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“Three can keep a secret, if two are dead.” – Benjamin Franklin

Private thoughts are a dying breed. You may recall the story of the city government of Bozeman, Montana, which mandated that job applicants turn over their social networking passwords. Another “give me (voluntary) access to your private life or I will hurt you” case has appeared, this time in a Houston’s Restaurant in New Jersey.     read more »

This week brings word of two new cases testing whether state shield laws apply to user comments posted on news websites.  In Texas, a Taylor County District Court judge ruled that the Abilene Reporter-News may refrain from disclosing the identities of commenters who posted comments to articles about a murder victim and the teenager charged in connection with his death. According to a follow-up story by the Reporter-News, defense counsel in the criminal case had sought the commenters' identities to make sure they weren't chosen as jurors in the trial, which began last week.   read more »

Earlier this month, the United States House of Representatives passed H.R. 2765, an amendment to Title 28 of the US Code that would “prohibit recognition and enforcement of foreign defamation judgments.”  The bill goes beyond H.R. 6146, which passed through the House last year in a number of ways (elucidated below).  Both bills were introduced by Rep. Steven Cohen.   read more »

As part of today's launch of YouTube's Reporters' Center, which features how-to videos on news reporting, the Citizen Media Law Project created a short video addressing some of the newsgathering and privacy issues people are likely to face as they head out with camera in hand to cover the news.  The two-part series of newsgathering videos (the first video is embedded below, the second video should be up later this week) describe the legal and practical issues you may encounter as you gather documents, take photographs or video, and interview others. 

The YouTube initiative aims to educate budding videographers on a wide array of issues associated with news reporting, such as how to fact check stories, avoid breaking the law while reporting, and adhere to journalistic principles.  According to YouTube's press release:   read more »

What do Harry Potter books, The Blair Witch Project, Razor scooters, the Ford Focus and Hebrew National hot dogs have in common? In the late 1990s and 2000s, these brands -- or, more precisely, the marketers behind them -- were at the cutting edge of a new advertising technique: "buzz marketing." A decade later, the government's efforts to control such marketing techniques may have impact on blogs and other citizen media.

Inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, the idea behind buzz marketing, as explained by BusinessWeek magazine in July 2001, was to eschew traditional advertisements, replacing them with "influencers" whose role is to promote a brand to a particular group of people. These "influencers" can be paid in the traditional sense, or instead they can be offered special perks and benefits, or given free samples for their own use, or to give away to others. They key is that the "influencers" do not reveal the arrangement, so that their use and interest in a product seems to be a genuine personal preference.   read more »

Although the Smiths' situation is unusual, it is not unprecedented, and it serves as a reminder of the vulnerability of content you choose to post online.  While it's difficult to stop a bad actor set on simply stealing your work, you can obtain a measure of control by licensing your online content. Licensing your work in a clear manner can help good-faith users know what's OK and what's not.   read more »

The Iranian government has been busy in its efforts to smother free expression.  The regime has raided school meetings, newsrooms, political offices, blocked social networks, and slowed the Internet to a crawl. Yesterday, the regime added the soccer pitch to the list of areas that have been soiled in defense of the double plus good democratic "election" results.  This should remind us all of the power of athlete speech and the heavy-handed means governments and sports associations use to ensure silence.   read more »

Back in May, the CMLP joined Public Citizen, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in submitting an amicus curiae brief in support of Yahoo!'s petition for rehearing in the Barnes v. Yahoo! case.  On Monday, we got some good news when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order amending its previous decision.   read more »

Today, Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic submitted an amicus curiae brief urging the New Hampshire Supreme Court to defend the First Amendment rights of a website that covers news about the mortgage industry. The Cyberlaw Clinic, with the assistance of local counsel Paul Apple of Drummond Woodsum & MacMahon in Portsmouth, NH, filed the friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Citizen Media Law Project and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) in the case of The Mortgage Specialists, Inc. v. Implode-Explode Heavy Industries, Inc.    read more »

Let's assume you are employed, use Facebook, have a decent grasp of privacy settings, and want to occassionally express your opinion. Welcome to Facebook Club. The first rule of Facebook Club is “Do not friend your employers.” The second rule of Facebook Club is “DO NOT friend your employers.” We all know about the tragic consequences that can follow the violation of these simple rules. One click on a friendship request turns your computer into an Orwellian telescreen and suddenly your boss can monitor your “Am I bedridden or at the ballgame” status.

But the government of Bozeman, Montana elected to bypass the covert survellience of social networks. Instead, it opted for the overt. Until last Friday, all applicants for city jobs in Bozeman were required to “list any and all current … memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs, or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.” Oh, and after you list your username, be sure to give us your password.   read more »

The music and motion picture industries suffered a setback in their global anti-piracy carpet-bombing campaign on June 10, when the French Conseil Constitutionnel struck down the internet-banning portions of the HADOPI law. The court held that "free access to public communication services online" was a fundamental human right and could not be stripped from users (read: merely accused illegal downloaders/ pirates … arrr) without case-by-case judicial approval.  Industry brass had hoped that the French legislation would be a successful prototype, a terrifying copyright super-weapon free from the burdensome moving parts of due process or judicial oversight. But it was not to be. French Socialists prevented the deployment of the policy, and bought French Internet users a brief reprieve.   read more »

Another week, another restriction of student speech.  S.K. Johnson, the principal of Orange High School in (where else?) Orange, California, has confiscated copies of a student magazine prior to publication.  His main complaint about the latest issue of PULP concerns the cover, which features a faux full-back tattoo with the publication’s name and a picture of a panther, the school mascot.  The principal alleges that the image promotes gang life and might encourage students to get tattoos, singling out the use of Old English font to create “gangster-style writing.”   read more »

For years, the Iranian government has had to deal with the pesky problem of citizens trying to use the Internet to access information from the outside world. The powers that be usually go about solving this problem in a hamfisted way, banning huge swaths of the internet or shutting down access entirely. But unsophisticated filters, that block searches as basic as "woman," can and have been defeated by Iranians employing both proxy sites and anti-filtering software (interesting side note, one such package was authored by the Falun Gong.)   read more »

Dear friends, let’s begin with a little story about the death of liberty at Rome. When Mark Antony had the chance, he proscribed (read: murdered) the orator Cicero. To emphasize the effective silencing of his largest critic, the triumvir had Cicero’s head and hands put on public display. If you think we have progressed from mutilations and ostentatious displays of State power, note the case of Alex D. Phillips. Now this young man is no Cicero. But the twenty-year old is just as dead, as far as the Internet is concerned.   read more »

In Hawaii, a 22-year-old former hospital worker was recently sentenced to one year in jail, five years probation and 200 hours of community service on a felony charge of "unauthorized computer access to confidential records" (apparently under Haw. Rev. Stat. §708-892, Computer damage in the first degree) after she obtained a patient's records stating that he was HIV-positive and gave them to the patient's sister-in-law, who posted them on her MySpace page. The prosecutor had recommended a sentence of only 30 days, but Circuit Judge Randal Lee reportedly said during sentencing that "Young people in this society have to realize that the Internet is not something that can be taken advantage of. You can't use the Internet to do unlawful conduct."

Although the patient in the Hawaii case his since died, a lawyer for his estate said that he planned to file a civil lawsuit against the former hospital worker who may face liability for the publication of private facts. (Another civil suit stemming from posting of personal medical information is Mason v. Grey, detailed in the Legal Threats database.)   read more »

In a recent decision, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Colorado District Court’s rejection of a student’s First Amendment and Equal Protection claims over a forced apology resulting from her valedictory address.  The case, Corder v. Lewis Palmer School District No. 38, No. 08-1293, 2009 U.S. App. LEXIS 11668, results from an unwritten School District rule requiring students to submit their valedictory addresses for content review prior to giving the speech.  Erica Corder, one of fifteen valedictorians selected based on their 4.0 GPA, submitted a thirty-second speech, which contained no religious content, to the principal of Lewis Palmer High School for content approval.  However, during the graduation ceremony she presented a different speech, telling the students about Jesus Christ and encouraging them to “find out more about the sacrifice He made for you.”  As a result of the speech, she was denied her diploma until she issued an apology email, including the statement: “I realize that, had I asked ahead of time, I would not have been allowed to say what I did.”  Corder issued the apology email, including the preceding statement, and was awarded her diploma.     read more »

This week, PBS MediaShift's Mark Glaser laid out his ten commandments for local newspapers that want to survive in the digital age. Sixth on his list of ten tweets was "smart multimedia." "Don't do it just to do it," Glaser says. "Use the right medium to tell the right story." But what does "smart multimedia" look like, exactly? (If I had to guess, probably a lot like this.)

Most reporters today have been told in newsrooms and in journalism schools that they need to incorporate audio and video into their storytelling. And with the help of graphic and web designers they can put together some really amazing stuff. But reaching the "smart multimedia" point can be tough, especially since the line between too little multimedia and multimedia overkill is so subjective.    read more »

The raging villagers of the twitterverse were busy in April. The cruelest month gave witness to #savejon and #amazonfail, campaigns against corporate bullying and intolerance, respectively.  However, both movements likely put the black hat on the wrong party.  These cybermaulings should frighten us all and spur us to let a little Ockham into our hearts.

The #savejon folks were trying to raise awareness about the legal difficulties of Jon Engle, a graphic designer. Jon claimed that plagiarists had snatched his work from his Logopond showcase and uploaded them to StockArt.com. The evil company then billed Jon for $18k for the use of his own images.  The story flashed across Twitter and in mere moments the champions of the oppressed were lending moral and financial support, organizing boycotts and sending the occasional death-threat.   read more »

Don't believe the anti-hype around Twitter (cross-posted from Legal Tags). Twitter hype punctured by study, reports the BBC on a recent Harvard B school finding: The median user has written only one tweet, and "the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets." As though it sealed Twitter's fate, the BBC adds:

Research by Nielsen also suggests that many people give the service a try, but rarely or never return. Earlier this year, the firm found that more than 60% of US Twitter users failed to return the following month. "The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen data says very, very few people listen consistently," Mr Heil told BBC News

Rather than taking the study as a condemnation, though, I'd suggest that the fact Twitter works despite the large number of "unproductive" users is a sign of success. More power to the Twitter team for creating a tool that allows so many people to try it so easily that the seemingly small percentage who get value out of it can find and continue using it. We should be celebrating what happens when infrastructure is cheap enough that we can accept that 60% just throw it away (even assuming all those non-tweeters aren't using the service to listen).   read more »

Tony La Russa's lawsuit against Twitter, which we first published in the Legal Threats Database back on May 29, seems to have hit the mainstream over the past week. Following the path of the case through the Internet and into the mainstream media provides a fascinating case study in the the possibilities of Twitter and other social media platforms for disseminating and amplifying a message. (And indicates that I should revise my previous Cluetrain addendums to include sports managers.)

It all started back on May 21st, when this client alert from law firm Howard Rice caught the attention of those of us in the CMLP offices. (The alert may, in fact, have been sparked by this post over at SFGate, which seems to have flown under the radar when first posted.) By the end of the following week, the Legal Threats entry on La Russa v. Twitter, Inc. was live on the CMLP website. That same day, Twitter user @socialmediainfo sent out a tweet about the case, with a link back to our entry. This was soon followed by tweets from @Jenn822 and @FO_Brooks relaying information about the case.   read more »