Week of June 5, 2009

Posted June 5th, 2009 by CMLP Staff
in

Citizen Media Law Brief

News and more from the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Week of June 5, 2009

Welcome to the Citizen Media Law Brief, a weekly newsletter highlighting recent blog posts, media law news, legal threat entries, and other new content on the Citizen Media Law Project's website. You are receiving this email because you have expressed interest in the CMLP or registered on our site, www.citmedialaw.org. If you do not wish to receive this newsletter, you can unsubscribe by following the link at the bottom of this email or by going to http://www.citmedialaw.org/newsletter/subscriptions.

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The latest from the Citizen Media Law Project blog...

Lee Baker makes his CMLP Blog debut, with an update on the BC "hacker" case.
Search Warrant Quashed in Boston College "Hacker" Case

Sam Bayard takes a look at what happens when you mix guns, huskies, camera-toting tourists, and a blog.
Tourist Video Casts Complex Light on Florida Defamation Lawsuit

Kimberley Isbell offers some thoughts on the HBS Twitter survey, inspired by Berkman Fellow Lokman Tsui's recent talk.
Signal to Noise

David Ardia sees lots of opportunities for new journalism graduates.
Journalism Graduates: It's Time to Reinvent Journalism

Kimberley Isbell reports on the fallout when Scientology and Wikis collide.
Scientology Suffers Another Setback -- This Time in Wiki Court

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Recent threats added to the CMLP database...

Comins v. VanVoorhis
Posted June 4, 2009

Remove Your Content v. Does
Posted June 3, 2009

Mason v. Grey
Posted June 3, 2009

Ascentive v. 1ShoppingCart.com
Posted June 2, 2009

Young v. New Haven Advocate
Posted June 2, 2009

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Other citizen media law news...

Web site tracks policy changes at popular sites
The Washington Post - Thurs. 06/04/09

Twitter Imposter Lawsuits Begin.  First Up to Bat: Tony La Russa
THR, Esq. - Thurs. 06/04/09

In MySpace Cases, Appellate Judges Wrestle With Possible Split
Law.com - Wed. 06/03/09

Craigslist's Forced Censorship of Erotic Ads Saves Journalism Industry
Wired/Threat Level - Tues. 06/02/09

Microsoft's Bing playing fast and loose with fair use?
ZDNet - Tues. 06/02/09

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The full(er) Brief...

"On May 21, 2009, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court quashed a search warrant for the computers, electronic equipment, and digital storage devices of a Boston College computer science student and ordered the seized items returned. Riccardo Calixte's ordeal has received quite a bit of coverage, likely in part because of the involvement of the EFF, but there are a couple of interesting points in the Court's order that are worth highlighting here. . . . Although Calixte's motion to quash the search warrant and have his property returned was denied by the Newton District Court, Justice Margot Botsford of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed that decision, quashing the search warrant and ordering that all forensic analysis be ceased and the property returned. Of particular interest is Justice Botsford's response to the Commonwealth's claim, outlined in their memo opposing Calixte's appeal, that the email might be illegal because it 'violate[d] a hypothetical internet use policy maintained by BC.' According to the EFF, this is likely the first time a state high court has addressed the central question in the (in)famous Lori Drew/MySpace suicide case - whether violation of terms of service can constitute unauthorized access to a computer system creating criminal liability. Justice Botsford firmly rejected this theory under state law, stating that such an outcome 'would dramatically expand the appropriate scope of G. L. c. 266, § 120F,' the relevant Massachusetts code provision. . . ."
Lee Baker, Search Warrant Quashed in Boston College "Hacker" Case

"A story mixing the absurd and the tragic comes to us from Florida, where Christopher Comins, an Orlando businessman, recently filed a defamation lawsuit against Matthew Frederick VanVoorhis, who publishes a wordpress blog called Public Intellectual. Comins objects to two of VanVoorhis' blog posts from June and August 2008, which reported and followed up on a truly bizarre incident that occurred in May, in which Comins shot two husky dogs believing they were wolves intimidating a group of cattle grazing on land being developed by one of his business partners. According to the Orlando Sentinel, both dogs survived, one with four gunshot wounds and the other with three. . . .  The six-minute video shows Comins shoot the dogs while a sizeable number of onlookers express increasing amounts of outrage. It also shows the dog's owner, Chris Butler, run onto the scene in a frantic effort to save the dogs. After the video appeared, an Internet backlash of sorts erupted on animal-rights websites and forums, according to the Sentinel, and there was lots of negative press coverage. . .  No less than three facebook groups sprung up decrying the shooting or showing support for the injured dogs. . .  VanVoorhis' first post, called 'Christopher Comins: Barbarian Hillbilly Dog-Assassin (w/Friends in High Places),' which embedded a copy of the tourist video, took a highly critical stance on Comins' conduct and used an almost novelistic approach to recreating the timeline of events and the participants' emotions. He sketches details with literary flair and uses an omniscient narrative voice, looking inside Comins' head. . . ."
"Since my Wikipedia post on Monday, I've been giving more thought to the question of who gets to be heard on the Internet, especially with the rising ubiquity of different social networking platforms. These thoughts were sparked in large part by two occurrences around the Harvard-verse yesterday: the release by the Harvard Business School of a recent study of Twitter usage, and yesterday's installment of the Berkman Luncheon Series, presented by Berkman Fellow Lokman Tsui. The HBS study, by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, is but the latest in a long line of studies attempting to quanitify gender differences in Internet and social media usage. Once again, the HBS study points to a conclusion that's a bit inconvenient for those of us that celebrate the promise of the Internet to lower the barriers for entry into the public debate -- women, despite making up the majority of both Internet and Twitter users, have fewer followers and thus are less likely to have their voices heard on Twitter. According to Piskorski, this differs from the typical pattern on social networking sites, where both men and women are more likely to follow updates from women. Many have raised questions regarding the conclusions of the HBS study. . . . Yet the HBS study tracks the results of at least one other investigation into the intersection of gender (and race, and socioeconomic status) and the Internet -- Matthew Hindman's recent book, The Myth of Digital Democracy. . . ."
Kimberley Isbell, Signal to Noise

"Spring is upon us and with it comes commencement season at universities across the country. . . . This is a tough time for graduates in almost every discipline, but especially so for journalism grads. At least that is the conventional wisdom. Which is why it is so refreshing to see a shift in perspective occurring (perhaps even, gasp, a paradigm shift?) at two of this country's preeminent journalism schools: the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In commencement speeches last month, Nicholas Lemann and Barbara Ehrenreich both exhorted the graduates to view these difficult times as an opportunity to reinvent journalism. From Nicholas Lemann's speech at Columbia. . .: 'It's amazing to think about how many new journalistic forms have been developed over these last few years, because of the Internet: blogs, wikis, interactive graphics, animations, audio slide shows, and so on. If you keep constant our basic mission of gathering, assessing, and presenting information, the specific ways in which we do this are changing more rapidly than at any time I can remember. And we don't get to decide on our own how they change -- that depends on what the technology permits us to do, what provides an economic basis for our work, and what our audiences respond to. . . .'"
David Ardia, Journalism Graduates: It's Time to Reinvent Journalism

"The Blogosphere and the MSM have been abuzz recently with news of a decision handed down last week by Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee. Already the subject of law review articles and deep thoughts by Berkmanite Jonathan Zittrain, Wikipedia finds itself again in the spotlight for a decision that, on the surface, seems contrary to the Wikipedian ethos: Wikipedia, the 'free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,' has declared edits by the Church of Scientology to be unwelcome, permanently blocking contributions originating from IP addresses owned or operated by the Church or its associates. One writer at the Huffington Post has declared the move to be nothing less than 'a threat to our civil liberties,' while others have interpreted the move as a power-grab by Wikipedia admins. . . ."
Kimberley Isbell, Scientology Suffers Another Setback -- This Time in Wiki Court

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The Citizen Media Law Project (hosted at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society) provides a variety of legal resources to digital publishers and citizen journalists, including the Online Media Legal Network, an attorney referral network for online media. For more information about the CMLP, please visit our website at http://www.citmedialaw.org. If a friend or colleague passed you this Brief and you would like to subscribe, please sign up at http://www.citmedialaw.org/newsletter/subscriptions. Past issues of the Brief can be found here.

Last updated on June 5th, 2009

  

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