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When Tim Donnelly, a 26-year-old job seeker, Googled his name recently he found that the first link provided was that to a mugshot of him taken seven years ago. He got into a fight as a teenager and was arrested for criminal trespass and assault. According to Donnelly, the trespass charge was dismissed and the assault charge was downgraded to disorderly conduct. "I have since learned better," he said.

What bothered Donnelly wasn't the publication of his mugshot per se, but instead the companies working together to solicit payment for its removal. "I am all for having a completely open government," he said, "but something needs to make this online shaming device stop." Donnelly believes he has a solution.

Since I wrote about the prevalence of mugshot websites last October, many CMLP readers weighed in with their own take on what David Kravets described in Wired as a "racket." According to Kravets's article, self-described "reputation companies" are part of an emerging industry of websites publishing mugshots and then charging those pictured to remove the photos to spare them further embarrassment.   read more »

On April 24, 2012, a Texas jury awarded $13.78 million to a married couple in a case based upon an extended campaign of defamation on the website Topix.com - to be specific, more than 1,700 separate statements accusing the plaintiffs of a wide array of criminal activity and, shall we say, unusual sexual practices, among other misconduct. The husband was awarded $5.1 million from one defendant and $1.7 million each from two others. The wife was separately awarded $3.168 million from the first defendant (the less-than-round number reflecting in part the value of the wife's business, which she allegedly lost as a result of the defamation).

A brief review of the 733-page complaint is enough to make one's skin crawl, and if the allegations are to be believed – as clearly the jury did – the size of the verdict becomes more understandable from a gut perspective. That said, the core of a defamation action is injury to reputation; i.e., the impairment of the plaintiffs' good name in the view of their community or a respectable part thereof. The sheer size this verdict begs the question of whether the jury was actually attempting to compensate for reputational injury, or was simply trying to smack the defendants with as large a number as they could rationalize.

Even when not confronted with conduct as disturbing and provocative as that alleged by the plaintiffs in this case, juries face difficult questions when evaluating damage to reputation caused by false statements on social media. For example:   read more »

Once again, the CMLP is pleased to report that the First Amendment has scored an important victory in a case involving the recording of police officers in public. Last summer saw the strong pro-First Amendment decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Glik v. Cunniffe (see our coverage here); the spring of 2012 brings us another sunny (and lengthy) decision for freedom of speech from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in today's opinion in American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois v. Alvarez.

(Full disclosure, and a point of pride: the CMLP, through the remarkable services of our colleagues at Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, joined in an amicus brief in Alvarez drafted by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. We have raised many of these arguments ourselves in prior cases -- see the CMLP's brief in Glik.)   read more »

What happens when the First Amendment collides with military decorum and respect for chain of command?  

It looks like we'll get to find out as the matter of Sgt. Gary Stein, the Marine who on a Tea Party Facebook page slammed President Obama and threatened to disobey his orders, rolls ahead. 

Stein got drummed out of the Corps with an other-than-honorable discharge late last month, and his lawyer promised to pursue all his options in administrative proceedings and federal court.  But does Stein really have a case?

Well, he's already in trouble when it comes to one of the preeminent government-employer/free-speech cases, Pickering v. Board of Education.  In Pickering, a teacher was fired by his public school employer after he wrote a letter to the local newspaper complaining about the school board regarding a particular matter of public importance. The Supreme Court ruled the firing a violation of the teacher's First Amendment rights, saying that the teacher's speech rights outweighed the school's interests as an employer, given that the teacher's complaint had little to do with the fact of the teacher's employment.    read more »

This morning Jeff and I had the pleasure of watching the Massachusetts Appeals Court argument in Jenzabar, Inc. v. Long Bow Group, Inc.  As we mentioned once before on this blog, the CMLP filed an amicus brief in this case with the assistance of Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic. (And thanks again to HLS students Mike Hoven and Andrew Pearson for their help!)

The case concerns a documentary film company that released a film concerning the Tiananmen Square protests, called The Gate of Heavenly Peace. The film profiles many of the figures surrounding the protest, and is critical of a student protester named Ling Chai. Chai later moved to Boston and co-founded an educational software and service company named Jenzabar. The film company, Long Bow, created a website related to the film, which, among other things, criticized Chai on a webpage. Long Bow titled the page "Jenzabar," and included terms related to Jenzabar in the metadata.   read more »

We are pleased to announce the expansion of the CMLP Legal Guide to cover the state of Arizona! You may have noticed our Arizona section growing over the past several months.  Our legal guide now includes several sections on Arizona defamation law, intrusion law, open meetings and public records law, and more.

This new portion of the CMLP Legal Guide would not be possible without the help of Caitlin Vogus, who graciously offered her time and effort to help us.  Caitlin is a Harvard Law School graduate and a clerk on the Virginia Court of Appeals.  We are very appreciative of her help, and look forward to her continued assistance!

Please note that our Arizona section is still a work in progress, as we are still adding to it so as to parallel the coverage of our other state sections.  But we hope that you find the new sections useful now.  As always, if you have suggested updates or additions for our Legal Guide, please contact us.

(Image of vintage Arizona billboard used courtesy of flickr user Roadsidepictures under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license.)

Venkat Balasubramani and Eric Goldman, over on Eric's blog, have highlighted a rather interesting if fundamentally flawed decision from the Eastern District of Virginia. 

The case is Bland v. Roberts, and involves six plaintiffs who were civilian employees of the defendant, a sheriff in Hampton, Virginia.  Apparently the plaintiffs were in favor of someone new sitting in the sheriff's seat, and when the election came around, they expressed public support for the sheriff's opponent through a variety of means including "liking" the opponent's Facebook page.  Unfortunately for the employees, the sheriff won reelection, and soon after he fired the six of them.

What's interesting about the case, and what caught Venkat and Eric's eyes, is that in granting summary judgment for the defendant sheriff, the court ruled that "liking" something on Facebook is not constitutionally protected speech.  

Let me repeat that to drive the point home.  The court ruled that clicking Facebook's "Like" button – which thereby expresses one's opinion to at least one's friends if not the whole world – is, as Judge Raymond Jackson writes, "insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection."

I'm sure Judge Jackson is a wise man, but I think he whiffed on this one.     read more »

Connecticut, like most states these days it seems, has been having a problem with cops interfering with people photographing or filming them. Members of the Connecticut legislature are concerned about citizens being harassed for filming cops, and are working on passing a bill, No. 245, aka "An Act Concerning the Recording of Police Activity by the Public," to address the issue.  This is a good thing.

Unfortunately, the whole thing falls apart when you read the bill and discover it has almost no teeth.

To be fair to the bill's sponsors, their hearts are in the right place.   According to a press release from Sen. Majority Leader Martin M. Looney (D) of New Haven, the event that inspired the bill was the false arrest of Father James Manship, a New Haven pastor, after he recorded several East Haven cops who apparently were harassing Latino business owners.  The FBI subsequently arrested four East Haven cops on charges of false arrest and obstruction, among others. So the sponsors seem to have been trying to crack down on abusive cops – a commendable goal. 

But the bill rather neatly establishes the right of the public to film cops before punching that right full of so many holes as to be unable to hold any water. Consider the bill's section 1(b):   read more »

I'm not all that worried about YouTube's legal fate as such (I'm pretty sure Google can afford plenty of lawyers), but when the Second Circuit speaks on the DMCA, I listen. And really, the Court of Appeals' opinion (DMLP threat entry on the case here; .pdf of the opinion here) in Viacom v. YouTube is pretty decent on most of what I care about. But my focus today is on one particular spot in the opinion that turns out to be a bit squishy: the meaning of the statutory phrase "right and ability to control [infringing] activity." The parties presented two clear – albeit diametrically opposed – interpretations of the phrase, and the Second Circuit settled on... neither one. It's an unfortunate bit of fogginess in what could have been a seriously clarifying opinon. (After all, when the Second Circuit speaks on copyright, other courts tend to notice.)

A quick DMCA refresher, if you're rusty: The statute sets up a system to shield online service providers from copyright liability based on their users' activity. So in the YouTube case, the fight is over whether YouTube (and now its corporate daddy Google) can be held liable for infringing videos posted by users. If YouTube qualifies for the DMCA "safe harbor," it's in the clear. If not, there's pain on the horizon.   read more »

A pedicab driver was arrested in D.C. recently for pretending to record police arresting one of his passengers. He wasn’t actually filming anything – apparently he wasn’t even sure how to operate his new camera.

One would think that with all the attention this issue has received lately, we’d have seen a decrease in incidents of police arresting those filming their actions. But police officers continue to arrest journalists and other citizens for lawfully recording incidents of police activity. It happened to CMLP friend Carlos Miller (for the third time) while he was covering an Occupy Miami evacuation in February. And, as Carlos reported, to a San Diego videographer in January. And to others in Boston, Austin, and Memphis. And many other places.   read more »

For the past few years here in Seattle, a fascinating debate has been brewing about the balance between government transparency and citizens' privacy, particularly at the intersection of the state Public Records Act and the state Privacy Act.

The current controversy involves a lawsuit for declaratory relief filed in January by the City of Seattle against local attorney James Egan, after he submitted a public records request for 36 Seattle Police Department dash-cam videos (see the complaint here).  Egan requested the videos from the SPD under the Washington Public Records Act in relation to his representation of clients with misconduct claims against the police. (Egan has publicly posted prior videos that he received from the SPD under earlier Public Records Act.  The 36 videos at issue in the new request don’t necessarily relate to police interactions with Egan’s clients, but rather to the officers involved in the earlier incidents.)   read more »

I am excited to welcome Bryce Newell as a guest blogger!

Bryce Newell is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington's Information School and a Graduate Fellow of the Comparative Law & Society Studies (CLASS) Center. He is also a graduate of the University of California, Davis School of Law and is a member of the California State Bar (inactive). Bryce is engaged in conducting both doctrinal and socio-legal research that investigates the role of intellectual property, privacy, and information technology law and policy in society, both domestically and globally. Years as a photographer, videographer, and filmmaker have instilled in him a soft spot for photographer rights and an interest in citizen journalism. Prior to obtaining his J.D., Bryce worked in television, film, and video production as a producer, cinematographer, editor, and motion graphics artist. He is currently producing, directing, and editing a documentary film about humanitarian response to migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border. In his spare time, he enjoys the occasional round of disc golf or a game of Ultimate Frisbee.

Please join me in welcoming Bryce to the CMLP blogroll!

From the ever-growing file of trademark cases that are bad for free speech, Eric Goldman and Techdirt bring us an interesting case concerning a recent Hyundai ad. The ad is a series of brief vignettes conveying luxurious items in non-luxury settings: a yacht parked next to a small suburban ranch house, cops in a squad car snacking on caviar, chandeliers for streetlights, lobsters and roast pigs in what looks like an office breakroom, and – most importantly for our purposes – a group of people playing basketball with a ball that appears to have what Louis Vuitton calls its "Toile Monogram" pattern on it. Baroque music plays throughout, and a sonorous voice asks the audience, "What if we made luxury available to everyone? Would it still be called luxury? Or maybe we'd need a word for it. Oh, here's one: 'Hyundai.' The all new Hyundai Sonata."

Get it? The ad asks us to ponder whether luxury is defined by its exclusivity to an upper caste, or whether we can all experience the creature comforts of "luxury" regardless of social strata, when a vendor makes high-quality goods at a convenient price point. (Also, buy our car.)   read more »

Federal Judge Marco A. Hernandez got a lot of attention and cyberchatter late last year when he held that blogger Crystal Cox was not protected by Oregon's reporters' shield law, leading to a $2.5 million defamation verdict against her. See Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox, No. CV-11-57-H (D. Or. Nov. 30, 2011).

A lot of the online commentary focused on Judge Hernandez's statements that, as a blogger, Cox did not fit into any of the categories of journalists specified in Oregon's reporters' shield law, Ore. Rev. Stat. 44.520(1). He also declined to apply precedents holding that plaintiffs in libel lawsuits against media entities must show that the defendant(s) acted with at least negligence, writing that:   read more »

“RTs do not = endorsements.”

We’ve all seen it on Twitter bios, usually bios belonging to members of the media.

These kinds of disclaimers, disassociating the tweets from the people who retweet them, are common. The Twitter bio belonging to Brian Stelter of the New York Times (@brianstelter) notes, “RT & links aren’t endorsements.”

A Social Media Policy Addressing RTs and Linking

But for some, those disclaimers are not enough.  Last fall, the Associated Press introduced an updated social media policy for its reporters and editors.  As recently reported in Yahoo! News, the AP memo advised reporters and editors that “Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you’re relaying.” The guidelines note, “[W]e can judiciously retweet opinionated material if we make clear we’re simply reporting it.”

Members of the media might want to be careful, however, that statements like “No comment” or “without comment” before tweets do not take on meanings of their own. Often, retweeting something “without comment” can indicate an unwillingness to comment due to an either enthusiastic support for or disapproval of the content of the original tweet.   read more »

As you might have seen from our home page, the Digital Media Law Project [FN] today released our Guide to the Internal Revenue Service Decision-Making Process under Section 501(c)(3) for Journalism and Publishing Non-Profit Organizations. The Guide is intended to demystify the standards applied by the IRS in determining whether a journalism-oriented non-profit is entitled to a federal tax exemption.

Many new journalism ventures consider forming as non-profit corporations. This should come as no surprise in the current market, where making a profit in the news business remains a dubious proposition even for mainstream outlets. As of December 2011, the number of clients who had contacted our legal referral service, the Online Media Legal Network, for help forming non-profit organizations was about twice the number looking to form traditional for-profit businesses.   read more »

So this case slipped by me when it first came down in January, but it raises my ire enough to come back to a bit late. It's Sandholm v. Kuecker, the Illinois Supreme Court's attempt to make sense of the state's anti-SLAPP statute, and it's an impressively terrible piece of work. In it, the Court introduced what amounts to a mind-reader approach: If the plaintiff has a pure heart and really believes he's been wronged, then the anti-SLAPP law won't stand in the way.

The facts in Sandholm are pretty basic. A bunch of parents were dissatisfied with the local high school basketball coach/athletic director, so they spent a couple of months mounting a campaign to get him fired. Once the dust settled, the embattled coach brought this defamation case.

It gets interesting for my purposes because the defendant-parents brought Illinois' anti-SLAPP law into play. The Illinois statute, 735 Ill. Comp. Stat. 110/15, in the universe of all anti-SLAPP laws, is already on the narrower side, limited to some kind of broadly-defined government-participation speech. According to the statute, speech/petition/etc. activities are "immune from liability, regardless of intent or purpose, except when not genuinely aimed at procuring favorable government action, result, or outcome."   read more »

The All-Party Intellectual Property Group (APIP) in the United Kingdom recently announced that it is taking on an arduous task: “conduct[ing] an inquiry into the role of government in protecting and promoting intellectual property.”

The APIP is soliciting thoughts on the UK’s current IP policy by asking organizations to respond to six topical, but broad questions, like "What should the objective of IP policy be?" and "What changes to the machinery of government do you believe would deliver better IP policy outcomes?"  Most importantly for our purposes, it also addresses the issue of digital media: “There have been numerous attempts to update the IP framework in the light of changes brought about by the digital environment. How successful have these been and what lessons can be learnt form these for policy developments?"

The end goal of the APIP’s inquiry appears to focus less on what the UK's IP policy is and more on how it is shaped - where and how the government creates and refines the administration of IP in Britain.  The APIP’s chair, MP John Whittingdale, notes in the announcement that “[t]here have been numerous reviews of IP policy in the last ten years but little examination has taken place of how Government itself promotes and develops the protection of Intellectual Property Rights.”

But reviewing IP policy has become something of a habit in Britain.  In fact, the UK Parliament has published four government-commissioned reports on IP policy within six years, which are strikingly repetitive in their recommended policy changes.   read more »

Thanks to its ongoing war against the drug cartels, Mexico is one of the most dangerous places in the world for a journalist to work. 

Reporters are routinely threatened, attacked, and killed if they report on crime.  Local law enforcement is often in the cartels' pockets, leaving journalists with little protection.  Over the past three years, Mexico has climbed to number 8 on the Committee to Protect Journalists' 2011 "Impunity Index," which tallies the unsolved murders of journalists around the world.  And that's to say nothing of those who are murdered after commenting on crime via social media – an alarming trend in recent years.  Is it any surprise that the local press often ignores crime reporting entirely, for fear of reprisal from the cartels?

Thus, last week saw some excellent news: The Mexican Senate on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment that would federalize criminal attacks on journalists.  McClatchy reports that under the amendment, journalists would no longer be at the mercy of quite possibly corrupt local cops, but could instead turn to the federal authorities, who have a much better reputation re: corruption, for law enforcement.     read more »

If there is a polar opposite to organizations like ours, it is the intellectual property troll.  And in the IP troll heirarchy, one of the trolliest has long been Righthaven, the self-described "pre-eminent copyright enforcer" that sued hundreds of bloggers and other Internet denizens apparently as part of its business model.  If the DMLP, the EFF, Public Citizen, and the like are the Justice League, Righthaven would be in the Secret Society of Supervillians.

So it is with no small amount of glee I pass along the news that Righthaven appears to have finally run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

On Tuesday, Judge Phillip Pro of the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada signed an order transferring all of Righthaven's intellectual property – some 278 copyright registrations – to a court-appointed receiver, who will auction them off to pay the fees that Righthaven owes its creditors, including defendants who defeated Righthaven in court.  Righthaven owes $186,680 in debts, reports the Las Vegas Sun, but it claims it has no cash to repay them.   read more »