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The Arizona Star reports that the Tucson Greyhound Park has dropped its defamation lawsuit against blogger Karyn Zoldan of the End Tucson Greyhound Racing website and blog. Both parties agreed to dismissal of the suit, but Zoldan did not pay anything in return for the settlement. She did, however, make some minor changes to statements on the website, which apparently satisfied John Munger, the lawyer who represented the track in the lawsuit.

The track filed the lawsuit in Arizona state court in January 2008.  According to court documents, the dispute revolves around postings on Zoldan's site claiming that tens of thousands of dogs had died at the track during its sixty-year history, that one dog was "ruthlessly euthanized," and that the park had not been paying its taxes. The track also sued a number of other individuals and organizations, alleging that they were associated with Zoldan and the disputed content. In May, the track dismissed its claims against one of these defendants, the Greyhound Protection League, according to the Greyhound Network News.    read more »

Kevin Cogill, a blogger on Antiquiet, a site that provides "uncensored music reviews and interviews," was arrested yesterday at his home near Los Angeles on suspicion of violating federal copyright law after he allegedly posted nine songs from the unreleased -- and highly-anticipated -- Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy."

Here is how his fellow Antiquiet bloggers described the situation facing Cogill, who posts under the name Skwerl:

Axl Rose didn’t call the FBI, but today it became more than obvious that someone really was serious about that threat. Johnny and I sat on a pew in the U.S. District Court building in Downtown L.A. as Skwerl sat behind glass, in handcuffs, and still in his jammies since the FBI arrested him at 6:59 this morning. . . . 

The U.S.A. requested bail be set at $50,000. Skwerl’s court-appointed attorney thankfully called B.S. on that one and recommended his bail be $5,000 and that this case is the kind of case where the defendant should have been summoned to appear instead of being accosted by five F.B.I. agents at his home in a quiet neighborhood.

Interestingly, the Judge chimed in to add that he had actually recommended that it be a summons case and wasn’t sure why it went down as it did. He also dismissed the idea presented by the U.S.A. that squirrels be forbidden to use the internet.  In the end, the Judge ruled that his bail be in the form of a signature bond at $10,000.    read more »

The Guardian reports that a Turkish court has lifted the ban on YouTube in that country, imposed by an Ankara court in May 2008 after it determined that certain videos posted on the popular video-sharing site insulted Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Turkey has two notable laws restricting freedom of speech on the Internet -- (1) Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which criminalizes the denigration of Turkishness, the Republic, and the foundation and institutions of the state; and (2) Internet Publication Law No. 5651, which regulates online content and includes a prohibition on insulting the memory of Ataturk (additional information on 5651).     read more »

I just updated one of the more frivolous entries in our legal threats database, which has now spurred a federal lawsuit.  While it is barely worth blogging about, I thought it might be valuable as a cautionary tale for those who believe sending cease-and-desist letters is a no-lose proposition.   

The entry involves Jennifer Reisinger, who operates Sheboygan Spirit, a website focusing on the government and community of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Brat City Web Design, a site promoting her web development business.  The latter site contained a link to the Sheboygan Police Department (without any text or other explanation, it appears). 

On October 19, 2007, the city attorney for the City of Sheboygan sent Reisinger a cease-and-desist letter demanding that she remove the link to the police department from her site. The letter said that "maintenance of this link could be construed as having been authorized or endorsed by the City and/or its Police Department."   read more »

Privé Vegas, LLC and two of its owners sued Las Vegas-based blogger Michael Politz last week, alleging trademark infringement, dilution, and "disaparagement" under the Lanham Act, defamation, trade libel, tortious interference with business relations, and extortion. The company operates a nightclub called "Privé" in the Planet Hollywood Casino in Las Vegas.  Politz operates the TheVegasEye.com blog, which covers goings-on in the Las Vegas entertainment and hospitality industries and provides restaurant reviews and reports on celebrity sightings and the like.

According to the complaint, filed in federal district court in Nevada, Politz published a post on July 23, 2008 reporting on a lawsuit Privé brought against four former employees. In his post, Politz allegedly made false statements about the lawsuit and about management "shaking down" employees for tip money to be placed in a "Slush Fund." Cmplt. ¶ 20. At the top of his post, Politz included a graphic of  Privé's trademark (shown on the right).   read more »

A federal district court in California held on Wednesday that copyright owners must consider fair use before sending DMCA takedown notices to avoid liability for abuse of the law's procedures. The ruling is a huge victory for free speech advocates and may have far-reaching implications for the way content owners police infringement online. 

The decision is just the latest highlight in a dispute that has drawn public attention from the start.  In February 2007, Stephanie Lenz posted a video of her toddler son on YouTube. In the 29-second video, Lenz's son dances to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy," which is playing in the background. In June 2007, counsel for Universal Music sent YouTube a DMCA takedown notice pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 512(c), claiming that the video infringed its copyright in the Prince song and requested that YouTube remove it from the website. YouTube complied and notified Lenz about the takedown. Lenz sent a counter-notification pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 512(g), and the site put the video back up about six weeks later.    read more »

An Illinois appellate court has tentatively concluded that Illinois' newly enacted Citizen Participation Act, which provides immunity for speech related to certain matters of government and public concern, violates the Illinois Constitution because it allows a party to appeal the denial of a motion to dismiss under the Act before the entire case has come to a conclusion.  Mund v. Brown et al., No. 05-L-83 (Ill. App. Ct. Aug. 13, 2008).   If the court, which has asked the parties and the Illinois Attorney General to brief the issue, ultimately invalidates the right to file an interlocutory appeal, it would significantly undermine the effectiveness of this important new law.   read more »

EFF reports that U.S. District Court Judge George O'Toole has lifted the temporary restraining order that the court had issued against the three MIT students who had planned to present their research on the security vulnerabilities in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's (MBTA) transit fare payment system at DEFCON, a highly-regarded conference for hackers. The students' research grew out of a project that they had worked on for a network security class at MIT, and they had offered to share their results with the MBTA before presenting their findings at DEFCON. You can read more about the background of the case here.   read more »

Last week, the Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio, Texas upheld the trial court's dismissal of Clark High School vice-principal Anna Draker's lawsuit against two students and their parents over a fake MySpace profile. Benjamin Schreiber and Ryan Todd allegedly created a fake MySpace page for Draker in 2006, which contained her name, photo, place of employment, and explicit and graphic sexual references implying that she was a lesbian. After learning about the fake profile, Draker contacted MySpace, which promptly removed the page.

Not content to stop there, Draker sued Schreiber, Todd, and their parents, asserting claims for defamation, negligent supervision, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.  On a motion for summary judgment, the Texas trial court dismissed the defamation claim, ruling that the statements appearing in the fake profile were not defamatory as a matter of law because they asserted no facts that could be objectively verified.  The district court ruled on a separate motion that Draker's intentional infliction of emotional distress claim failed because it repackaged the same allegations as the defamation claim. Draker appealed this latter ruling only. 

The tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress may be less familiar to our readers than defamation. There are four elements of an intentional infliction of emotional distress claim:   read more »

In an effort to goad Ohio officials into making more state records available online, the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a private policy think tank, created the Center for Transparent and Accountable Government earlier this week. The center, led by former Ohio Statehouse reporter Mike Maurer, will collect and post online state and local government budgets, employee contracts, public records policies, and other information.

Claiming that Ohio lags behind other states and the federal government in the quest to make government data available online, the new center called on candidates for state office to sign a Pledge for Transparency and Accountability. By signing, candidates pledge to demand full disclosure of government activities.

The Transparency Center also launched the OhioSunshine.org wiki, on the model of the  Sunshine Review wiki created by the nonprofit Sam Adams Alliance. The wiki provides a resource for Ohio citizens seeking information from their state government without itself providing direct access to that information.   read more »

You know you've got a pretty good job when you turn to the first order of business for the day and read this:

NOW COMES Defendant, A horse walks into a bar, a.k.a. Ryan Mariner ("Mariner"), and specially appears, without having been properly served and without waiving his right to proper service, and files this Brief in Support of his Motion to Dismiss Plaintiff's Second Amended Complaint against him.

One of the John Doe defendants in the sprawling AutoAdmit litigation has come out swinging, revealing his true identity and asserting that he "has done nothing wrong." Ryan Mariner, formerly known as "A horse walks into a bar," filed a motion to dismiss on Wednesday in federal court in Connecticut, asking the court to set him free from the case, which has been going on for over a year. 

He argues that the two anonymous Yale Law students who are plaintiffs in the case have willfully failed to serve him and prosecute the action against him, despite repeated offers by his counsel to accept service of the complaint. He argues that the plaintiffs' only possible motive for continuing to name him as a defendant in their second amended complaint and yet failing to serve him "seems to be to threaten and harass him by abusing the legal system." Ouch!

Mariner opens up a surprisingly literary can of whup-ass:   read more »

A recent post on Prawfs Blawg by Professor Howard Wasserman further explores some of the questions raised in my post, Searching for Both Sides of Body Slam Video, where I discuss some of the problems with videos that document forceful arrests. Prof. Wasserman's post profiles a video depicting someone being forcibly removed from a press conference by Dino Rossi, the state of Washington GOP gubernatorial candidate, and a discussion of his recent paper, "Orwells Vision: Video and the Future of Civil Rights Enforcement," that provides an analysis of the constitutional and civil rights that videos like this one may be protecting.

The video is strikingly similar to the videos I describe in my previous post on the subject: a seemingly innocent person gets forcibly dragged out of a room while a handheld video camera captures everything. The people doing the removing look fairly unreasonable and person being removed looks like a victim. Yet, similar to the videos that capture the arrests of the bicycle riders, we don't get the whole story. We can only discern from the video that the videographer may have been asked to leave the premises and told he was trespassing on private property.    read more »

Denise Howell at Lawgarithms points us in the direction of a recent legal threat that goes right to the intersection of trademark law and freedom of speech.

Los Angeles real estate developer Barry Shy and his development company, 5th St Loft, have sued Jessica Jordan and Alan Dylan, who reside in a building developed by Shy and run the website Truedowntown, the "unofficial" site for the Shybary Grand Loft in Los Angeles.  The lawsuit, which plaintiffs filed on June 17, 2008, claims that Jordan and Dylan libeled Shy and damaged his businesses by making disparaging comments about him.   read more »

Last Wednesday, the Newspaper Tree, an online news site out of El Paso, Texas, which focuses on business, politics, and culture in the region, filed a motion objecting to an El Paso federal court's sealing of plea hearings and court documents in the pre-trial phases of a large public corruption prosecution. That same day, Judge Frank Montalvo of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ordered the government to file a response by September 5. 

In May 2008, Judge Montalvo rejected a similar motion by a community activist to open the court's proceedings, ruling that the government's interest in the integrity of its ongoing investigation and in preventing witness intimidation outweighed the public's interest in access. At that time, the court released a few documents in redacted form, but refused to provide access to plea hearings (including putting the date of such hearings on the public docket or providing transcripts), plea agreements, and affidavits filed in support of warrants in the case.    read more »

A great New York Times article last weekend drew our attention to this rather colorful legal threat and its target, Jason Fortuny, a freelance web designer, programmer, and noted (or notorious) Internet troll. In 2006, Mr. Fortuny engaged in what he called the "Craigslist Experiment," in which he posted a fake ad on Craigslist pretending to be a woman seeking a man for rough sex.  According to the Times article, over one-hundred men responded, providing photographs and contact information. Mr. Fortuny allegedly posted this material to his blog, RFJason, and Encyclopedia Dramatica (described by the New York Times as "an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore"). Mr. Fortuny disputes posting the photographs and contact information to Encyclopedia Dramatica.    read more »

On August 1, 2008, the Third Circuit Court of the Appeals issued its opinion in United States v. Wecht. The opinion is great news for citizen media creators, because the court ruled that the First Amendment confers a presumptive right of access to obtain the names of trial and prospective jurors in a criminal case prior to empanelment. U.S. v. Wecht, --- F.3d ---, 2008 WL 2940375 at *9 (3rd Cir. Aug. 1, 2008).   read more »

Even elected officials can be citizen journalists.  The New York Times has an interesting report about Representative John Culberson (R) of Texas, who took on a role normally filled by CSPAN after the House had officially adjourned for its summer recess last Friday. When Republican representatives decided to hold what Culberson called a GOP "pep rally" on the House floor, Culberson, an outspoken advocate of using online tools to communicate with constituents, broke out his mobile phone and streamed live pictures using Twitter.  (He did not film the event, however, as doing so is not permitted on the House floor.)  After the speeches were over and the representatives moved to the hall for a press conference, Culberson used his phone to record videos of it, which he later posted to his Qik account.

Interestingly, Culberson's Twitter and Qik posts apparently violate regulations of the Committee on House Administration (CHA).  According to a letter Representative Michael Capuano (D) of Massachusetts sent to CHA in June, CHA's rules have been interpreted to prohibit representatives from posting any official communications on platforms outside of the House.gov domain, such as YouTube. Capuano's letter noted that some legislators find the House.gov sites a difficult and inefficient mechanism for posting video and encouraged CHA to loosen the rules to permit posting of official video content on approved House "channels" on external sites, so long as the content is properly marked and does not otherwise conflict with House rules.   read more »

Over the next few weeks I'll be posting about various topics we cover in the CMLP's Citizen Media Legal Guide.  If you would like to read any of the previous "highlights" from the guide, you can find them here. 

Today, I'll start with the risks associated with publishing online (for information on the legal risks associated with gathering, as opposed to publishing, information, see the Newsgathering section of the CMLP's legal guide).  Every time you publish something online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video, or even a user comment, you open yourself up to potential legal liability. This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise because the Internet, after all, is available to anyone who wishes to connect to the network, and even the smallest blog or most obscure discussion forum has the potential to reach hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.

Often the legal risks are small, but not always. The risks you could face when you publish online can take a number of forms, depending on what and how you publish. This post and the legal guide sections it links to are not intended to make you an expert on media law, but merely to help you identify potential "red flags" so that when you publish something that might result in liability, you will know to be extra careful and will take the necessary steps to minimize your potential legal risks.

Let's start with the more obvious risks.   read more »

Last week, Salisbury, Maryland Police Chief Allan Webster and Joe Albero, operator of the Salisbury News blog, reached a settlement in Webster's defamation and false light lawsuit, just hours before the case was scheduled for trial. Albero reported on his blog that no money exchanged hands under the settlement, but the precise terms are not public. 

Webster filed the lawsuit in  May 2007 after Albero, who often takes local politicians to task, criticized Webster and posted information about him on the Salisbury News. The dispute revolved in part around Albero's posting of a third-party, anonymous letter addressed to Salisbury City Council Members, which expressed negative views about Webster.

In a pre-trial memorandum, Albero argued that he should not be compelled to disclose his source for the letter. He argued that the identity of the source was not relevant to the case, that Maryland's shield law protected him from having to identify his source, and that section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) immunized him from liability for posting the letter.   read more »