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Citizen Media Law Project

Legal training and resources to protect free online speech. Advocacy for citizen participation in online media.
By Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Center for Citizen Media

Post Frequency: 3.9/day

Last Entry: July 20, 2010 at 10:11:43

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, 2009
The 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...

LegoŽ My Video: "Clearance Culture" Becomes a Parody of Itself

Posted on August 19, 2009
Much 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, 2009
Anyone 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, 2009
Last 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...

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Yes We Cannabis: Another Obama Photo Sparks Fair Use Controversy

Posted on August 14, 2009
Is 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, 2009
When 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, 2009
Once 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
There 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, 2009
Quick 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Yet 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, 2009
Daniel 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, 2009
Iran?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, 2009
Restraints 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, 2009
Last 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Horizon 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, 2009
We 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, 2009
Attorneys 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, 2009
As 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, 2009
Amazon 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, 2009
CBS 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, 2009
Buffets 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
It 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, 2009
There'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, 2009
It 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, 2009
As 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...

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