January 23rd, 2012
A leaked image published by TechnoBuffalo.
A state court in Illinois has ruled that gadget blog TechnoBuffalo is not covered by the Illinois shield law. Chris Healy of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reports on the decision.
In August of last year, TechnoBuffalo published photos of an instruction manual for a yet-to-hit-stores Motorola Droid smartphone. The photos came to the blog by way of an “anonymous tipster.”
The Johns-Bryne Company, the printers hired to reproduce the material for Motorola, sued the blog to learn the identity of the leak, and the blog claimed the protection of Illinois’s reporter’s privilege law. The court, however, read the statute in a restrictive way, saying that TechnoBuffalo does not qualify as a “news medium” and its bloggers are not “reporters,” thus making the law inapplicable.
TechnoBuffalo has asked the court to reconsider and has vowed to appeal.
Tags: illinois, Motorola, rcfp, TechnoBuffalo
Posted in images, lawsuits against bloggers, shield laws | No Comments »
January 19th, 2012
Christine Neylon O’Brien, Professor of Business Law at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, has published The First Facebook Firing Case Under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act: Exploring the Limits of Labor Law Protection for Concerted Communication on Social Media in the Suffolk University Law Review (vol. 45, pp. 29-66, December 2011). Here’s the abstract:
The emergence of social media, from Facebook to Myspace and Linkedin to Twitter – much like the earlier evolution of email, IM and web 2.0 – have changed communications, expanding the virtual horizons for social networking and business promotion on these popular communications platforms. Smartphones, and other data interfaces including iPads and eReaders, and even internet hotspots in motor vehicles, have encouraged the blurring of work and personal time such that people are tethered to their devices, checking their work and personal messages wherever they are and whatever else they are doing.
In the first case of its kind, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint against an employer, American Medical Response of Connecticut (AMR), for the suspension and firing of an employee who posted negative comments about her supervisor on her personal password-protected Facebook page. The NLRB alleged the employer retaliated against the terminated employee for her Facebook postings and for requesting a union representative at an investigatory interview that led to her discipline, thus violating her Weingarten right. Most importantly, the NLRB maintained that the employer’s social media policy was overbroad because its rules on blogging and internet posting, standards of conduct relating to discussing co-workers and superiors, and solicitation and distribution, interfered with employees’ rights to engage in concerted activities protected by section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The AMR case and the NLRB’s ongoing interest in employer social media policies has signaled that the agency will prosecute companies whose policies interfere with employee communications concerning wages, hours, and working conditions, and other matters for mutual aid or protection on social media sites. Employers should review their policies governing employee communications, including the use of email and social media during non-work time, to ensure compliance with the NLRA.
Tags: Boston College, Christine Neylon O'Brien, Suffolk University
Posted in employment, microblogging, scholarship | No Comments »
January 19th, 2012
Guess what I did today! I was on the radio talking about SOPA! Not an internet radio station, but a real stick-in-the-ground over-the-airwaves AM radio station: KNOX 1310 Grand Forks, a talk program hosted by Brian Michaels and Denny Johnson.
Has the MPAA and RIAA finally overreached when a law professor is on a midday radio show talking about INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY? Yup, I think so.
Thanks to the blackout against SOPA, and mostly Wikipedia’s part in it, Copyright’s suddenly become a mainstream political issue. The blackout against SOPA was even on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams last night! How about that?
Tags: SOPA
Posted in copyright, intellectual property, legislation and regulation | No Comments »
January 18th, 2012
Today, Congress is considering passage of SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act – legislation that would destroy the free architecture of the internet and initiate censorship.
I’m blacking out Blog Law Blog for the day to join with many others in showing symbolically what the internet could look like if this bill becomes law.
If you are in the U.S., please take a moment to contact your representative to register your opposition.
Tags: SOPA
Posted in censorship, copyright, intellectual property, legislation and regulation | No Comments »
January 17th, 2012
Wikipedia is planning to blackout its whole site tomorrow as a protest to SOPA and PIPA – those internet censorship-in-the-name-of-fighting-intellectual-property-piracy bills on Capitol Hill. I know other websites are planning or contemplating the same.
I think I’ll do the same here on Blog Law Blog. I just have to figure out how to do it in terms of the code on the back end. If you are planning to join in, read up on how to do it the right way so you stay friendly to search engines.
Tags: SOPA
Posted in censorship, copyright, freedom of expression, intellectual property, legislation and regulation, upcoming | No Comments »
January 16th, 2012
The White House has responded to online petitioning done by opponents of SOPA. In a blog post, IP czar Victoria Espinel, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra, and national cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt wrote:
While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.
That’s very good to hear.
Tags: obama, SOPA, white house
Posted in copyright, First Amendment, freedom of expression, intellectual property, legislation and regulation | No Comments »
January 11th, 2012
New trends in how juries are being instructed about social media have been a recurrent topic on this blog. I thought it might be interesting to let you see that those Jury instructions actually look like in the flesh.
These particular jury instructions come from a Missouri automobile-collision negligence case, Molina v. Harlan. The full instructions comprise 1641 words. (I’ve put the whole set of instructions in the Blog Law Blog library.) The portion concerning juror research or communication about the case is 335 words (so, it’s a little more than a fifth of the whole thing).
One thing that strikes me as kind of funny, right off the bat, is that even as the instructions are an attempt to stay in step with the times, they show an old-school haplessness with punctuation and capitalization. Not only do they capitalize “Internet,” but they lowercase and place in quotes “‘facebook’,” “‘myspace’,” and “‘twitter’.”
What’s up with that? Does the court think that “facebook” is some kind of slang that the young kids are using? It’s very odd.
And, of course, another sign of out-of-touchness is any reference at all to Myspace.
(8) PROHIBITION OF JUROR RESEARCH OR COMMUNICATION ABOUT THIS CASE
Your deliberations and verdict must be based only on the evidence and information presented to you in the proceedings in this courtroom. Rules of evidence and procedure have developed over many years to make sure that all parties in all cases are treated fairly and in the same way and to make sure that all jurors make a decision in this case based only on evidence allowed under those rules and which you hear or see in this courtroom. It would be unfair to the parties to have any juror influenced by information that has not been allowed into evidence in accordance with those rules of evidence and procedure, or to have a juror influenced through the opinion of someone who has not been sworn as a juror in this case and heard evidence properly presented here.
Therefore, you must not conduct your own research or investigation into any issues in this case. You must not visit the scene of any of the incidents described in this case. You must not conduct any independent research or obtain any information of any type by reference to any person, textbooks, dictionaries, magazines, the use of the Internet, or any other means about any issues in this case, or any witnesses, parties, lawyers, medical or scientific terminology, or evidence that is in any way involved in this trial. You are not permitted to communicate, use a cell phone, record, photograph, video, e-mail, blog, tweet, text, or post anything about this trial or your thoughts or opinions about any issue in this case to any other person or to the Internet, “facebook”, “myspace”, “twitter”, or any other personal or public web site during the course of this trial or at any time before the formal acceptance of your verdict by me at the end of the case.
If any of you break these rules, it may result in a miscarriage of justice and a new trial may be required.
Tags: jury instructions, missouri
Posted in blogs as evidence or authority, judges, jurors and juries | No Comments »
January 10th, 2012
Eugene Volokh (Photo: Jeff Barnett-Winsby / UCLA)
Arthur Bright at Citizen Media Law Project blog has the latest on Obsidian Finance v. Cox in Oregon: Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law has stepped in to work on an appeal of the $2.5 million libel judgment against blogger Crystal Cox, which was rendered by a federal court last month.
Critical is whether First Amendment protections established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974) will apply to Cox, or whether, as a blogger, she’s not a member of the “media.”
A post last month by Eric P. Robinson explores both the Gertz issue and the court’s ruling on the application of the Oregon shield law.
Tags: Arthur Bright, cmlp, Crystal Cox, Eric P. Robinson, Eugene Volokh, Obsidian Finance, Oregon
Posted in analogy/relation to paper press, defamation, First Amendment, lawsuits against bloggers, lawyering, press freedom, shield laws | No Comments »
January 9th, 2012
As Blog Law Blog continues it’s look back at 2011, I’d like to note a very good wrap-up article over at PBS’s MediaShift:
The article covers the principal stories in media law over the past year, and it does a nice job of hitting the important topics, but the legal analysis isn’t always right on. I’ll just look at one example – what the article lists as the number-one topic in media law over 2011: “‘Wiretapping’ the Police.”
“Wiretapping” sounds like it should involve a man in a headset sitting in a van listening in on your telephone calls. But the legal definition is often far broader — as many journalists and ordinary citizens found out after being charged with a felony for simply filming a few seconds of police activity in public.
It’s true that laws against making surreptitious audio recordings do go well beyond classic “wiretapping,” but I’m aware of no law that purports to make criminal “filming” police activity taking place in public. The an Illinois statute mentioned in the article prohibits recording audio of any conversation without the consent of all persons speaking. That was used against someone with a video camera that was also capturing sound, but the case was ultimately dropped, and it’s not clear that any recent prosecutions have happened under similar circumstances.
In general, however, the problem is not laws themselves – the problem is police arresting people for conduct that does not violate any law.
For instance, when attorney Simon Glik used his cell phone to record Boston Police officers arresting a homeless man in a public park, the officers arrested Glik under a law (Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 272, § 99) that prohibits “secretly” recording wire or oral communications. Glik wasn’t being secret. He was recording openly. His conduct didn’t violate the law. The problem there was that police were arresting Glik for doing something that wasn’t against the law. Indeed, the charges were soon dismissed. (Post-dismissal, Glik filed a lawsuit that successfully established constitutional rights to make such recordings as well.)
Another instance of this coming up – not mentioned in the PBS article – was the Baltimore Police’s action against Christopher Sharp, who recorded the arrest and apparent abuse of a woman at the Preakness Stakes. The problem there was not that Maryland law prohibited Sharp’s conduct – it didn’t. The problem was that the police seized Sharp’s cellphone on the spot and deleted a bunch of videos (including personal ones as well as the one of the police). At the time, one police officer made the completely absurd claim that it is “illegal to record anybody’s voice or anything else in the state of Maryland.” But, as I explained, that’s not the law.
That’s why the article kind of misses the point when it says:
The importance of the wiretapping cases cannot be overstated. If the government is permitted to prosecute citizens for collecting and disseminating accurate information about acts of official misconduct, specifically when those acts occur in a public place, both citizen and professional journalism — and by extension the public at large — will suffer greatly.
The problem is not the prosecutions. The prosecutions almost never happen. The problem is the police acting lawlessly on the scene.
Tags: 2011, MediaShift, PBS, review, year
Posted in about this blog, criminal law, First Amendment, freedom of expression, local government, police, press freedom | No Comments »
January 6th, 2012
Professor Eric Goldman has been keeping a list of cases in which a person’s social media has been used as evidence against them, or, as he puts it, when litigants say “one thing in court and another when talking to their friends online.”
In the latest case, a workers comp claimant, who says he is in excruciating pain after a refrigerator fell on him, put pictures on Facebook and MySpace that show him drinking and partying. To try to get the photos excluded from evidence, the claimant attempted to seize the moral high ground, arguing that the use of the pictures in litigation was “a disgrace to the dignity of the workers’ compensation proceedings and the legal system.”
Nice try.
The court allowed the evidence.
Confronted with this case, Goldman offers the following:
Now that Facebook can do facial recognition, it should next develop a tool to automatically detect photos depicting alcoholic drinks and give users a way to automatically opt-out of those photos!
Goldman’s quite a guy, huh? Instead of trying to grab some quick cash by applying for a software/business-method patent on this, he’s offered it up as a public service. Someone note this down so that Goldman’s post can be used as prior art to block patent-hungry Facebook if and when they apply for a patent on “Method of Shielding Workers Comp Claimants from Impeaching Photos of Boozing”.
Here’s the full list of social-media-evidence-gotcha cases Professor Goldman has collected:
Tags: Eric Goldman, patents
Posted in blogs as evidence or authority, courts, images, intellectual property | Comments Off
January 5th, 2012
Stanford University Graduate School of Business (Photo: EEJ)
Attempting to extract advertising revenue from your blog introduces a myriad of potential legal problems. I’ve said before, I think it’s not worth the hassle for the tiny bits of coin you might eek out. Now here comes an interesting paper form Monic Sun, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Feng Zhu, Assistant Professor of Strategy, Management and Organization from the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. The working paper, posted to SSRN, is Ad Revenue and Content Commercialization: Evidence from Blogs.
Investigating a new ad-revenue-sharing program introduced to a Chinese blogging platform, Sun and Zhu conclude that the availabilty of ad revenues increased the quality of participating bloggers’ posts and caused an overall shift toward “popular” topics, including primarily the stock market, celebrities, and “salacious content.”
What does that say about the desirability or perniciousness of blog ads? Good question. And here’s another: To what extent might these results be affected by the repression of political speech in China? After all, political speech is a huge driver of blogging in the rest of the world.
Here’s the abstract:
Many scholars argue that content providers, when incentivized by ad revenue, are more likely to tailor their content to attract “eyeballs,” and as a result, popular content may be excessively supplied. We empirically test this prediction by taking advantage of the launch of an ad-revenue-sharing program initiated by a major Chinese portal site in September 2007. Participating bloggers allow the site to run ads on their blogs and receive 50% of the revenue generated by these ads. After analyzing 4.4 million blog posts, we find that, relative to nonparticipants, popular content increases by about 13 percentage points on participants’ blogs after the program takes effect. This increase can be partially attributed to topics shifting toward three domains: the stock market, salacious content, and celebrities. We also find evidence that, relative to nonparticipants, participants’ content quality increases after the program takes effect.
Tags: advertising, Feng Zhu, Monic Sun
Posted in FTC / advertising law, scholarship | Comments Off
January 4th, 2012
An article by Erika Fry in the Columbia Journalism Review investigates an intriguing question arising out of the police action against people reporting on the occupy protests in New York. With bloggers and other non-traditional reporters seeking to avoid being swept up by the New York Police Department, Fry asks: Who’s A Journalist?
The article’s a great read, and it gets at one of the essential questions of blog law – to what extent are bloggers entitled to be treated by the police and the government like traditional journalists?
The particular object of Fry’s scrutiny is the NYPD’s system for issuing press credentials to reporters. The credentials help in official and unofficial ways, getting reporters access to press conferences and allowing them to avoid hassles at crime scenes and to avoid roundups of crowds. The way the NYPD doles out press credentials has been hotly criticized. But for bloggers, things are, at least, better than they used to be. Fry writes:
Yet this system, backlog and all, is roundly considered by journalists and civil liberty types to be an improvement over the NYPD’s press credentialing process that was in place until 2010, and was notorious for being opaque and inaccessible to bloggers and journalists from nontraditional media organizations—so much so that three men filed a lawsuit against the NYPD for unfairly denying them credentials in 2008. As Gothamist reported at the time, the reforms to the system in 2010 were intended to “help the Police Department modernize the City’s credentialing system to reflect changes to the media industry and, for the first time, expressly incorporate online-only media such as blogs.”
Tags: Occupy
Posted in analogy/relation to paper press, credentials / press access, New York, police | Comments Off
January 2nd, 2012
Unlike a lot of tawdry, pandering, cut-rate journalistic operations out there (Time, CNN, etc.) who claim to review 2011 before it’s over yet, here at Blog Law Blog, your faithful blogger waited until it was all over before claiming to look back at it.
So now it’s time. What characterized 2011 in blog law?
First up: Bad legislating. This was a year when legislatures engaged in all kinds of nonsense that, at best, was dopey, and, at worst, was potentially disastrous.
The California legislature outdid itself this year. First there was the absurd new statute threatening jurors with jail time if they tweet, blog, or otherwise use the internet to communicate about their trial. The law’s not inane because I have an affection for tweeting jurors. It’s inane because, when you look at it closely, it’s inane:
Could the California legislature have felt egged on by reading my withering critique? Well, they urned around and did something even worse with their Reader Privacy Act. Some laws I just disagree with. But the California Reader Privacy Act actually makes no sense. Here’s an actually quote from me about this law:
That’s P.O. Box Crazy Crazy Crazy, Crazytown Station, Crazy Valley Acres, California 95814.
For a more in-depth explanation:
Now, the worst legislation of 2011 was a set of related measure working their way through the U.S. Congress: the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives. Now this stuff hasn’t become law yet – it’s still a bill (sittin’ there on Capitol Hill). But it’s really bad. The House Judiciary Committee will be taking SOPA back up this month. Let’s hope 2012 is a better year for legislation than 2011 was.
Tags: California Reader Privacy Act, review, SOPA
Posted in about this blog, California | Comments Off
December 30th, 2011
Oregon plastic surgeon Jerry Darm (Image: Darm, via YouTube)
Blogger Tiffany Craig (Criminally Vulgar, @tcraighenry) has reported that the lawsuit between her and plastic surgeon Jerry Darm has been settled.
This happened back in October, but you’re just now finding out about it on Blog Law Blog, where, with paywall-less blogging, you get what you pay for.
Darm sued for defamation, but then dismissed the suit. It looks like Darm just bailed after he realized that all that was likely to happen was that he would lose and get stuck with legal fees for both sides, thanks to Oregon’s anti-SLAPP law. The complained-of tweet and blog post are staying up.
The suit appears to have arisen out of this blog post, in which Craig embedded a YouTube video, since removed, of an uploaded Dr. Darm television commercial. Underneath, Craig wrote:
Seen that around? Sure you have. If you watch television in Portland Dr Darm is ubiquitous. Especially on those local channels that show endless reruns of Two and a Half Men. He wants to fix you up good and spend thousands on cosmetic procedures that will get funneled straight into his Lake Oswego home.
What he should have added with his Results May Vary disclaimer is Dr. Darm Handed Over His Medical License Due To Disciplinary Action. …
EFFECTIVE 10/18/01 RECEIVED A LETTER OF REPRIMAND FROM OREGON, REQUIRED TO HAVE A CHAPERONE WHEN EXAMINING FEMALE ADULTS, AND ADDITIONAL CONTINUING MEDICAL EDUCATION COURSES. EFFECTIVE 01/08/09 STIPULATED ORDER OF 10/18/01 IS TERMINATED.
That’s right, he was censured by the state because he was examining female patients without a chaperone. If that’s not bad enough? Apparently needed just a teensy bit more education about how to respect the boundaries of his patients.
Oh and California just decided that he shouldn’t be licensed at all. If he tries to get licensed in California, he has to reapply.
And maybe you’re thinking, “so what if he examined a female patient without a chaperone? How is that a big deal.” You should really read the judgement which says:
“Licensee examined Patient A on August 3, 2000 and September 21, 2000 to evaluate the treatment results. Patient A repeatedly expressed concern about some “spider” veins on her legs, but that she could not pay for additional treatment. Licensee informed Patient A that he would provide her with free treatment at his clinic closing time. On or about November 16, 2000 at about 9:30 PM, Licensee used a laser to treat Patient A’s condition on her legs. At the conclusion of the treatment, as she was reclined on her back, Licensee leaned over Patient A and made intimate physical contact with her and inferred that would be his payment.”
That’s right, he tried to get a woman to sleep with him in exchange for cosmetic surgery.
I’m don’t think Results May Vary is quite enough to warn people off being treated by Dr. Darm.
Assuming the quotes are accurate, how could this be defamatory?
A report on the settlement by Alex Zielinski in the alternative weekly newspaper, the Portland Mercury, implies it was this:
Craig … didn’t note that Darm’s license is now renewed in Oregon.
So what? If the reasonable implication of Craig’s post was that Darm wasn’t licensed in Oregon, then, true, that could be actionable. But when I read Craig’s post, I certainly do not come away with the idea that Darm is unlicensed in Oregon. Quite the opposite. Craig’s post seems to imply that he still is licensed in Oregon.
A better candidate for the allegedly actionable content is this:
That’s right, he tried to get a woman to sleep with him in exchange for cosmetic surgery.
Indeed, the quoted material Craig uses does not support the literal truth of that statement. Making “intimate physical contact” with a patient and “inferr[ing] that would be his payment” does not literally mean that Darm tried to get the patient to sleep with him. But American defamation law is tolerant of this kind of poetic license. An instructive case on this point is another litigation I blogged about out of the District of Oregon in 2011: Obsidian Finance Group v. Cox. (What is up with the onslaught of Oregon defamation-by-blog cases?) According to heritage Portland newspaper The Oregonian the papers filed by Craig’s attrorney, Linda Williams, argued that “the gist” of the blog post was true and that the statements, in context, were opinions based on verifiable facts.
More:
Tags: Jerry Darm, Oregon, Portland
Posted in defamation, lawsuits against bloggers, microblogging, settlements, SLAPP / anti-SLAPP | Comments Off
December 29th, 2011
In Monday’s post, I noted that Dutch M.P. Marietje Schaake linked America’s proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) with China’s censorship of political expression (a point also picked up by Techdirt’s Glyn Moody.)
So, is it really fair to equate shutting off internet access because of claims of intellectual-property infringement with shutting off internet access because of unapproved political expression? Yes it is. Here’s why.
It’s what I call Newton’s Third Law of Intellectual Property. This is actually my thing, not Isaac Newton’s. But it is analogous to Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
In physics, Newton’s famous Third Law is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
My law, is that for every intellectual property entitlement, there is an equal and opposite reduction in freedom.
So, if someone has a trademark entitlement with regard to a certain word or phrase, the extent of that right is exactly coextensive with the public’s lost ability to legally use that word or phrase. Same for copyright: A copyright over a musical melody means a loss of freedom of everyone else to play that melody.
I don’t mean for Newton’s Third Law of IP to impugn all intellectual property. Just because something reduces freedom doesn’t mean it’s unjustified. But it does mean that there is an inescapable tradeoff. When one person gains an IP right, everyone else loses a freedom. Perhaps the loss of freedom is worth it for the good that the IP entitlement does, such as encouraging innovation. But it is intellectually dishonest to argue or imply that intellectual property entitlements don’t come without a surrender of some amount of liberty.
Image: NASA
Tags: Glyn Moody, Marietje Schaake, SOPA
Posted in copyright, freedom of expression, intellectual property | Comments Off
December 28th, 2011
From the front page of American Justice Associates' website
As a postscript to yesterday’s post about court-ordered free-speech lessons for Occupy L.A. protesters, let’s look at one more heaping spoonful of irony.
Jeffrey P. Hermes at CMLP blog pointed out that American Justice Associates, who has been tapped to run the course, bills itself on its website as “a supportive arm of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office since 1995.” Yet, as Hermes notes, the company is a private firm and not a branch of the government.
That’s pretty funny, because you imagine that one of the first things they will say in this free-speech class is that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression is not absolute. And that’s true. Of course, one of the hallowed examples of speech that’s not entitled to protection is false advertising. There’s federal and California state law that prohibits false statements in advertising. And saying your organization is an “arm” of the city attorney’s office, when it’s really a private contractor, sure seems false to me.
But I’m going to try to be thorough and fair before I accuse anyone of making false and misleading statements.
I’ll begin with the obvious: The word “arm,” when used in conjunction with an organization, is ordinarily understood to mean a branch of the organization.
Now, American Justice Associates could argue that you’ve got to look at the fact that they use the word “arm” in context with the word “supportive.” They claim to be “a supportive arm.” But then we have to ask, what the heck is a “supportive arm” anyway?
If “supportive arm” doesn’t mean a helpful branch of the government, then it’s oxymoronic. Arms don’t support. Okay, well, I guess arms are supportive for someone who is down on their hands and knees. So is that what American Justice Associates is saying about justice in Los Angeles? That it’s crawling on the floor? That’s pretty rough.
So, I have to conclude that “arm,” as American Justice Associates uses it, is false and misleading.
I think what they probably should revise it to is “crutch”: American Justice Associates – The Crutch of the LA City Attorney’s Office. That’s what they seem to mean when they put themselves out there as the solution to a justice system too overburdened to try defendants and put the guilty ones in jail.
Tags: American Justice Associates, Los Angeles
Posted in California, criminal law, First Amendment, freedom of expression, FTC / advertising law | Comments Off
December 27th, 2011
L.A. City Hall (Photo: EEJ)
Jeffrey P. Hermes at the Citizen Media Law Project Blog has spotted a small volcano of irony erupting from Los Angeles: The L.A. City Attorney’s Office has announced that it won’t press charges against Occupy L.A. protesters arrested on low-level misdemeanor offenses if they complete a free-speech course.
But freedom isn’t free: The lessons for the pre-trial diversion program will be supplied by a private-contractor, American Justice Associates, which will charge $355 per person for the course. Checks can be made out to “The One Percent, LLC.”
It’s a move Hermes calls “a dramatic, last-minute effort to win the prize for ‘Most Obnoxious Law Enforcement Tactic of the Year.’” Hmmm. Well put. As he explains:
Let’s reflect for a moment on this one, shall we? … This is, after all, the city that was on the wrong end of a $1.7 million verdict after police assaulted a journalist covering a rally in 2007, and attempted to control coverage of Occupy L.A. by excluding all media except a hand-picked pool of reporters. And let us not forget Special Order No. 11, which among other things directs the LAPD to file a “Suspicious Activity Report” about any photographer who takes pictures “with no apparent esthetic value.”
But there’s another side to this. As a Los Angeles Times article explains, the city wants to save on the expense of prosecuting the hundreds of people it’s rounded up. Fair enough. We all know how California is hurting for money. (Actually, in recent years the office has suffered a 25% budget reduction.)
Look, I think I’ve got an easy fix: Just require Occupy protesters to complete community service by teaching the class themselves, with LAPD higher-ups enrolled as students.
Tags: American Justice Associates, Citizen Media Law Project, Jeffery P. Hermes, Los Angeles, Occupy
Posted in California, courts, First Amendment, freedom of expression, imprisonment, police | Comments Off
December 26th, 2011
Earlier this month the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs hosted a conference called Freedom Online: Joint Action for Free Expression on the Internet. The conference was attended by more than 20 countries and NGOs, including the United States, which sent Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.
One particular subject of discussion was the need to help bloggers in countries ruled by oppressive regimes. There’s a good write up by Toby Sterling of the Associated Press: EU official: Protect bloggers from repressive governments.
Secretary Clinton, who opened the conference, issuing a call for companies to refuse to sell surveillance technologies to repressive governments. It’s wonderful to see the U.S. take a leadership stance on internet freedom, but there’s some irony as well.
Syrian blogger Amjad Baiazy, who was arrested and tortured earlier this year because of his online writing, noted that Western companies surveillance system that Syria’s been using to ferret out internet dissidents.
And Dutch member of parliament Marietje Schaake, while dittoing Clinton’s call for restraint among tech companies, took the U.S. to task for Congressional consideration of SOPA (the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act,” which, she said, “give great incentives to governments like China to do the same,” blocking access to expression they find inappropriate.
Important points, all around.
Tags: Amjad Baiazy, conference, Hilary Clinton, Marietje Schaake, Netherlands, SOPA, surveillance
Posted in censorship, Europe, freedom of expression, government criticism, press freedom | Comments Off
December 19th, 2011
Under a wave of phone calls and social-media attention, Lamar Smith (R-Texas) abruptly called an end to the hearings on SOPA, saying they would be rescheduled for the future. Lamar Smith is a toughie. So getting him to take a step backward is quite an accomplishment!
More:
Tags: Lamar Smith, SOPA
Posted in censorship, copyright, EFF, legislation and regulation, lobbying, Texas | Comments Off
December 15th, 2011
This is it. This is the time to make your voice heard on Capitol Hill before the disastrous Stop Online Piracy Act is passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Go to EFF’s action page on SOPA and type in your zip code to instantly get the phone number of your rep. And you can bet I’ve called.
SOPA is a threat to blog freedom and internet freedom in American and abroad.
Make the call, and blog on!
Tags: SOPA
Posted in censorship, chilling, copyright, EFF, First Amendment, intellectual property, legislation and regulation, search and seizure | Comments Off
December 13th, 2011
This is a key week in the fight against SOPA – a sledgehammer law, ostensibly to fight copyright infringement, that would be a disaster for bloggers and for the internet in general. The bill is approaching a vote in the House Judiciary Committee. Please consider taking some time learn about the issue, and if your member of Congress is on the House Judiciary Committee (list below), please write them!
The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society (where I am an affiliate scholar), recently hosted a panel discussion called What’s Wrong with SOPA? You can now watch the video of the event.
Julie Ahrens of CIS did a really nice post explaining concisely why SOPA is such a bad idea, broken down into five points:
1. SOPA violates due process.
2. SOPA censors lawful speech.
3. SOPA breaks the Internet’s infrastructure.
4. SOPA blows up the safe harbor.
5. SOPA kills innovation.
She provides an explanation and cites to further reading for each.
Here is the membership of the House Judiciary Committee. If your rep is on here, please call and e-mail!
Adams – (R) Florida, 24th
Amodei – (R) Nevada, 2nd
Berman – (D) California, 28th
Chabot – (R) Ohio, 1st
Chaffetz – (R) Utah, 3rd
Chu – (D) California, 32nd
Coble – (R) North Carolina, 6th
Cohen – (D) Tennessee, 9th
Conyers Jr. – Ranking Member – (D) Michigan, 14th
Deutch – (D) Florida, 19th
Forbes – (R) Virginia, 4th
Franks – (R) Arizona, 2nd
Gallegly – (R) California, 24th
Gohmert – (R) Texas, 1st
Goodlatte – (R) Virginia, 6th
Gowdy – (R) South Carolina, 4th
Griffin – (R) Arkansas, 2nd
Issa – (R) California, 49th
Jackson Lee – (D) Texas, 18th
Johnson – (D) Georgia, 4th
Jordan – (R) Ohio, 4th
King – (R) Iowa, 5th
Lofgren – (D) California, 16th
Lungren – (R) California, 3rd
Marino – (R) Pennsylvania, 10th
Nadler – (D) New York, 8th
Pence – (R) Indiana, 6th
Pierluisi – (D) Puerto Rico, Resident Commissioner
Poe – (R) Texas, 2nd
Polis – (D) Colorado, 2nd
Quayle – (R) Arizona, 3rd
Quigley – (D) Illinois, 5th
Ross – (R) Florida, 12th
S?nchez – (D) California, 39th
Scott – (D) Virginia, 3rd
Sensenbrenner Jr. – (R) Wisconsin, 5th
Smith – Chairman – (R) Texas, 21st
Waters – (D) California, 35th
Watt – (D) North Carolina, 12th
Tags: CIS, SOPA
Posted in California, freedom of expression, intellectual property, legislation and regulation | Comments Off
December 6th, 2011
Facebook has entered into a big settlement with the Federal Trade Commission – America’s top consumer cops – regarding privacy of user data. As part of the deal, FB will warn users about privacy changes and must submit to biennial privacy audits for the next two decades.
I love the FTC. They do good stuff. Of course, it’s good to note also that FB has done a lot of backpedaling on privacy issues because of user backlash – a kind of semi-organized consumer pressure that is possible these days because of social networking technologies like, um, Facebook!
Here’s what Zuckerberg said in his blog post about the settlement (which he rosily calls a “settlement”):
… I’m the first to admit that we’ve made a bunch of mistakes [including] a small number of high profile mistakes, like Beacon four years ago and poor execution as we transitioned our privacy model two years ago …
[W]e’re making a clear and formal long-term commitment to do the things we’ve always tried to do and planned to keep doing — giving you tools to control who can see your information and then making sure only those people you intend can see it. In the last 18 months alone, we’ve announced more than 20 new tools and resources designed to give you more control over your Facebook experience.
I actually think Facebook is getting quite a bit better – not just about privacy, but about being a better service altogether. I predicted the demise of Facebook earlier this year. If Facebook keeps changing fast enough, it might hold on. But I just don’t think it will. Fundamentally, the company seems out of touch with what people want. Like the Facebook ticker feature that was new this fall – that’s just creepy.
Here are the words from the parties:
Here are some write-ups:
Tags: facebook, FTC / advertising law, Mark Zuckerberg
Posted in FTC / advertising law, privacy, settlements | Comments Off
December 5th, 2011
The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, where I am an affiliate scholar, is hosting a panel discussion on SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act – and the Protect-IP Act that are making their way through the U.S. Congress.
The discussion – WHAT’S WRONG WITH SOPA? – is open to the public and will take place on Wednesday, December 7, 2011, at 7 p.m. PST in Room 290 of the Law School Building at Stanford. There will also be a 6 p.m. reception on the Neukom Terrace, at the Neukom Building. You’re encouraged to RSVP.
Tags: SOPA, Stanford, Stanford CIS
Posted in California, copyright, intellectual property, upcoming | Comments Off
December 2nd, 2011
The ABA Journal’s list of the top law blogs of 2011 is out and Blog Law Blog is among the honorees!
This is completely awesome. I’d like to thank Eric Goldman, for nominating me and for saying kind things, which were quoted in the write-up, and I’d like to my wife, for reading many of my draft blog posts – especially the ones where I try to be funny. And maybe now that this is a Top 100 blawg, she might even read it when I don’t specifically ask her to. I’d like to thank the American Bar Association for this honor. And of course, I’d like to thank all of my readers – the ones who write, the ones who comment, and all the ones who show up as blips on my Google Analytics reports. Without you, blogging would be a silly exercise in self-aggrandizement, which, of course, many people conclude it is anyway (but look how awesome I am now!). And I’d also like to thank – wait! Don’t play the music yet! I’d also like to encourage you to vote for Blog Law Blog in the ABA Journal’s fan favorite polling that is going on now through December 30. Thank you!
Tags: ABA, ABA Journal
Posted in about this blog | Comments Off
December 1st, 2011
Declan McCullagh at CNET has a worthwhile post about one lobbying group’s puzzling and unfortunate support for SOPA:
The Chamber claims SOPA is good for businesses, but the businesses that oppose it include eBay, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, AOL, and LinkedIn. Yahoo has quit the Chamber now, and the Consumer Electronics Association and Google may soon do the same.
Tags: SOPA
Posted in copyright, intellectual property, legislation and regulation, lobbying | Comments Off
