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A bill pending in the New York Legislature would allow the public to photograph, videotape, and audio record public meetings in New York, providing better access to government deliberations and information. It would impose two minor conditions: the photographing or recording activity must not be disruptive, and the public body holding the meeting can regulate where equipment and personnel are located in the room. The bill is an amendment to section 103 of the New York Open Meetings Law, which gives the public a right of access to the meetings of a large number of government bodies at the state and local level. 

Judicial decisions in New York have already indicated that the public may use unobtrusive recording devices in public meetings and have influenced Missouri and North Dakota to provide the same recording right. In Mitchell v. Board of Education of Garden City Union Free School District, 113 A.D.2d 924 (N.Y. App. Div. 1985), the court reasoned that allowing the public to use recording devices at public meetings may provide a better way to document what transpires at the meetings than merely using pen and paper. The court expressed that

[a] contemporaneous recording of a public meeting is undoubtedly a more reliable, accurate and efficient means of memorializing what is said at the proceeding. Once the information and comments are conveyed to the public, it should be of no consequence that they may subsequently be repeated, by means of replay, to those who were unable to attend.   read more »

“Photography is not a crime, it’s a First Amendment right,” proclaims the title of photojournalist Carlos Miller’s blog.  Nonetheless, a jury found Miller guilty of obstructing traffic and resisting arrest without violence during his encounter last year with five Miami police officers that he photographed on a public street.  As a result, Miami County Court Judge Jose Fernandez sentenced him to one year of probation,100 hours of community service, anger management lessons, and over $500 in court fees, well in excess of the three months probation the prosecutor had been seeking.

Miller was arrested on February 20, 2007, after he saw the police questioning a man "in a gravel construction area between the road and the sidewalk," according to a post Miller made a few days later on Democratic Underground, a liberal online forum.  (The post does not indicate how the construction affected traffic along the street.)  When Miller, who was also standing in the gravel area, started to photograph the police, they told Miller to move along.  Miller said he refused, arguing that it was a public street, and continued to shoot photos of the police.  The police then escorted him across the street and, according to Miller, forcibly arrested him.   read more »

News reports (here, here) indicate that New Jersey Superior Court Judge Jamie S. Perri dismissed Barbara Bauer's defamation lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation yesterday. In what appears to have been an oral ruling from the bench, the court relied on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230), which protects providers and users of interactive computer services from state-law tort liability for publishing the statements of third parties, to dismiss Bauer's claims. (For more on CDA 230, see our Primer on Immunity and Liability for Third-Party Content Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act).   read more »

Last week, Global Voices held a summit in Budapest, Hungary for its members and the wider community of bloggers, activists, technologists, journalists and others from around the world. Called the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008, the two day event focused on the topic of "Citizen Media & Citizenhood."

As David Sasaki notes, the summit was held to address questions such as:   read more »

LoHud.com, an online news site operated by The Journal News that focuses on New York's Lower Hudson Valley, reported on Friday that a Westchester County judge has ruled that it must turn over the names of three pseudonymous posters to former House Representative Richard Ottinger and his wife, June Ottinger. According to the report, Ottinger and his wife subpoenaed The Journal News asking for identifying information for posters to the site's Westchester and Mamaroneck community forums going by the psuedonyms "SAVE10543," "hadenough," and "aoxomoxoa." The posters allegedly made statements accusing the Ottingers of unsavory conduct in the course of a neighborhood dispute over their construction of a house in the Orienta, NY waterfront community. 

The Journal News moved to quash the subpoena,  but the court ruled that the newspaper had to turn over the requested information.  Although the details are still sketchy, the court appears to have applied the standard for protecting the First Amendment right to anonymous speech set forth in Dendrite v. Doe, 775 A.2d 756 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2001). We are trying to get the underlying court documents, and we'll update this post and our database entry, Ottinger v. The Journal News, when we have more information.    read more »

Following on the heels of a Virginia lawyer being sanctioned for improperly using a subpoena to silence a critic, we hear about a lawyer in California who is threatening to use a meritless lawsuit to force Julia Forte, who runs a forum for consumer complaints about telemarketers, to remove user-submitted comments that are critical of his client.

Paul Alan Levy at the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which represents Forte, has the story:

In a recent series of demands, a purveyor of “nutraceuticals” called mynutritionstore.com threatened to sue Julia Forte over consumer criticisms appearing on her web site 800notes.com, a forum for identification and discussion of telemarketers based on their phone numbers.  (The specific dispute is summarized here)  My Nutrition Store’s expressed concern was that the comments about it show up in Google searches.   read more »

“Laws are like sausages. You should never watch them being made.” This adage, generally attributed to Otto von Bismarck, rings true to anyone who has had the opportunity to watch Congress make public policy. Just tune into C-SPAN sometime for a taste.

Across the pond in England, a website, TheyWorkForYou.com (TWFY), aims to change this by offering a new service that allows users to watch archived BBC coverage of parliamentary debates and tag the video.

The tagging solves a big problem: there is currently no way to search the video to find the speaker or topic you are interested in. TWFY is crowdsourcing the work, allowing visitors to mark the moment in the video when a speaker begins by pressing a big red button. They call this activity "time-stamping" and provide incentives to compete with others by displaying the names of the top time-stampers and giving away promotional hoodies to the top time-stampers. The time-stamping synchronizes the video with the transcript and makes the video much more useful by allowing users to search the video according to their interests.   read more »

After passing state bill H7422 last week, Rhode Island is set to join the growing list of states – including Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Oregon – that have strengthened their freedom of information laws in the past year. The bill, which contains several reforms of the state's open records practices, awaits only Governor Don Carcieri's signature before it will come into law.

From a citizen media perspective, the bill's most useful upgrade of Rhode Island's existing FOI law is that it will bar agencies from requiring that requestors provide personally identifiable information or specific reasons for their request. If passed, these provisions will help prevent agencies from denying open records requests based upon the characteristics of the individual requestor. For instance, it would be more difficult for an agency to refuse an open records request from a citizen speaker who has been known to criticize the state government.

The bill offers several other reforms, including:   read more »

According to a new report by the World Information Access (“WIA”) Project, 64 independent bloggers have been arrested since 2003, suggesting governments around the world are growing more aware of blogs and more likely to act to silence bloggers.

In the report, WIA researchers write that they used Google and LexisNexis to find arrests of bloggers who were unaffiliated with news organizations.  The researchers found that the number of reported arrests appeared to increase over the years, with just five arrests during 2003, but totaling 36 in 2007.  Arrests were most frequent in China (11), Egypt (13), and Iran (8), and overall Asia and the Middle East accounted for the lion’s share of WIA’s data.  But western nations were not blameless – researchers recorded a blogger arrest in each of Britain, Canada, and France, and three arrests in the U.S. as well (Josh Wolf, Jack McClellan, and Daniel Aljughaifi).  On the whole, WIA reports that the arrested bloggers tended to be males between the ages of 21 and 45, and the durations of their arrests ranged from a few hours to eight years.

The researchers observe that blogger arrests seem to increase during “times of political uncertainty,” noting for example that most of Egypt’s arrests took place during its 2007 elections.  The researchers predict that 2008 will likely see a further increase in the arrests of bloggers, as China, Iran, and Pakistan all have elections this year.   read more »

A federal magistrate judge in New Hampshire has sanctioned Clifford Shoemaker, a Virginia attorney, for abusing the legal process by issuing a subpoena to Kathleen Seidel. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v. Bayer, in which the plaintiffs Lisa and Seth Sykes sought to link exposure to mercury to their son's autism. (For more on her statements about the lawsuit, see my previous post: Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation.)   read more »

I am at the Carnegie-Knight Conference on the Future of Journalism hosted by the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, & Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.  This is my third conference in three weeks, and I think I have reached my limit on conferences.  These three very different conferences, however, are excellent examples of the various approaches being studied (and in some instances, implemented) to ensure that good journalism survives the transition to new media.

The first was the Journalism that Matters (New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs) conference at the University of Minnesota. This was a participatory affair full of independent journalists, placebloggers, and other citizen media types who are leading the charge of bringing quality journalism and conversation to their communities.  The energy and enthusiasm at this "unconference" was palpable, and I came away quite invigorated -- and optimistic -- that journalism would thrive (and is thriving in some places) on the Internet.    read more »

In a rare Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) decision, the Supreme Court recently held in Taylor v. Sturgell that an individual's failed FOIA request does not preclude similar requests from related individuals. In doing so, the court rejected the legal doctrine of "virtual representation," which would have prevented a FOIA requestor from seeking judicial relief if he had a "close relationship" with a party who had previously litigated the same FOIA request.   read more »

Singapore officials Monday amended the charge against blogger Gopalan Nair, a U.S. citizen who blogs from Fremont, California, accusing him of insulting a public official for his criticism of Singaporean Judge Belinda Ang that he published in his blog, Singapore Dissident, last month. The original charge had asserted that Nair insulted Ang in an email.

In late May 2008, Nair, a former Singaporean lawyer before he emigrated to the U.S., attended a sentencing hearing in the defamation trial of two members of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party. The defendants had been found guilty of libeling former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew’s son. Lee Kuan Yew, whom Nair frequently criticized in his blog, testified at the hearing.

In his May 29, 2008 blog entry, Nair wrote that Ang, who presided over the hearing, "prostitut[ed] herself during the entire proceedings, by being nothing more than an employee of Mr. Lee Kuan Yew and his son and carrying out their orders." In another blog entry, Nair challenged Lee Kuan Yew to charge him with defamation, writing "I am now within your jurisdiction.... What are you going to do about it?" On the evening of May 31, Singaporean police arrested Nair in his hotel and put him in solitary confinement until he was released on bail on June 5.   read more »

Last week some reporters, politicos, and bloggers may have mourned the end of the endless presidential primary season. But it's not like political mudslinging is now going to end. Indeed, in ancticipation of the focus on the general election battle, in the muddy backwaters of the Internet – in forums, blog comments, email chain letters and listservs – defamatory statements are being bandied about in hopes that some of the reputation damaging misinformation will enter the zeitgeist of the electorate to sway public opinion about the candidates one way or another.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported on the trend, noting that Snopes.com and PolitiFact.com have not only been tracking the smear campaigns against the presumptive nominees but also determining the veracity of the claims. Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, similarly analyzes the veracity of statements made by parties or campaigns themselves. So as to not add to the clutter of misinformation on the web, I’ll let you find some of the best calumny that have been floated around the web yourself.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe in his article Drive-by Defamation suggests this kind of mudslinging has been going on since the founding. He writes that
  read more »

Last week, the Associated Press ("AP") sent a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Rogers Cadenhead, the founder of Drudge Retort, a liberal alternative to (and parody of) the well-known Drudge Report, demanding that he remove six user-submitted blog entries and one user comment on the site that contained quotations from AP articles. Today, the New York Times reported that AP was reconsidering its request while it creates a set of guidelines for bloggers and websites that excerpt AP material.

The Drudge Retort is a community site similar to Digg and Reddit, allowing its users to contribute blog entries, comments, and links to interesting news articles. According to Cadenhead, none of the six posts republished the full text of an AP story; instead, each contained quotes ranging in length from 33 to 79 words (although the posts have been removed, Cadenhead has provided a summary of them here).   read more »

In an interesting counterpoint to Prince’s latest takedown exploits – see Sam’s recent posts – rock band Metallica recently “ear spanked” its management for demanding that websites take down reviews of unreleased Metallica songs. While the reviews are back online after the short downtime, the dispute raises copyright issues worth further discussion.

Last Wednesday, June 4, Metallica representatives hosted an invitation-only listening party in London for U.K. music writers, previewing six of the band’s new songs. Several attendees promptly posted their impressions about the new songs online. QPrime, Metallica’s management company, just as promptly told at least four sites – Metal Hammer, Rock Sound, Classic Rock, and The Quietus – to remove the reviews. The sites complied.   read more »

I'll be at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the next two days at a conference for the winners of the Knight News Challenge. CMLP was a lucky recipient of a Knight News Challenge award in 2007. The conference, which Knight plans to make an annual event, is being hosted by MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (which, incidentally, also won a News Challenge award last year).

It has been a fascinating day and a half so far, with presentations by both MIT researchers and Knight award winners, such as Adrian Holovaty, who showed off EveryBlock, an impressive aggregator and filter of local news by location, and Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger.

I won't even pretend to provide comprehensive coverage of this conference, especially when some of the best conference bloggers on the planet are here. For "live" coverage, you can't do better than Ethan Zuckerman and Amy Gahran. Ethan has several insightful posts up already (see here and here) and Amy is putting her fingers to the test by "live tweeting" at amylive.   read more »

All right copyright geeks, it's time to do some more hypothesizing on the Prince/Radiohead/YouTube flap I blogged about in my previous post, Prince, Radiohead, and the Bootlegging Provision of the Copyright Act. Readers posted great comments that merit some elaboration in this post. The idea here is not to provide any sure answers (because I don't have them), but to raise some questions for further discussion. If you are not a copyright lawyer, you'll have to excuse the technical bent; there's just no way to deal with these questions without getting a little esoteric.

To recap, previously I discussed whether the mystery bootlegger who recorded and posted Prince's cover of Radiohead's "Creep" at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival might have violated the anti-bootlegging provision of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 1101 and whether sending a DMCA takedown notice was an appropriate legal response. The next day, Eric Goldman of the Technology & Marketing Law Blog, posted the following intriguing comment:   read more »

Last Wednesday, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gave the keynote speech at the annual Games for Change convention at the Parsons The New School For Design in New York City. In her speech, O'Connor announced her project Our Courts, which she is developing with Arizona State University (ASU) and Georgetown University Law Center. For the project, O'Connor is collaborating with James Gee, a professor at ASU, to design an online game that teaches students civic lessons about the American judiciary.

Justice O'Connor got involved in part because of the potential she sees for online tools to promote youth participation in political life. According to Wired:   read more »

In late May, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issued an opinion in Utah Lighthouse Ministry v. Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, 2008 WL 22043807 (10th Cir. May 29, 2008). With this decision, the Tenth Circuit joins an expanding group of federal appeals courts holding that federal trademark law does not prohibit a noncommercial website's use of a trademark for purposes of commenting on or criticising the trademark owner. See, e.g., Bosley Medical Institute, Inc. v. Kremer, 403 F.3d 672 (9th Cir. 2005); Taubman v. Webfeats, 319 F.3d 770 (6th Cir. 2003); Falwell v. Lamparello, 420 F.3d 309 (4th Cir. 2005). The case is not your usual "gripe site" case, but instead involves a more subtle parody of an ideological opponent's website.   read more »