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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

Feeding the Hand that Bites: Statutory Misinterpretation in the Name of Good

Posted on July 10, 2009
One 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
If 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)...

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Michigan High Court Sends Message to Tweeters

Posted on July 07, 2009
I 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, 2009
Exercising 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
Earlier 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, 2009
What 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, 2009
As 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, 2009
Meet 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Back 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, 2009
Today, 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, 2009
Let'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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Another 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, 2009
For 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, 2009
Dear 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Don'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, 2009
Tony 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, 2009
On 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Since 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...

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