Michael Savage's Lawsuit
Posted on January 31, 2008I've blogged before about the Savage v. CAIR lawsuit, in which the conservative talk show host claims that CAIR violated his copyright (and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act!) by posting and commenting critically on an audio clip from one of his shows, in which Savage makes all sorts of hateful and inaccurate claims about Muslims and the Islamic faith...
CUNY Journalism School Launches Website to Help Citizen Journalists Avoid Legal Risk
Posted on January 30, 2008In a project headed by Associate Professor Geanne Rosenberg, CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism has launched a new website -- Top 10 Rules for Limiting Legal Risk. The project, which is carried out in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Knight Citizen News Network, aims to provide training to citizen journalists on the legal rights and responsibilities that go along with newsgathering and online publication...
Plaintiffs Seek Information to Unmask Pseudonymous Defendants in AutoAdmit Case
Posted on January 28, 2008Last Thursday, the plaintiffs in the AutoAdmit case filed a motion for expedited discovery, seeking permission to serve subpoenas on a number of ISPs, universities, and websites demanding information about the identities of the the pseudonymous posters named in the lawsuit...
Students Shown Drinking on Facebook Banned From School Activities
Posted on January 28, 2008School officials at Eden Prairie High School outside of Minneapolis punished 13 students after discovering photographs of them drinking on Facebook.com. As punishment, the students were banned from their sports teams or other extracurricular activities...
Court Awards Perez Hilton Nearly $85,000 in Attorneys Fees in Ronsen Suit
Posted on January 25, 2008I previously blogged at length about Mario Lavandeira's victory under California's anti-SLAPP statute (Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 425.16) in the libel lawsuit brought against him by celebrity DJ and Lindsey Lohan pal Samantha Ronsen. Now, my RSS feeds are clogged with reports that the California court has awarded Lavendeira nearly $85,000 in attorneys fees under the anti-SLAPP statute...
Primer on Copyright Liability and Fair Use
Posted on January 24, 2008As a lead up to the launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide later this month, we are putting up longer, substantive blog posts on various subjects covered in the guide. This post is the second in our series of legal primers. The first addressed the subject of immunity and liability for third-party content under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act...
Mashups, DVD Ripping, and Fair Use
Posted on January 23, 2008Chris Soghoian at CNET Blogs published an interesting post yesterday -- Did Slate violate copyright law? It talks about a hilarious mashup video that Slate posted a few days ago called Hillary's Inner Tracy Flick, which juxtaposes images from the 1999 film Election and current footage of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton...
Fernando Rodrigues Discusses Access to Public Information in Brazil
Posted on January 22, 2008Today at the Berkman Center, Fernando Rodrigues, a journalist from Brazil who is currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, spoke about "Journalism and Public Information in Brazil." In 2002, Rodrigues launched "Políticos do Brasil," a website that contains approximately 25,000 records of Brazilian politicians showing electoral information and personal data ? including the list of personal assets of each politician who ran for office in the past three general elections in Brazil...
Comparative Analysis of Copyright Fair Use in Canada, United Kingdom, and United States
Posted on January 20, 2008Giuseppina D'Agostino, a law professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, has a new paper coming out entitled "Healing Fair Dealing? A Comparative Copyright Analysis of Canadian Fair Dealing to UK Fair Dealing and US Fair Use." Here is the abstract: As a result of the March 4, 2004 Supreme Court of Canada decision in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada for the first time in Canadian copyright history, the court determined that Canadian law must recognize a "user right" to carry on exceptions generally and fair dealing in particular...
Gawker Defies Demand from Church of Scientology to Remove Creepy Tom Cruise Video
Posted on January 18, 2008Earlier this week, a promotional/inspirational video for the Church of Scientology featuring Tom Cruise began circulating online. The video is bizarre -- against the background of what sounds like the Mission Impossible theme, Cruise extols the virtues of Scientology and urges viewers to embrace its ethics and worldview...
New Hampshire to Stop Issuing ID Cards to Journalists
Posted on January 17, 2008The Associated Press is reporting that New Hampshire will no longer issue identification cards to journalists. According to a report in Seacoastonline: The man who handled the chore ? Jim Van Dongen of the state Department of Safety ? says the decision is based on the proliferation of online and specialty news outlets and technology that allows just about anyone to call himself a journalist...
Court of Appeals Affirms that Single Publication Rule Applies to Internet
Posted on January 16, 2008In a case of first impression in Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the "single publication rule," which states that the statute of limitations period for libel begins to run when a defamatory statement is first published, applies to publications on the Internet...
Ban 'Hate Speech' at Your Own Peril
Posted on January 15, 2008Glenn Greenwald accurately explains the grotesque result of laws that seek to curb that amorphous problem of ?hate speech? ? a concept that turns free speech on its head. And unlike many of his colleagues on the political left, Greenwald explains why he?s defending people whose speech frequently deserves contempt: People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around...
Chinese Citizen Journalist Beaten to Death by City Officials
Posted on January 14, 2008This is terrible news. CNN and TechCrunch reported Friday that city officials in central China beat a man to death for attempting to record a protest on his mobile phone. Apparently, there was some sort of confrontation between villagers in the central Chinese province of Hubei and local municipal "inspectors" over the dumping of waste near the villagers' homes...
Reconstructing the Journalists' Privilege
Posted on January 11, 2008Eric Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University School of Law, has an article entitled "Reconstructing Journalists' Privilege" coming out in the Cardozo Law Review. The article is part of a symposium issue that includes pieces by an impressive list of scholars, including Anthony Lewis, Max Frankel, Victor Kovner, Joel Gora, and Rodney Smolla...
Grand Jury Issues Subpoena to MySpace in Megan Meier Suicide Case
Posted on January 10, 2008The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that a federal grand jury in Los Angeles has begun issuing subpoenas in the Megan Meier case, the Missouri teenager who committed suicide after a "boy" she met on MySpace abruptly turned on her and ended their relationship...
Kansas Court Issues Search Warrant to Lawrence Journal-World Seeking Identity of Anonymous User
Posted on January 09, 2008Last month, an investigator at Kansas University delivered a search warrant to the Lawrence Journal-World, a highly regarded newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, demanding access to their computer servers in order to get information about the identity of a user who had posted comments on the paper's website, LJWorld...
Australian Foreign Minister "Condemns" YouTube Video
Posted on January 08, 2008Here is a weird one from the New York Times Lede blog: An anonymous person posted a video on YouTube that accuses the Australian government of opposing Japan?s whaling practices because of its "prejudice and racism against the Japanese." In response, Foreign Minister of Australia Stephen Smith issued an audio statement condemning the video and re-affirming the Australian government's view that Japanese whaling should cease...
British Blogger Threatened with Arrest for Inciting Racial Hatred
Posted on January 07, 2008Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit.com reports that a British blogger was recently threatened with arrest for inciting racial hatred. The blogger, who runs a controversial Christian blog and goes by the pseudonym Lionheart, stated on his blog that British police are threatening to arrest him for "stirring up racial hatred by displaying written material" contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986...
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my boyfriend is a green card holder in the U.S.and is married here in the Philippines .. the marriage last for 2 years . his wife now gave birth from another man,he is planning to marry me here in the Philippines but the
if your b.f. is a greenc ard holder,he can file for a divorce and the Phil. law ...
Can I marry an alien while my US citizenship application is being procesed?
it doesn't matter,you can marry,just provide them with marriage certificate...
I married American citizen 2 years ago and have conditional permanent resident status. The marriage has not gone well and my husband has left. What effect will filing for divorce have on my application to have conditions
Many visas, etc., involving spouses must be applied for by both spouses (for exa...
How to tell if I have been subject to gender discrimination in hiring practices?
You didn't apply for the job. so that's a tough one. Seemingly your Bo...
Can a debt owed in France be collected in the United States?
Not really. The procedure of collecting is governed by complicated treaties and...
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