CMLP International Blog

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 »

Does the European Union offer web hosts any protection from liability for the content of third parties, a la section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) or the "safe-harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?  This looks to be a key question for four current and former Google executives, as Italian prosecutors prepare to launch criminal charges against them over a video hosted by Google Video.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported last week that the prosecutors are looking to charge the executives with defamation and invasion of privacy, both of which are criminal claims in Italy, due to Google Video's hosting of a clip featuring the abuse of a teenager who has Down syndrome. Reuters reports that in the video, which was recorded in Turin, Italy, in May or June 2006, four high schoolers are seen "taunting" and "humiliating" the youth with Down syndrome.

An Italian Down syndrome advocacy group alerted Google to the clip's presence on the site in September 2006, and Google removed it "within hours." The WSJ wrote that sources close to the prosecutors said that the charges against the executives would be premised on Google "allegedly failing to adequately control the content of the site."  The four teenagers are facing separate charges.   read more »

Admittedly, Max Mosley's lawsuit against an English tabloid is not the heartland of citizen media, but who can resist posting about a story that involves "sadomasochistic orgies, car racing, and Nazis," as Bill McGeveran puts it.  Mosley, the head of the governing body for Formula One racing, sued the News of the World for reporting in March 2008 that he organized a “sick Nazi orgy” with five prostitutes and for posting a surreptitiously recorded video of the party on its website. Mosley claimed that the S&M extravaganza had no Nazi theme and that recording and publishing the video and story violated his right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights. England's High Court ruled in Mosley's favor yesterday and awarded him £60,000 in compensatory damages and  £450,000 in attorneys' fees (ouch!). BBC news has a good article providing lots of background.

The big issue in the case was whether details about the S&M orgy were a matter of legitimate public concern. English law (or the English court's interpretation of the European Convention), like U.S. law, recognizes a defense to a publication of private facts claim when the matter publicized is newsworthy. The tabloid argued, reasonably enough, that a public figure holding a Nazi-themed sex party was newsworthy, especially when this public figure's father was notorious fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley argued that there was no Nazi element to the party and thus his private consensual sexual acts were not newsworthy.   read more »

Back in April, I blogged about New York's Libel Terrorism Protection Act, which bars the enforcement of foreign defamation judgments unless a New York court has found that the foreign court proceeding provided at least as much protection for freedom of speech and press in that case as would be provided by both the United States and New York Constitutions. "Libel terrorism" (a term I am not a big fan of) describes the practice of libel plaintiffs who pursue claims against American publishers in foreign courts that offer few, if any, of the protections for speech available in the United States.    read more »

Online free speech has never been well received by the Iranian government, but now Tehran is just one step away from making blogging on certain topics into a capital crime. 

Under a new bill approved by Iran's parliament, those convicted of "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy" will now be eligible to receive the death penalty. The International Freedom of Expression eXchange (“IFEX”), a free speech watchdog, writes that the bill passed on first reading by a vote of 180 to 29, with 10 abstentions. Under Iranian law, the Council of Guardians must now examine the bill to determine if it complies with Sharia and the Iranian constitution. If approved within ten days by a majority of the council, the bill will become law.

Agence France-Presse reported last week that the bill lists several crimes which are already punishable by death in Iran, including rape, armed robbery, and apostasy, in addition to the new criminalization of blogging.

Those convicted of these crimes "should be punished as 'mohareb' (enemy of God) and 'corrupt on the earth'," the text says.

Under Iranian law the standard punishments for these two crimes are "hanging, amputation of the right hand and then the left foot as well as exile".

Agence France-Presse added that the bill says the sentences for such crimes "cannot be commuted, suspended or changed".   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 »

“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 »

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 »

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 »

Vuestar, a patent-holding company from Singapore that describes itself as "the Pioneer of visual search," is asserting patent rights in the technology that enables websites to link to other webpages using an image rather than text. According to Ars Technica, the firm recently has been sending invoices to companies that it believes are using its patented technology. The impact of this patent claim could be huge -- as another report puts it, "almost every site on the Internet" uses this technology to link photos and graphics to other webpages. This Vuestar logo is a good example (and, no, it doesn't link to Stuff on My Cat.com):

Vuestar claims to hold patents in Singapore, Australia, and the United States. The U.S. patent, titled "Method of locating web-pages by utilising visual images," was filed in 2001 and granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2006. While the patent claim itself appears to describe an image-based search engine technology (which sounds very similar to Google Image Search), Vuestar apparently believes that the claim extends further. The FAQ section of Vuestar's website makes clear that the company views ordinary website image-linking practices as within the scope of its patent.   read more »