As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Law”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)
Chapter 7: Law & Norms
2008
GateHouse v NY Times Co.: Not So Simple After All
One 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. (UPDATE: A Judge has denied, for now, an injunction.) I’ve been looking at this from both sides’ perspectives, and this is not as simple as it looks on first glance. more…
Big Media, Still Missing the Point on Their Culpability in Financial Debacle
Ask yourself: If the media had done their jobs, would there have been such widespread shock at discovering the mess we’re in? This answers itself. The answer is a loud No. It should inspire shame, not bragging. more…
Turning Everyone into Criminals
We should stand behind our words. But the best way to handle anonymous and pseudonymous trolls and sleazebags is to ignore them and persuade everyone else that such speech is less than worthless. Sending people to jail for this is an assault on speech itself. more…
WSJ Business Columnist’s Logical Lapse
Holman W. Jenkins Jr., who writes the Business World column in the Wall Street Journal, is one of the more predictable of pundits there — entirely on the side of business people when it comes to their innate right to do just about anything they please. more…
The Net Remembers, for Good and Bad
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. Like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, information, once out in the wild, is all but uncontainable. more…
Comcast Blocks Data, Collects Cash
Washington Post: Comcast Defends Role As Internet Traffic Cop. Comcast said yesterday that it purposely slows down some traffic on its network, including some music and movie downloads, an admission that sparked more controversy in the debate over how much control network operators should have over the Internet. more…
Legal Guide | Citizen Media Law Project
The Citizen Media Law Project has launched the first iteration of its Legal Guide, which
addresses the legal issues you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work. 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. You can search by keyword, browse by state, browse by section, or simply jump right in. more…
Ban ‘Hate Speech’ at Your Own Peril
Glenn 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: more…
2007
Town of Manalapan, New Jersey, Versus Free Speech
Follow the links from Electronic Frontier Foundation page on the bizarre Manalapan v. Moskovitz lawsuit to see a local government running wild against free speech. The town is suing to get the identity of — and all kinds of other information about — a critical anonymous blogger. more…
New Legal Threats Database for Citizen Media Creators
The Citizen Media Law Project has created a new Legal Threats Database:
Our goal is to create an accurate and complete collection of legal threats directed at online speech. In order to accomplish this goal, we need your help.more…
How Burma Censored the Net
The Open Net Initiative, in “Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burma,”
examines the role of information technology, citizen journalists, and bloggers in Burma and presents a technical analysis of the abrupt shutdown of Internet connectivity by the Burmese government on September 29, 2007, following its violent crackdown on protesters there. more…
Arizona Republic: Sheriff’s deputies arrest ‘New Times’ owners. The charges stem from a story published under their byline in the Thursday edition of New Times, in which they describe a subpoena the paper reportedly received from a grand jury convened by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Lacey has been released from jail after posting bail; there’s no jail record available on the status of Larkin. Efforts to reach them Friday have been unsuccessful. Grand jury proceedings are secret, and the two wondered in the opening paragraphs of the article whether they could face legal repercussions for making the subpoena public, but they viewed the subpoena as an attack on freedom of the press. more…
Lenin in Modern Russia
Not an original thought, of course, but it’s hard to miss the fact that the statue of Vladimir Lenin in the central square of Etakerinburg, Russia, is surrounded today by heavy traffic, construction and billboards of global enterprises. This city, closed to outsiders less than two decades ago, is in the middle of a construction and economic boom. more…
When Oligopolists Interfere with Free Speech
NY Times: Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Rights Messages.
Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.more…
Claiming Prices as ‘Intellectual Property’
Harvard Crimson: Coop Discourages Notetaking in Bookstore:
Coop President Jerry P. Murphy ’73 said that while there is no Coop policy against individual students copying down book information, “we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes.” The apparent new policy could be a response to efforts by Crimsonreading.org—an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers—from writing down the ISBN identification numbers for books at the Coop and then using that information for their Web site. Murphy said the Coop considers that information the Coop’s intellectual property. Crimson Reading disagrees. “We don’t think the Coop owns copyright on this information that should be available to students,” said Tom D. Hadfield ’08, a co-creator of the site. more…
YouTube Reverses Course on User’s Video: Reposts It
Chris Knight, who’s been unfairly treated by media giant Viacom, now says: YouTube has restored my clip. more…
More Paranoia About Photography in Public Places
Syracuse.com: SU student questions VA security actions. A Syracuse University graduate student taking photographs outside the VA Medical Center says she was questioned and ordered to delete several images by hospital security officers Thursday afternoon. Mariam Jukaku, 24, of Michigan, said the officers also photocopied her university ID and driver’s license and asked if she was a U.S. citizen. She wonders if her appearance played a part in how the incident was handled. more…
Punishing Corporate Copyright Abusers
Chris Knight says, “Viacom hits me with copyright infringement for posting on YouTube a video that Viacom made by infringing on my own copyright! more…
China Continues to Pressure New Media
So it’s yet more Big Brotherism from a regime that considers intellectual freedom a danger to the state.
Anonymity has its place in the world, and a dictatorship is one of those places.more…
Sleuthing the Many (Logo) Lives of the Cheney Video
Jon Garfunkel has done prodigious homework on how a variety of online video posters used (and abused) the attribution principle in “Internet Slash-Ups: Even the pros rip off C-SPAN. more…
AT&T’s Phony Denials on Net Neutrality
Timothy Carr, in “AT&T Gets Caught in its Own Spin Cycle,” notes the telecom company’s increasingly “slippery response” when confronted with evidence of snipping out political content on its webcast concerts. The company’s sleazy behavior is no surprise, but nonetheless telling in context of its push to decide what bits will reach customers’ computers in what order, if ever. more…
AP: YouTube Seeks to Depose Jon Stewart. YouTube wants to question Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as part of its defense against claims the online video-sharing site illegally shows snippets of sports and entertainment videos. more…
Network Neutrality Attacked by British ISPs
Salon’s Farhad Manjoo, asks, “Is network neutrality a fake issue?” No, he says, at least for people in the U.K. who want to watch BBC videos online: more…
Is It Permissible to Say that New Zealand’s Parliament is Filled with Idiots?
Press Gazette (UK): MPs outlaw satire in New Zealand. New Zealand’s Parliament has voted itself far-reaching powers to control satire and ridicule of MPs in Parliament, attracting a storm of media and academic criticism. The new standing orders, voted in last month, concern the use of images of Parliamentary debates, and make it a contempt of Parliament for broadcasters or anyone else to use footage of the chamber for “satire, ridicule or denigration”. more…
A Reminder of Free Speech’s Value
BBC: Malaysia cracks down on bloggers. The Malaysian government has warned it could use tough anti-terrorism laws against bloggers who insult Islam or the country’s king. more…
Lies from Top Media People: Ho Hum?
Of course, today’s media tend to let politicians lie with impunity. Rare is the case in which someone truly calls a lie what it is. Words like “dissemble” or expressions like “apparently at odds with what others have said” — when a blatant lie has been told — are routinely used to paper over the reality. more…
Freedom of Information a Joke to Some Agencies
Given the utter lack of incentive to cooperate with FOI requests, this should not be surprising. Some state laws do it better, forcing taxpayers to pay the legal bills when agencies break the law. The feds ignore it because they can. more…
Your Insurance, Please, or No Photos
NY Times: New York City May Seek Permit and Insurance for Many Kinds of Public Photography. Some tourists, amateur photographers, even would-be filmmakers hoping to make it big on YouTube could soon be forced to obtain a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance before taking pictures or filming on city property, including sidewalks. more…
Lawyer Threatens Suit Over Online Review (of Him)
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Avvo’s attorney rating system draws fire. Setting up an online rating system that attempts to rank the best and worst attorneys, is kind of like dipping your toes in shark-infested waters. Sooner or later, you are bound to get bitten. That’s the situation facing Avvo, the heavily funded Seattle startup that just four days ago unveiled a controversial Internet site that ranks lawyers on a scale of one (”extreme caution”) to 10 (”superb”). John Henry Browne, a Seattle criminal defense attorney who in my story on Avvo Tuesday called the service a “joke,” is now threatening to sue the company over what he calls a “ridiculously low rating” for him and other attorneys. more…
First Amendment For Broadcasters, Too
It was important for the networks to stand up to the bullying that was turning the FCC into the Federal Censorship Commission. Broadcasters deserve First Amendment protections, and the current regulatory system has been grossly misused to clamp down on speech of various kinds. more…
Texas Erecting Barriers to Citizen Journalists
Pegasus’ Mike Orren calls this a blatant attempt to prevent activists and others from covering what local officials are doing. This interpretation sounds about right: a terrible bill in a state known for terrible government. more…
Citizen Media and the Law: A New Project
The Citizen Media Law Project, jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and this Center, is launching this week, with the help of a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. more…
Good News on Freedom of Information Front
The California First Amendment Coalition has won a crucial lower-court ruling that Santa Clara County must provide — at cost — its geographic “base map” of real estate boundaries in the county. The county had been saying it would charge tens of thousands of dollars for information collected on behalf of residents, using taxpayer money. more…
Open Net Initiative Launches Pathbreaking Study
The Open Net Intitiative global Internet filtering study was posted this morning, and it’s an incredible piece of work. From the BBC story on the launch:
The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests. The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering.more…
Linking Law: Decision Favors Online Innovation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed Internet innovators and users of all stripes a huge victory in a case involving a company called Perfect 10 versus Google: more…
Wall Street Journal: Why China Relaxed Blogger Crackdown. Now, the Ministry of Information Industry, the agency responsible for the policy, has abandoned plans for a law requiring all Chinese blog service providers to ask their users for verifiable personal details before they can start blogging. Instead, the government is going for the soft approach.more…
New Republic’s Prescription for Preserving Newspapers
Self-help for unnerved newspaper people includes feeling good about themselves, opines the New Republic:
How can newspapers recover their mojo? For starters, they should stop sounding apocalyptic. Their business is in much less of a crisis than you might imagine. more…
Military Censorship
The Washington Post and others are reporting that the Pentagon is blocking soldiers’ access to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other social-media sites. The reasons: bandwidth pressures — an entirely bogus claim — and worries about the “disclosure of combat-sensitive material,” a more understandable consideration. more…
Using the Web, and Openness, to Improve Political Debates
In this impossibly early presidential campaign season, so-called “debates” are already making modest waves. They could be much more useful, and there’s promising progress to suggest that they will. more…
CNN Serves Democracy
Unlike the greedy executives at NBC, who have slapped severe restrictions on anyone else’s use of the debates broadcast by the network and MSNBC, CNN recognizes the public value in giving the widest possible access to this material. more…
Obama: Make Debates Widely Available
From BarackObama.com, an
open letter to Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean urging the DNC to make the video from any Democratic Presidential debate publicly available after the debate for free and without restriction. more…
Joining the Investigations
At Real Time Investigations, a Sunlight Foundation project, you can follow what Bill Allison calls
sort of a diary of investigations, where you can follow, day by day, what my colleague, Investigative Writer Anupama Narayanswamy, and I are up to as we go about our business trying to make Congress more transparent.
more…
Blog Legal Dispute Settled
Over at Just Another Pretty Farce, Nashville blogger Katherine Coble reports settlement of what was shaping up to be a nasty legal disupte. You can find more about the situation in earlier postings on her blog, but the main point is that the threatening party agreed — after the intervention of a lawyer for the Media Bloggers Assocation — to drop the matter. more…
Does Anti-Plagiarism Service Violate Copyright Law
Washington Post: McLean Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service.
The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database. more…
Sunshine Year
Last week, March 11-17, was known in journalistic and (some) governmental circles as “Sunshine Week” — a tribute to notions of open government, and a call to action to make it more so. Freedom of information was on tap in all kinds of ways. more…
Hypocrisy in Copyright Enforcement
Valleywag points to the incredibly hypocrisy of Viacom, which has sued Google for big bucks over YouTube but encourages its own video “pirates” on a Viacom-owned site. more…
Broadcasting & Cable: C-SPAN Loosens Copyright for Some Content Online. C-SPAN is loosening its copyright policy on some material for online use, saying it wants to expand citizens’ access to online video of congressional hearings, White House activities, and other government-sponsored events.
Progress, but C-SPAN’s behavior has been a bit obnoxious, and the proof will be in the actual policies it puts forward. more…
Banning Citizen Reporters from Capturing Video of Crime?
If this is true — a report that “France bans citizen journalists from reporting violence” — then the French lawmakers have well and fully lost all grip on reality. more…
Louisiana Officials Backpedal on Photo Ban
New Orleans Times-Picayune: LHSAA rescinds block of photo sales. Calling the matter a misunderstanding, Louisiana High School Athletic Association Commissioner Tommy Henry on Tuesday rescinded a policy that sought to block newspapers from selling to the public photographs taken at state athletic championships. more…
Banning Pro Photographers from Basketball Game; Citizen Photographers Next?
New Orleans Times-Picayune: News photographers denied access to LHSAA’s girls state tournament. Several newspapers, including The Times-Picayune, were denied access to photograph the state girls high school basketball championships Monday night when they refused to sign a document limiting the right of newspapers to resell their photos to the public. more…
More Light on Lawmaking
OpenCongress “brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the story behind each bill” before the national legislature. Lots of intriguing ideas, and well worth a look. more…
Egypt Government’s War on Speech
Reuters: Egyptian blogger jailed for insulting Islam.
An Alexandria court sentenced an Egyptian blogger to four years in jail on Thursday for insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Abdel Karim Suleiman, a 22-year-old former law student who has been in custody since November, was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for his Internet writings. He was convicted in connection with eight articles he wrote since 2004. more…
Investigating Congressional Websites
The Sunlight Foundation’s Congressional Web Site Investigation Project is under way:
Though no law requires them to do so, members of Congress maintain official Web sites at taxpayer expense to provide their constituents and the general public with relevant information about their work in Washington on our behalf. more…
Wrapped in First Amendment, Protecting a Sleazebag
Slate’s Jack Shafer tries to unravel “The BALCO mess or travels in the gray areas of confidential source arrangement,” and writes of the San Francisco Chronicle reporters whose source for grand-jury minutes turned out to be a defense attorney: more…
British Big Brother to Police Online Commercial Speech?
Times of London: Fake bloggers soon to be ‘named and shamed’. Hotels, restaurants and online shops that post glowing reviews about themselves under false identities could face criminal prosecution under new rules that come into force next year. Businesses which write fake blog entries or create whole wesbites purporting to be from customers will fall foul of a European directive banning them from “falsely representing oneself as a consumer”. more…
Video Journalist Remains Jailed
SF Chronicle: Blogger jailed for defying grand jury sets record / He’s U.S. journalist imprisoned longest in contempt of court. Josh Wolf, a blogger who refused to give a videotape of a San Francisco anarchist protest to a federal grand jury, achieves an unwanted distinction today, when he becomes the longest-imprisoned journalist for contempt of court in U.S. history. more…
Apple’s Just Desserts a Big Win for Online Journalism
Mac News Network: Apple pays $700,000 for bloggers’ legal fees.
In total, Apple was ordered to pay nearly $700,000 — a small amount for a company that reported nearly $1 billion in profit in the December quarter, but a large moral victory for bloggers, journalists and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which helped defend against Apple’s subpoenas. more…
Plea Deal Keeps Reporters Out of Court
AP: Watada Agreement Means Journos Won’t Have to Testify in ‘Antiwar’ Case.
Watada’s attorney Eric Seitz agreed that two subpoenaed reporters will not have to testify. They are Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s Gregg Kakesako and freelance reporter Sarah Olson. “We will stipulate and agree to the testimony that the reporters would have otherwise provided and the accuracy to the statements that are attributed to my client,” said Seitz, of Honolulu.
Seitz said Watada’s action shields the journalists from the “heavy handedness of the government.” more…
Defending Journalism
A new site, Defend the Press, is taking up the case of Sarah Olson:
a journalist who published an exclusive interview with Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, the highest-ranking member of the military to refuse to deploy to Iraq. Now, the Army wants Olson to be their witness in the lieutenant’s upcoming court martial. The Army is trying to turn speaking to the press into a crime — and wants to have a reporter participate in the prosecution of political speech. more…
OUT-LAW.com: Texas court bans deep linking. A court in Dallas, Texas has found a website operator liable for copyright infringement because his site linked to an ‘audio webcast’ without permission. Observers have criticised the judge for failing to understand the internet. more…
Father of the Web: Neutrality Vital
We cannot afford to allow the new robber barons — the cable and phone giants that are bidding to own the broadband marketplace and decide which bits flow in what order and at what speed — to capture that kind of control. more…
Progress in Global Net Freedom
Rebecca MacKinnon: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Vodaphone display some cojones. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and others have been getting a lot of heat over the past year for colluding with human rights violations and state censorship in countries like China. Fortunately, three of those four companies have found the wherewithal to do more than just duck and cover. more…
Political Watchdogging
I’m in Cambridge for my monthly visit to the Berkman Center. Today features a Sunlight Foundation mini-conference where people who are interested in political transparency are comparing notes. (See also Ethan Zuckerman’s great notes; and there’s a Technorati BerkmanSunlight taglist.) more…
Talk Radio Station Loathing Free Speech
SF Chronicle: Owner of conservative radio station KSFO demands liberal critic quit using audio clips. Now, bloggers and media freedom advocates are concerned about the legal reaction from Disney/ABC-owned KSFO. Shortly before Christmas, an ABC lawyer demanded that Spocko remove audio clips from his blog on the grounds that Spocko’s posting of KSFO content was illegal. Digital freedom advocates counter that the clips constitute fair use and worry that critical voices could be silenced by corporations threatening legal action for violation of copyright law. more…
AT&T’s Phony Concessions Win Plaudits
Tom Evslin explains how the alleged “concessions” by AT&T to get approval of its BellSouth buyout are a sham: more…
2006
Legal Weirdness: Newspaper Owner Sues Journalist
Editor & Publisher reports that Wendy McCaw, the eccentric owner of the Santa Barbara (California) News-Press, isn’t just presiding over the meltdown of a newspaper. She’s suing a freelance journalist who wrote about her activities, claiming an American Journalism Review article was defamatory. more…
Glasnost in Newspaper-land: McClatchy buys Fresno Famous; GateHouse rolls Creative Commons over 96 newspapers
You can hear the ice breaking up from here. Global warming, or just relations between blogs and newspapers warming up? First, McClatchy has bought Fresno Famous, the community site founded and operated with great flair by Jarah Euston. more…
*Blogging in the Newsrooms
Well, it took only, what, seven years for blogging to catch on in newsrooms. Given the journalism industry’s hidebound ways, that’s not so bad. more…
Would-Be Next President Wants “Re-examination” of Free Speech
Gingrich is voicing what all too many Americans believe, that free speech is for themselves but not for others deemed sufficiently dangerous. There are limits — such as falsely shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater — but Gingrich’s remedy goes much further. more…
Major Court Decision Protects Online Speech
SF Chronicle: ISP not responsible for online libel, state’s top court rules. People who claim they were libeled on line can’t sue the Internet service providers that carried the messages, the California Supreme Court ruled today. The unanimous ruling reversed an October 2003 decision by a state appellate court in San Francisco that would have held carriers like Google and Yahoo to the same legal standard as newspapers and book publishers. They can be sued for the contents of a libelous message if they knew, or had reason to know, that the message was defamatory and failed to remove it. more…
Antitrust Alert
Peter Scheer, executive of the California First Amendment Coalition, asks, “What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?” more…
Names@Work: Senator Would Outlaw Anonymous Blogs. New proposed legislation (in Brazil) would make it a crime, punishable by four years in jail, to anonymously send email, join a chat forum, download content, or write a blog. more…
Election Day Law FAQ
The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society asked you for your questions about Election Day legal issues, and you responded. Below are some questions and answers, which will become a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) page, and we will be adding more soon. more…
Big Telco Launching News Team
As the cable and phone industries move closer to creating a broadband duopoly in America, the idea that they may be going into the news business is both great and scary. Great, because they’ll have resources beyond most other competitors, and could do some excellent work. Rosenblum’s record is sterling for innovation, and he’ll be making waves for sure with this project. more…
Low Power Radio, No License
Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have been slow on the uptake with low-power radio, and people are just going ahead to do it themselves. The evidence of any widespread interference is minimal, and this movement makes us wonder if it’ll turn into a virtually unstoppable force. more…
Department of Not Getting It
In an item on Poynter Online about the likely dismissal of a libel lawsuit against a website where a commenter posted allegedly libelous material, a staffer from the San Diego Union Tribune is quoted thusly: more…
Sanity to Prevail in Journalist’s Jailing?
AP: Freelancer jailed over video released. Freelance journalist Josh Wolf was released on bail today from a federal prison where he had been held since Aug. 1 after challenging a grand jury subpoena that demanded outtakes of videos he shot at a San Francisco protest. more…
Legal Support for Citizen Journalist
The California First Amendment Coalition has joined other supporters of journalism in filing a legal brief on behalf of Josh Wolf. He’s in jail for contempt of court, because he refused to hand over to the federal government out-takes of footage he shot at a street demonstration in San Francisco. more…
Future of Video Lies in Open Networks
The annual Aspen Institute Conference on Communications Policy starts today, and I’m participating. The basic mission is to take note of huge changes in the way video will move around the world in coming years, and then consider how to create “a regulatory regime appropriate to the new world of video.” more…
New Collaboration: Cyberlaw and Citizen Media
Also posted at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society: If citizen journalism is to become a valuable part of the media ecosystem, citizen journalists will need help in navigating increasingly choppy legal waters — and the legal community will need better information on what’s happening in the citizen media arena as well. more…
Tom Evslin, Net Neutrality, Berkman Conversation
This spring, Harvard and Oxford law professor (and Berkman Center colleague) Jonathan Zittrain published “The Generative Internet,” a paper that looks at the future of general-purpose technology (such as PCs). more…
Private Communications: One More Reason Why Reporters Need to Be More Tech Savvy
When I was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, I published for several years at the bottom of my column something called a “PGP Fingerprint.” This was a way of letting people who understood a little bit about encryption, the scrambling of information to keep it away from prying eyes, a way to contact me in a way that would improve the security of the communications. more…
Criminalizing Photography
The people who would rule our lives in the most minute ways are now trying to stop picture-taking in public places. They are the ones who should be stopped. more…
Indian Government in the Censorship Business, Too?
BoingBoing has collected a number of links that strongly suggest India’s government, in the wake of last week’s bombings, is on a broad Internet censorship campaign. It’s bad enough to watch China do this kind of thing, but India is supposed to be a democracy. more…
Good News for Citizen Journalists
CNET: Apple abandons effort to unmask leaker. The case, filed in the superior court of Santa Clara County, drew national attention not only because it involved unreleased products–but also because it was one of the first to set the rules of how the rights of uncredentialed online journalists should be balanced against the rights of trade secret holders. By not appealing its loss, though, Apple has set a legal precedent that could embolden other journalists (and perhaps other leakers) in the future. more…
Film Maker and Blogger Freed in China
Reuters reports that Wu Hao, a Chinese film maker and blogger and now a U.S resident, has been freed after a months-long imprisonment in China. This case has been one of the clearest examples of the Chinese regime’s loathing of truly free speech, and his release is good news. more…
Proof that College Students Are Not Stupid
The entertainment industry’s belief that we should all be in a pay-per-view world runs contrary to common sense. Digital restrictions management is more than a speedbump; it is an outright barrier. more…
Google’s Deep Pockets to Fuel Antitrust Lawyers?
Good for Google. As Congress prepares to give the big telecom players — the phone and cable companies — the means with which to turn the Net into their own walled gardens, we’ll need the deep-pocketed companies like Google to challenge them. more…
Brainstorm Begins
It turns out that Fortune’s Brainstorm 2006 conference is on the record. Also, it turns out, my former Knight Ridder colleague Oliver Ryan, who’s now with Fortune, is blogging with his colleagues. more…
The First Amendment is for Everyone
The National Review, like its pals in the Bush administration, is in a froth over the New York Times’ valiant reporting on administration’s secretive spying on everyone and everything. Now, clueless on what it means to enjoy free-speech rights in our republic, the NR huffs and puffs: more…
Wall Street Journal: Flag-Burning Debate Reclaims Spotlight. Polls tend to show that the flag issue is relatively low among voter priorities. Some voters who favor the amendment feel strongly about it, and the issue could make a difference in tight races, particularly in conservative-leaning states. more…
Telecom Propaganda
The phone companies are behind a slew of anti-network neutrality TV ads I saw in Washington the other evening. It was unfortunate that their commercials, aimed at Congress and staffs on Capitol Hill, are designed not to enlighten but rather to obfuscate. more…
AP: Fines to Rise for Indecency in Broadcasts. Congress gave notice to broadcasters on Wednesday that they would pay dearly for showing material like Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction,” passing legislation that would multiply indecency fines 10 times.more…
Vital U.S. House Vote Today on Net Neutrality
The U.S. House of Representatives is voting today on amendments to a new telecom law. One in particular, supported by Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Anna Eshoo of California among others, is vital in keeping the Net open to innovation from the edges. more…
Surveillance of Everything You Do
NY Times: Internet firms are asked to keep search records. Justice Dept. tells executives it may need data to counter terrorism and child porn. more…
Yahoo’s Continuing Deliberate Blindness
Wall Street Journal: Yahoo Defends China Cooperation. Yahoo’s Terry Semel faced tough questions from Walt Mossberg — and the audience — over the search company’s decision to comply with requests for user data from the Chinese government, which has used the information to pursue dissidents. more…
Apple Loses a Round on Secrecy Versus Journalism
San Jose Mercury News: Apple loses appeals court battle over leaked information. Applying strong First Amendment protections to bloggers and Web site operators, a San Jose-based appeals court today rejected Apple Computer’s bid for the identities of individuals who leaked confidential information on one of its new products. more…
Ad Agency Drops Suit Against Maine Blogger
Lance Dutson, a Maine blogger who has gone after a state tourism agency and its advertising contractor, found himself at the wrong end of a legal gun barrel when the contractor, an ad agency, filed a libel suit that looked from here like raw intimidation. more…
Maine Blogger Legal Trouble is Message
Lance Dutson (Maine Web Report): State Contractor Files Federal Lawsuit Against Me. So here I am, one man against the state and its contractors, put in the position of shutting up or being pounded by their deep pockets and a wild misconception of what the court system is supposed to be used for. One person who has exposed a cavalcade of incompetence and who has to choose to allow it, or face an onslaught of personal attack and legal action. more…
Saving the Net from the Real Predators
The Save the Internet coalition is trying to prevent a hijacking of our future. The robber barons of the Information Age — the phone and cable giants — are trying to wrest control of this absolutely essential infrastructure away from the edges of the networks, and put that control back in the center where they can tell us what to do and how. more…
Tibet ‘Disappeared’ From Google Earth?
Scot Hacker: Where’s Tibet? When we think about Google being in bed with the Chinese government and blocking access to information about Tibet, we know it’s bad, but we also assume the censorship applies only to Google users in China. Here we have an example of Google’s complicity affecting searches conducted from anywhere in the world. more…
Challenging the Federal Censorship Commission
NY Times: TV Networks Sue to Challenge F.C.C.’s Indecency Penalties. With no allies among either the Democrats or the Republicans on the Federal Communications Commission nor any significant ones in Congress, the four broadcast networks, joined by the Hearst-Argyle Television group of stations, embarked late last week on a low-risk strategy of turning to the courts. more…
Smithsonian’s Ill-Advised Deal with Showtime
The Smithsonian Institution is a museum complex that has been called our national attic, and it is one of the great treasures of American history and life. But in an outrageous deal with a private media company, the Smithsonian has moved down a path that would privatize a vital part of our national cultural commons. more…
Legislation Designed to Help Stifle Open Internet
Washington Post: Internet Firms Want FCC to Enforce Net Neutrality. Internet companies yesterday criticized legislation that would give the Federal Communications Commission only limited ability to stop phone and cable companies from blocking access to Web sites, saying the proposal would endanger the open nature of the Web. more…
NY Times: TV Stations Fined Over CBS Show Deemed to Be Indecent. The Federal Communications Commission leveled a record $3.6 million fine yesterday against 111 television stations that broadcast an episode of “Without a Trace” in December 2004, with the agency saying the CBS show suggested that its teenage characters were participating in a sexual orgy. more…
Reassembling Ma Bell’s Dominance, Without the Regulation
AP: Reports: AT&T, BellSouth near$65B deal. AT&T is nearing a deal to acquire BellSouth Corp. for $65 billion, according to reports published Sunday. The companies were expected to announce the terms of the deal as soon as Monday, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Both papers cited unidentified sources, due to the sensitivity of the negotiations. more…
Even Bigots Deserve Free Speech
The political left has made a mistake by not standing up for the free-speech rights of even such disgusting people as Holocaust denier David Irving. We can’t have free speech only for the people we agree with, because then it’s not the genuine article. more…
Your Rights, Being Bartered Away in Global Forum
James Love: A UN/WIPO Plan to Regulate Distribution of Information on the Internet. But what the broadcasters and the webcasters really want has nothing to do with protecting copyrighted works. They want to “own” the content of what they transmit, even when they are not the creative party, and even if they can’t acquire such rights from the copyright owner (if any). more…
Our Internet, Up for Grabs
The modest hyperbole in this commentary should not distract you from its essential truth: The cable and phone companies are truly out to turn the Net into their own collection of walled gardens. They have purchased a compliant Congress, and the more centralized the Net becomes, the easier it will be for the Bush administration’s domestic spies and other controlling types to keep tabs on everything we do. more…
Citizen Video Takes on Bush Domestic Spying
It’s a big download — they should use BitTorrent — but it’s worth a look: “No-Spy Video” is a clever and trenchant look at President Bush’s notion that warrantless spying on American citizens is a natural right of government. more…
Debating a Shield Law for Journalists
I’m at the American Bar Association’s Communications Law conference, at a mock Senate hearing about the so-called “Free Flow of Information Act,” a bill that went before Congress last year but went nowhere. Some of the people who testified, including former NY Times reporter Judith Miller, is “testifying” before one former senator, Slade Gorton, and Bush’s former solicitor general, Theodore Olson, and several other folks. more…
Bloggers, Fantasy League Gamers and Law
Later this morning I’ll be on a panel at the American Bar Association’s Communications Law conference. The title of the panel: “Who Owns The News? Attempts by sports organizations and entertainers to control coverage.” It refers to the tendency of these industries to lock down journalism on what they do, at all levels — essentially to control what people can say about the performances, images and even statistics. more…
A DRM Lesson for Spielberg
The Guardian has a front-page story, “Spielberg loses out at the push of a button,” about problems British critics are having when they try to view a limited-edition DVD of his new movie, Munich, for an awards contest: more…
A Dangerous Question
Reporters Without Borders, an organization that wants to protect and encourage free speech around the world, asks a big question: “Do Internet companies need to be regulated to ensure they respect free expression?” more…
Phone and Cable Companies: Dangerous to Citizen Media
CNN: Report: Phone companies want Web providers to pay. Large phone companies are seeking payments from Internet companies for high-quality delivery of music, movies and other content that will move over their telecommunications networks, according to a published report. more…
Microsoft’s Continuing China Blog Censorship
Rebecca MacKinnon, in a detailed posting about Microsoft’s latest adventures in censoring Chinese bloggers, writes:
Microsoft’s MSN Spaces continues to censor its Chinese language blogs, and has become more aggressive and thorough at censorship since I first checked out MSN’s censorship system last summer. more…
2005
A Win for Fair Use, Consumer RightsNow the entertainment cartel will have to get its wishes the old-fashioned way. It will have to attempt to verbally bludgeon or buy enough members of Congress to get an actual law passed, as opposed to the end run it pulled with its friends at the Federal Communications Commission, which enacted a rule giving the cartel what it wanted.
more…
Why Current Intellectual Property Law is So Wrong-Headed
This important essay asks, and begins to answer, the key question of why IP law has gone so wrong. more…
Apple’s War on Journalism, Continued
A bunch of bloggers joined an amicus brief in the Apple-versus-bloggers situation, which asks the court to adopt “a functional test for the newsgatherers’ privilege that does not discriminate between reporters, regardless of the medium in which they publish” as well as creating a “a test that will not impede journalists’ use of the Internet to report news by limiting their constitutional protections when they publish there.” more…
Big Journalists Finally Take on Apple in Blog Case
They’ve been AWOL so far, but finally some Big Media companies are coming to the legal defense (Silicon Valley Watcher) of the Web publishers Apple is suing for reporting “trade secrets” in recent months. I suspect this is because the judge in the case dodged the question of whether the site owners were journalists in the first place. more…
He Don’t Need No Stinking First Amendment
Hollywood Reporter: Sensenbrenner to cable execs: Indecency is criminal act. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner III, R-Wis., told cable industry executives attending the National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. conference here on Monday that criminal prosecution would be a more efficient way to enforce the indecency regulations. more…
Turning Sunshine into Fog
The whole point of open-records and sunshine laws is to conduct the public’s business in the light of day. But governments are always trying to shield their doings from the people who pay the bills. more…
Apple’s “Trade Secrets”
Reporting on business, if this bad ruling is upheld on appeal, will be a great deal harder in the future. Companies will simply slap “trade secret” protection on everything they do, and any reporter who gets a scoop on anything the company doesn’t want the public to know about will be under a legal threat. more…
Note to Business Week: Bloggers Aren’t Immune from Libel Law
In an otherwise constructive look at Apple’s attack on freedom of the press, Business Week Online says:
However, blogs have also fast gained a reputation for inaccuracy that threatens to erode their writers’ claim to the title of journalist. Just as these sites have been touted as the new pillars of American democracy for their ability to ensure that any literate person can publish, they have also proven to be swirling rumor mills. In traditional media, the same legal rights that allow a journalist to protect sources also hold such writers accountable to report the truth. If journalists stray from what’s true, they can be charged with libel.more…
The Gathering Storms Over Speech
Apple Computer’s disgusting attack on three online journalism sites, in a witch hunt to find out who (if anyone) inside the company leaked information about allegedly upcoming products, has taken a nasty turn. Too bad it’s not surprising — and journalists of all kinds should be paying attention. more…
Thought Police in Malaysia — and America
The estimable Jeff Ooi, a blogger in Malaysia who is doing great things for free speech, has been questioned by the authorities about his blog, according to GlobalVoices, which cites this Malaysiakini item. more…
Newspaper Objects to Fair Use
Denseness in the copyright sphere is too common a phenomenon, but it’s bizarre and not a little scary when the offender is a newspaper. After all, newspapers rely in part on the notion of “fair use” — using short quotes from others’ work — to create their daily report. more…
Will Congress Ban Government Payoffs of Journalists?
Of course, when Democrats introduced — and got many, many co-sponsors for — legislation mandating verifiable electronic voting, they couldn’t get serious Republican support even for that. more…
Grassroots Journalism and the Law
I’m happy to report that the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society has named me as a Fellow for the upcoming year. The center has been doing important work in understanding how law intersects with the online world, and I hope to spend some serious time in the next few months on key issues. more…
Free Speech Belongs to Us All
In a thought-provoking blog posting, Mitch Ratcliffe discusses the ever-relevant topic of journalists and their conflicts of interest. But he goes off the rails briefly when he says: “Bloggers simply haven’t had enough time to fuck up as royally as those who have been granted First Amendment protection for a couple centuries.” more…
Dave Winer Defends Bill Gates, Sort Of
Dave Winer asks some questions in the wake of my posting about Bill Gates’ recent interview, in which Gates called people who want balance in intellectual property laws “communists.” (Dave calls them “neo-communists who want musicians to give their work away,” so if I understand him correctly he agrees with Gates on this, even though that language largely misrepresents the beliefs of people who are trying to restore copyright fairness.) more…
Iran Government Censors Blogs
Hoder reports:
Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling.
They have also ordered to filter Orkut, Yahoo Personals and some other popular dating and social networking websites. more…
More Anti-Camera Absurdity
New York City is about to ban “unauthorized” use of cameras in the subways…more…
Truth and Bill Gates
CNet’s interview with Bill Gates has any number of howlers, but a couple of them stand out. more…
CNet: Apple suit foreshadows coming products. Apple on Tuesday sued the publisher of Mac enthusiast site Think Secret and other unnamed individuals, alleging that recent postings on the site contain Apple trade secrets, according to court documents seen by CNET News.com. The suit, filed Tuesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, Calif., aims to identify who is leaking the information and to get an injunction preventing further release of trade secrets. However, in filing the suit, Apple identifies specific articles that contain trade secrets, indicating that at least parts of those reports are on the mark. more…
Media Cluelessness at Wal-Mart
In a story about a disturbed man who walked nude outside a shopping mall, the Herald-Mail of Hagerstown, Maryland, describes its employee’s confrontation with a Wal-Mart employee. The Wal-Mart security man demanded that the newspaper man turn over his camera, which he correctly refused to do. more…