There’s a cool conference going on right now in Washington D.C. It’s called Freedom to Connect.

It’s pricey at $595. But there’s a great line up of big-name speakers, including Vint Cerf, Larry Lessig, Michael Copps, and Rebecca MacKinnon. It’s a more polished affair than the logo at right would lead one to believe.

If you aren’t in D.C. or don’t have that kind of disposable cash, you can follow the action at hashtag #F2C.

Defamation Defendant Julie Anne Smith (Image: Smith via Blogger.com)

A judge in Oregon is set today to hear the anti-SLAPP motion in the case of Pastor Charles O’Neal of the Beaverton Grace Bible Church, who is suing former church member Julie Anne Smith for defamation, seeking $500,000 in damages.

Smith’s blog, Beaverton Grace Bible Church Survivors, documents a cultish, creepy church. One commenter recounts a call for closet-raids to rid female church-goers of skimpy clothing.

An anti-SLAPP motion is a special kind of procedural device that allows the early summary dismissal of a lawsuit that is aimed at shutting down someone’s exercise of their First Amendment rights.

My bet is that Smith will win the anti-SLAPP motion, thus ending the lawsuit.

The best quick rundown of the fact’s is Smith’s own statement on her blog:

I began this blog in Feb. 2012 after noticing that the Google reviews I had posted of my former church were being removed. Days after the commencement of this blog, I received a legal summons suing me and three others for defamation to the tune of $500,000. The story of spiritual abuse needs to be told. People are being hurt emotionally and spiritually by pastors who use bully tactics and we need a place to learn, to talk freely, and to heal. I will not be silenced.

For me, the best evidece of Pastor Charles O’Neal’s sky-high creepster-factor is his own words, quoted by Smith on the blog, as he rails against her in a weird rant with frequent crazy-person use of ALL CAPS.

Nicely put is Smith’s February 25, 2012 response:

I wouldn’t waste my time on defamation – what is there to gain in that? I will, however, sacrifice my time and energy in speaking the truth when there is abuse of power going on and lives are at risk.

More:

• Beaverton Church Sues Former Member Over Blog
• Fox News: Oregon mother, daughter reportedly sued for writing bad reviews of church online
• Reuters: Church Sues Ex-Members for Defamation on Blog

I talk about the lawyering behind Facebook’s IPO on the Stanford CIS blog.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is conducting closed-door negotiations for a new trade deal involving intellectual property – the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Big Hollywood and Big Pharma are involved and are allowed to see negotiation documents. The public is not. Once the deal is concluded, it could bind Congress to change IP law and restrict free-speech, fair-use, and access-to-information rights.

In a brash move snubbing the lobbyist-challenged public, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative decided to cancel a very limited opportunity for people to voice their concerns at a “stakeholder” meeting.

The following is an abridged version of a letter to the signed by many legal academics to the U.S. Trade Representative, Ambassador Ron Kirk.

The letter was written by law professors David S. Levine of Elon, Christopher Jon Sprigman of UVA, and Sean Flynn of American U.

Dear Ambassador Kirk:

We write as legal academics from the US and current or potential future Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) member countries to express our profound concern and disappointment at the lack of public participation, transparency and open government processes in the negotiation of the intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). We are particularly and specifically concerned that the United States Trade Representative (USTR) took the opportunity of its hosting of the latest round of negotiations in Dallas, Texas, to begin this week, to further restrict public involvement in the negotiations by eliminating the full-day stakeholder forums that have been hosted at other rounds. We call on the USTR and all TPP negotiating countries to reverse course and work instead to expand, rather than contract, the opportunities for public engagement in the formation of the TPP’s intellectual property chapter.

At a time when the last international intellectual property law to be negotiated under a similar process, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, teeters on the edge of rejection by the European Parliament in large part because of the loss of faith in its secretive process demonstrated by hundreds of thousands of marchers across Europe, the move to scale back participation in the TPP appears highly unwise and counterproductive. The functional and theoretical impact of the lack of transparency and accountability in the TPP and other trade negotiations institutionalizes the kind of process that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan criticized as policy making through “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night.” This is no way to build support for a broad reaching new international law that will constrain democratic law making over intellectual property matters in the US and abroad, particularly in an era of massive and rapid technological change that is testing the bounds of our current policy framework.

Our first and most important suggestion is to immediately begin a policy of releasing to the public the kind of reports on US positions and proposals on intellectual property matters that are currently given only to Industry Trade Advisory Committee members under confidentiality agreements. The USTR has previously refused to share its own proposals with its own citizenry claiming that, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), to do so would damage the national security of the United States. …

Our concerns flow from the now-established observation that “trade” agreements no longer focus exclusively, or perhaps even predominantly, on the regulation of trade. Rather, the agreements increasingly propose international law standards that bind the legislative branch to change, or lock in place, domestic regulatory decisions. …

Unfortunately, there is little about the TPP negotiating process that is open to the broad range of inputs that would be reflected in domestic policy making. There has been no publicly released text of what USTR is demanding in these negotiations, as there would be in policy making by regulation, in Congress or in multilateral forums. Reviews of leaked proposals show that the US is pushing numerous standards that are beyond those included in any past (i.e. publicly released) agreement and that could require changes in current US statutory law. Reviews also show that the US proposal is manifestly unbalanced – it predominantly proposes increases in proprietor rights, with no effort to expand the limitations and exceptions to such rights that are needed in the US and abroad to serve the public interest. …

The unbalanced product results from an unbalanced process. The only private individuals in the US who have ongoing access to the US proposals on intellectual property matters are on an Industry Trade Advisory Committee (ITAC) which is dominated by brand name pharmaceutical manufacturers and the Hollywood entertainment industry. There is no representation on this committee for consumers, libraries, students, health advocacy or patient groups, or others users of intellectual property, and minimal representation of other affected businesses, such as generic drug manufacturers or internet service providers. …

All of the above makes the most recent further withdrawal from the TPP negotiation of a limited participation venue particularly disturbing. … While far from ideal for all involved, including the USTR and its ITAC advisors, this mechanism at least allowed for some exchange, even if that exchange was fundamentally flawed and artificially limited in value because of the information-disparity problems discussed above. In the place of these full day open forums in Dallas, USTR has channeled stakeholder input into a 4-hour mid-day (10:30am-2:30pm, i.e. over the lunch hour) exhibit hall for stakeholder tables. There will be no opportunity, as in the past, to speak to assembled negotiators through presentations. …

The Chicago Federal Center, home to the Seventh Circuit (Photo: EEJ)

The Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stood up for the public’s right to be informed about the actions of public officials Tuesday when it declared unconstitutional provisions in the Illinois wiretapping law that prohibits audio recording of police activity in public places.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press had argued in a friend-of-the-court brief to the Chicago-based court that the overbroad law was a danger to journalists’ and the public’s First Amendment rights.

“This decision is a First Amendment slam-dunk. The court could not have been clearer about the importance of protecting the public’s right to observe and record the actions of public officials in public places,” said Reporters Committee Executive Director Lucy A. Dalglish. “Although Chicago police had indicated they would not enforce the law during the NATO Summit later this month – which we all expect will be accompanied by protests and police activity – it’s nice to have the force of the court’s decision on the right to record those events.”

“The notion that audio recording police activity in a public place, where there is no expectation of privacy, constitutes a felony is absurd and advances absolutely no government interest,” Dalglish added. “We are delighted that the appeals court agreed.”

One little nit: I don’t understand where they get “Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals” from. The full name is the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. So you can shorten it to the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, if you like, but it makes no sense to put the “U.S.” between “Seventh” and “Circuit.” It’s kind of like putting something between “United” and “States.” Okay, I guess it’s not that bad. But it’s wrong.

Links:

• RCFP amicus brief
  
• RCFP summary of the ACLU v. Alvarez opinion

A worthwhile article from the U.K.:

Social media and the law – How to stay out of trouble when using Twitter and Facebook

The story points up the many differences between the U.S. and U.K. when it comes to freedom of speech. Tweeting can quite easily constitute a crime in the UK, whereas the First Amendment in the U.S. makes it near to impossible to go to jail for a tweet.

Frank Ferguson, district crown prosecutor from Norfolk County in the East of England, identifies three types of social-media crime cases:

“Firstly, where people have committed an offence through abusing or bullying someone else, so that could be harassment or racism.

“Then we have the types of postings where the message results in an offence, such as someone is having a party, thousands turn up and criminal acts follow at that party.

“Thirdly we have seen many cases where someone has committed and offence and then goes on to social media to brag about what they have done. This is an example where it can help us to track someone down.”

Not that the first category of speech – with more – can’t constitute a crime in the U.S. because of the broad application of the First Amendment.

Also, as discussed in the article, a civil libel case in the U.K. can ruin a defendant - especially if the plaintiff is wealthy and the defendant lacks resources. It’s not just the judgment, it’s the U.K.’s loser-pays-the-attorneys-fees rule. In the U.S., with everyone bearing their own legal costs, plus with the First Amendment hurdles to libel actions, the specter of civil libel liability is much lower.

Eric Goldman

Facebook “Likes” Aren’t Speech Protected By the First Amendment–Bland v. Roberts

This is a case where a sheriff fired sheriff’s department workers after they Facebook-liked the sheriff’s opponent in an upcoming bid for re-election. Venkat Balasubramani and Eric G. explain why the court’s wrong that liking someone on FB isn’t protected First Amendment speech. I agree, of course. It’s a baffling decision.

512(f) Plaintiff Can’t Get Discovery to Back Up His Allegations of Bogus Takedowns–Ouellette v. Viacom

This is exactly the kind of thing your civil procedure professor was talking about when they said “procedure is substance.” Big Hollywood is free to machine-gun takedown notices out there, and despite a substantive legal right to get redress for such bogus takedowns, the procedural requirements make the right nearly worthless, turning §512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into something quite different than what you would think it is just by reading it.

As Eric G. notes, “unless the 512(f) plaintiff has smoking-gun evidence of the copyright owner’s bad intent before filing the complaint, the plaintiff has virtually no chance of getting a 512(f) claim into discovery.”

Comments on the Megaupload Prosecution (a Long-Delayed Linkwrap)

The Megaupload case is one of those things that is extremely troubling, but it can be hard to explain exactly why it’s troubling in a pithy way. But here’s a quote from Eric G. that does a pretty good job:

The government is using its enforcement powers to accomplish what most copyright owners haven’t been willing to do in civil court (i.e., sue Megaupload for infringement); and the government is doing so by using its incredibly powerful discovery and enforcement tools that vastly exceed the tools available in civil enforcement; and the government’s bringing the prosecution in part because of the revolving door between government and the content industry (where some of the decision-makers green-lighting the enforcement action probably worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the copyright owners making the request) plus the Obama administration’s desire to curry continued favor and campaign contributions from well-heeled sources.

The resulting prosecution is a depressing display of abuse of government authority. It’s hard to comprehensively catalog all of the lawless aspects of the US government’s prosecution of Megaupload …

Megaupload’s website is analogous to a printing press that constantly published new content. Under our Constitution, the government can’t simply shut down a printing press, but that’s basically what our government did when it turned Megaupload off and seized all of the assets. Not surprisingly, shutting down a printing press suppresses countless legitimate content publications by legitimate users of Megaupload. Surprisingly (shockingly, even), the government apparently doesn’t care about this “collateral,” entirely foreseeable and deeply unconstitutional effect.

What do these three recent developments all have in common? Big guys win, little guys lose. Sometimes law is very dispiriting.

The good folks at the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press are putting on a free webinar for reporters and photographers who are covering events, such as protests, where they could be blocked from reporting or detained by the police. Examples include the Occupy protests as well as the upcoming political conventions in Charlotte and Tampa. Or, you know, if you are in Los Angeles, your local elementary school science fair.

The one-hour webinar will be held May 9, 2012 from 1:00 p.m. EDT. (That’s 12 noon Central, which is my time zone and the time zone where the next big opportunity for reporter-police interaction will be: Chicago, May 20-21, for the NATO Summit.)

The webinar will be lead by Lucy Dalglish, RCFP Exec Director and Gregg Leslie, Legal Defense Director. It looks like they will be giving both a theoretical perspective on where your journalist rights come from as well as practical advice on what to do when confronted or detained by the police.

Excellent stuff! I am signed up and looking forward to it.

To reserve your own place:

https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/941031095

Griffith Public Schools expelled three 8th grade girls for Facebook posts evincing a desire to kill ugly students at school. The ACLU has filed suit against the district.

According to the complaint and the Northwest Indian Times, the Facebook discussion began one eighth girl updated her Facebook status to reflect that she had cut herself while shaving her legs. The status update was after school and was visible to those in the students’ “friends” circle:

[Girl 1 status update:] … I hate when I’m shaving my legs and I get he tinyest, microscopic, little [expletive] cut and it bleeds so much and makes me lose like 1/3 of the blood in my body – _ -

The following are excerpts of the conversation that followed:

[Girl 2:] thee only people that make me mad, are 7th graders who dont move out of thee way. & ugly people liike[name][name][name][name] [name]…etc.

[Girl 1:] I would say kill all the ugly people at school than. But I don’t wanna die.

…

[Girl 3:] i wanna kill people.

[Girl 2:] ii wiish yu wouldnt get caught, cos shiit, half thee school would be gone by now…

[Girl 1:] I need new best friends. All of mine are homicidal.

In case you’re wondering, the district got the Facebook exchange from a classmate’s mother.

Missing from the mainstream-media write-ups of this is what it says about the ACLU itself to be involved in this case. It sure looks like the ACLU has put itself firmly on the side of the popular, beautiful people. I kind of always thought to ACLU attorneys as recovering junior-high nerds. You know, the kind of kids who were on yearbook and took it really seriously. Maybe that’s just what I wanted to believe …

More:

• Sarah Tompkins, Northwest Indiana Times
• Deanese Williams-Harris, Chicago Tribune
• ACLU Press Release [PDF]
• Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal

Jurors in Texas have handed a $13.8 million libel verdict to a married couple defamed on Topix.

Debra Cassens Weiss reports in the ABA Journal that Texas lawyer Mark Lesher and his wife Rhonda filed the suit against four defendants who posted anonymous comments accusing the couple of molestation, drug dealing, and perverted sexual behavior.

The Tarrant County jury apparently set a new record for online-libel verdicts. According to the Leshers, more than 25,000 defamatory posts forced Mark to shutter his law practice and Rhonda to close her beauty salon.

Meagan Hassan, the Lesher’s attorney, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “This was clearly a vendetta.”

“We originally sued 178 John and Jane Does, and it all came down to two IP addresses,” she said. That led them to a married couple, Shannon and Gerald Coyel, and two employees of the couple, Charlie and Pat Doescher.

A few years ago, Shannon Coyel had accused the Leshers of sexually assaulting her. That led to a case and an acquittal in 2009.

Eriq Gardner, legal-issues journalist for the Hollywood Reporter, has penned the ABA Journal magazine’s new cover story: “The Righthaven Experiment: A Journalist Wonders If a Copyright Troll Was Right to Sue Him.”

As a funny aside, the online version of the story says “Posted May 1, 2012 5:20 AM CDT.”

As I write this, it’s April 26, 2012 7:35AM CDT.

Today I’m debating Jacob H. Huebert at UND Law. Jacob will be arguing for the proposition that we don’t need any licensure of law schools or lawyers. I’ll argue the negative.

I really appreciate the Federalist Society for putting together and funding events like this. This is my second time as an opponent in a Federalist Society debate, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Coming to a bookstore near you:

Righthaven, the Nevada-based copyright thugster that sued scores of mom-and-pop bloggers with heavy-handed lawsuits seeking six-figure awards, has had its engine – or it’s malignant beating heart, the metaphor’s up to you – pulled out of it. The U.S. District Court in Las Vegas has ordered the transfer of all of Righthaven’s copyrights – the copyrights it used as its basis to sue – to a court-appointed receiver to auction them off against $186,680 owed to creditors, including Righthaven defendants who won fee awards.

The first auction may start on Monday.

• Steve Green on Vegas Inc
• Arthur Bright on CMLP

James O'Keefe (Image: O'Keefe, via Twitter)

O’Keefe is an A-lister of politically fueled citizen investigative journalism. He gained his fame by going undercover to expose the shenanigans of liberal community-activist group ACORN.

Last week, Olbermann-show guest David Schuster called O’Keefe “a convicted felon” and said he’d been accused of rape by a former co-worker. It appears that, in fact, O’Keefe once pled to a misdemeanor charge and had once been accused of harassment by a co-worker. Kind of not the same thing. Or even close.

If that’s all true, it looks like a decent libel case to me. But since O’Keefe is a public figure, he’ll have to over come the First Amendment standard of showing “actual malice,” which can be hard.

I personally didn’t realize that Olbermann was still on TV. It turns out that after disappearing from MSNBC, he’s turned up on Current TV, an Al-Gore-backed left-leaning cable network, which, I guess, I had kind of heard about some time ago. Current TV is also named in the suit.

Referring to the “mainstream media” by acronym, O’Keefe tweeted: “MSM will say, do anything to take a stop a citizen journalist they can not control. Understood. I’m going to sue them for libel, each time.”

I understand that O’Keefe is venting, but referring to Current TV as “mainstream media” is going off a little half-cocked. Mainstream? I’m not sure I get Current TV in my channel lineup, and I get approximately 17 bazillion channels. I think O’Keefe’s slam may be the best compliment Current TV has gotten recently.

Andrew Breitbart (Image: biggovernment.com)

Breitbart was best known for distributing a deceptively edited video that painted USDA employee Shirley Sherrod as a racist. The video resulted in her firing before it became understood that the Sherrod had not actually advanced a racist position in the speech videoed, but had, in fact, been telling a story championing racial healing.

Sherrod issued a classy statement:

“The news of Mr. Breitbart’s death came as a surprise to me when I was informed of it this morning. My prayers go out to Mr. Breitbart’s family as they cope through this very difficult time.”

Josh Gerstein at Politico speculates that Sherrod’s defamation lawsuit against Breitbart is “likely to continue.”

There’s nothing about Breitbart’s death that will legally affect the suit. But Sherrod could choose to drop it now. Either way, I would expect the lawsuit to continue against Larry O’Connor, a Breitbart aide who is a defendant in the suit.

I recently read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I thought the book was not all that well written. Pretty clearly, it was rushed. If you were the publisher, and Steve Jobs quits his job and then dies, what would you do? Install an espresso van outside of Isaacson’s house? Blast an airhorn every time he starts to nod off? Pretty much. And the book shows it.

That said, it was an enjoyable read. It ends up being a recent history of Silicon Valley, which is fabulous subject matter. And it illuminates the great ideological battles that rage in the tech world today: functionality vs. ease-of-use, open vs. closed, innovate vs. intimidate.

The most interesting thing about the book is that Steve Jobs wanted it, and even picked out Isaacson to write it, and cooperated wholeheartedly in it. Yet the book paints Jobs as a chronic a__hole. I mean, it is hard to like Jobs after you get to know him in these pages. I always rooted for Apple against Microsoft – back when that was a thing. But this book made me like Steve Jobs less and caused me to find all kinds of admiration for Bill Gates.

After learning more about him, I find myself deeply ambivalent about Steve Jobs. He brought the power of computing to the masses. He was a wonderful product designer. But he was not someone who upheld the cause of freedom in computing. And if you are a citizen blogger, few things are more important than freedom in computing.

Jobs discussed blogging specifically when he spoke to newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch and his son James about the potential of delivering news content over the iPad. He told them:

We can’t depend on bloggers for our news. We need real reporting and editorial oversight more than ever. So I’d love to find a way to help people create digital products where they actually can make money.

I too want a journalism ecosystem with professional reporters. But appifying the web has the potential to block out blogs. And the thought of that makes me sad.

Over on my Pixelization blog, I’ve explained why I think a ridiculous patent that threatens Silicon Valley should have carried the day in a federal court in Texas:
Court in Texas Should Have Upheld the Full Lousiness of Patent Law

Photo by me.

Arthur Bright has a nice post at Citizen Media Law Blog on the good news that the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11 to 7 to require the U.S. Supreme Court to allow television cameras into hearings.

The bill that has been approved in committee, S.B. 1945, provides:

The Supreme Court shall permit television coverage of all open sessions of the Court unless the Court decides, by a vote of the majority of justices, that allowing such coverage in a particular case would constitute a violation of the due process rights of 1 or more of the parties before the Court.

We’ll see if the bill becomes law. And if it does, the U.S. Supreme Court could always, of course, strike it down (making for a fun new case for your Federal Courts textbook). But it’s a great step in the right direction for open government and media freedom.

My concern going forward, if cameras are allowed into SCOTUS, is that everyone will have equal access to the footage. If the networks put their own cameras in and produce copyrighted footage, that won’t be a boon to bloggers and citizen journalists. The best implementation would be for the court to do its own television feed, which, as a federal government work, would be copyright-free.

And, of course, there’d be fewer cords to trip over …

Antitrust officials at the FTC are looking into Google. Background here and here.

Google, of course, is a big player in blogging, with its Blogger platform.

Now comes Reagan-era former FTC chairmen James C. Miller III and Daniel Oliver arguing in the Washington Examiner that against the FTC investigation, deriding it as “returning to its Star Trek law enforcement policies – that is, to boldly go where no agency has gone before.”

That’s a cheap shot. The FTC has to break new ground when monopolizers do. That would mean they are doing their job.

Miller and Oliver say that antitrust law “is for consumer welfare, not competitor welfare.” True. I totally agree with that. But Miller and Oliver go from there to a silly argument:

Has anyone heard consumers complaining about Google? We have not, probably because consumers are under no pressure to use Google. They do so because they get what they want from Google, and they get it for free.

Duh. So what? Consumers also don’t complain about predatory pricing – designed to drive out competitors. But consumers are sure hurt when competition eventually dries up.

I have no reason to think Google is engaging in any anti-competitive conduct. Time and time again, I see them on the anti-anti-competitive conduct side. But there’s no reason for the FTC not to look into it.

The best part of the op-ed is when Oliver and Miller disclose they are “advisers to Google,” and then immediately say, “but their thoughts and views are their own.”

Ha. Sure. Their arguments may still have merit regardless of their relationship to Google. But to lamely claim their opinions to be unfettered erases credibility in my book.

The real reason Google seems not to be a potential antitrust threat is that in the cyber world, today’s charging gorilla can quickly be hunched over wheezing (Microsoft, MySpace, and many others.)

But bellyaching about the FTC looking into it and doing their jobs is sorry work.

Here’s another local-political-blog-vs-small-town story: Emily Heffter in the Seattle Times: Activist’s blog hammers away at Gold Bar, costs tiny town money

The blog, the Gold Bar Reporter, has become a disruptive force in the Gold Bar, Washington, population 2,000. But good disruptive or bad disruptive?

There’s no doubt that it’s costing the town money. In 2010, the town spent $70,000 responding to public-records requests, nearly all of them from Gold Bar bloggers Anne Block and Susan Forbes. That’s out of a total annual budget of $573,898. The town says that they’ve had to re-assign staff to deal with the onslaught of records requests.

On the other hand, the blog has uncovered some things that seem worth uncovering. During the re-election campaign of County Executive Aaron Reardon, the blog accused Reardon of using taxpayer money for a trip with a mistress. A month afterward, a county employee came forward to admit that she traveled with Reardon in pursuit of an affair on county trips. And now the Washington State Patrol is doing an investigation to see if county funds were misused.

Beau Zimmer of WTSP television in Florida reports that Jacob Jock, a male juror in a vehicular negligence civil suit attempted to friend the “young, attractive” female defendant. Good for her she didn’t accept the friending. Instead, she altered her attorney, who told the judge, who kicked the guy off the jury.

Then the ex-juror, who has a large helping of some kind of reverse common sense, proceeded to get on Facebook and brag about how he got out of jury service.

That finally did it, and the judge held him in contempt. Now he’s facing possible jail time.

BTW, USA Today mis-credited Beau Zimmer as “Ben Zimmer”.

USA Today reports that two Americans and two Egyptians, who are employees of the International Center for Journalists, have been referred to Egypt’s Justice Ministry for prosecution.

ICFJ is a DC-based non-profit org that “promotes quality journalism worldwide in the belief that independent, vigorous media are crucial in improving the human condition.”

The president of ICFJ said that the organization was in Egypt to help improve citizen journalism by teaching fair, responsible, and in-context news coverage.

The American staffers are currently stateside – and presumably they won’t be headed back. The two Egyptian staffers have been questioned by Egyptian authorities, but they have not been arrested at this point, and only learned about the prosecutorial referral via reports in the media.

Pallas Athena fountain in front of the Parliament Building in Vienna, Austria (Photo: CIA)

This is a case that came down just before the New Year. I think it’s worth discussing here because blogs, of course, cross borders. American bloggers are likely to think that American concepts of free expression are likely to be shared with other industrialized Western countries. But that’s not true at all.

Eugene Volokh on the Volokh Conspiracy explains the legal angle with a post that provides a quick look at recent blasphemy prosecutions around Europe, as well as a discussion of America’s history of criminalizing blasphemy back in the early 1800s.

As far as the prosecution of Sabaditsch-Wolff, the defendant herself explains what happened in an interview:

What was the reason for this conviction, you may ask. Well, during the course of my seminars, I mentioned the choking EU directive “Framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia,” and in order to illustrate my point I told the audience about a conversation I had with my sister and how she believed that one should find a different word for Mohammed’s actions with Aisha. I said, “How does one name what he did if not call it pedophilia?” And this sentence got me convicted, for I am allowed by law to say that Mohammed had sex with a young girl, but I may not qualify this behavior as this is deemed “excessive” and thus denigrating.

It would be unthinkable for anyone in the United States to get in legal trouble for something like this. But, as Commenter Parker said in the thread after Volokh’s post, “This is Europe we are speaking of. Europe has a different idea of human rights and especially a different idea of the freedom of speech.”

True that. With the similarity in the media, press, and arts between the U.S. and Europe, you could easily assume that what’s sacrosanct as a matter of American expressive freedom would be protected in Europe. Just about anyone could guess that there’s no right to bear arms across Europe. But with free speech, you would be forgiven for thinking they are basically the same. And it’s probably true that 99% of what is protected in America is protected in EU countries. But once you get toward the fringes, you’ll realize that freedom of expression in Europe is actually very different. Free speech is at the apex of American freedoms and values. In the European scheme of values, there is the idea that free speech must often be subservient in the hierarchy of human rights. The Sabaditsch-Wolff case illustrates, I think, the European impulse that the right to be free from religious insult is considered as or more important than the right to be free to say whatever you want.

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.