CMLP

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 »

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 »

Over the next two days, I'll be participating in and speaking at the Journalism that Matters: Minnesota conference organized by the Media Giraffe Project, Minnesota Journalism Center, and Minnesota News Council. It's the third in a series of Journalism that Matters gatherings. The full name for the conference, which gives you some idea of its focus, is New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs. You can view the agenda here.

This will be my first time at a Journalism that Matters conference, and I am very excited to have been invited. What makes these conferences so interesting is that they aren't conferences in the traditional sense, but instead fall into that oxymoronic category of "unconference" conferences, where the participants largely decide the topics and run the discussions. For example, I am slated to join Robert Cox from the Media Bloggers Association for a "coffee klatch" on citizen media and the law.

If you are in the Minneapolis area, please come by. I'll try and post an update or two and may even begin using Twitter (gasp!).

This is the tenth in a series of posts calling attention to topics we cover in the Citizen Media Legal Guide. In this post, we highlight the section on trade secrets, which describes the limitations imposed on publishers who rely on or publish certain confidential business information and offers practical advice to citizen media creators on how to avoid liability for publishing trade secrets.

Trade Secrets

A trade secret is a form of intellectual property that applies to business secrets. If a company or other organization creates or compiles information that gives it an economic advantage over its competitors, it can protect that information as a trade secret -- in a sense becoming the "owner" of the trade secret. To do so, however, a business must take reasonable precautions to keep the information secret, and it loses its property right when competitors or the public at large uncover the secret. Trade secrets law is governed by state law. However, most U.S. states have adopted their own slightly modified version of the Uniform Trade Secret Act (UTSA), so there is a good deal of uniformity among state laws on the subject. For state-specific information, please see the State Law: Trade Secrets section of this guide.
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Today marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's blog. Back on May 20, 2007, we didn't have much in the way of staff (it was just me) and we didn't have a whole lot to say (again, it was just me), but we knew we had to start somewhere. My first post, entitled Time to Launch, begins with the following prose:

Don't let anyone tell you that launching a website is easy. It isn't. After several false starts and a lot of time spent trolling the Drupal community site (I'll talk more about Drupal in a later post), we are ready to put this out to the world, in beta form at least. Let's just say it has been a learning experience, which I guess is apropos because that is what this site, and the Citizen Media Law Project, are about: learning. . . .

Fortunately, other more talented writers joined the CMLP and the blog took off. With an average of about 5 new posts a week from 8 different authors, we've managed to publish a total of 267 blog posts over the one-year period (you can receive these posts automatically by signing up for our newsletter and/or RSS feeds). Because it can often be a challenge to come up with new and exciting topics to blog about (and I am feeling especially lazy today), I thought I would trot out the tried and true retrospective list.

So, in case you were wondering which CMLP blog posts are the most popular, we've got you covered. I am not sure what this list tells us about the project or you, our readers, but it's interesting nonetheless. Here are the titles of our ten most popular blog posts (ranked in order of page views with the original publication date included):   read more »

We are all at the Berkman@10 Conference at Harvard Law School today and tomorrow, so postings will be a bit light. The conference, subtitled "The Future of the Internet" (based on Jonathan Zittrain's engaging new book of the same title), includes a number of Internet luminaries such as Jimmy Wales, Esther Dyson, Joshua Micah Marshall, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Michael Fricklas, and Reed Hundt.

You can see the agenda for the conference here and many of the events are being webcast live.

This is the ninth in a series of posts calling attention to topics we cover in the Citizen Media Legal Guide. In this post, we highlight the section on copyright, which provides an overview of this important area of law and offers practical advice to citizen media creators on how to use the copyrighted works of others and protect their own work from exploitation.

Before we jump into the copyright overview, which is reprinted below, we would like to thank Allan Ryan, who is the Director of Intellectual Property at Harvard Business School Publishing. In addition to writing a large portion of the copyright overview, Allan provided invaluable feedback on the intellectual property sections of the guide and kept us focused on the unique needs of citizen media.

Copyright Overview

A basic understanding of copyright principles is essential for any blogger, researcher, reporter, photographer, or anyone who publishes their creative works. It’s important for two reasons. First, you should understand how you can properly make use of someone else’s work – quoting from it, reprinting it, summarizing it, even satirizing it. And second, you should understand how you can protect your own legal rights in what you create, so that others don’t take unfair (even unlawful) advantage of it.   read more »

We will be giving a talk today at the Berkman Center at 12:30pm about the Citizen Media Law Project. We'll discuss the project’s accomplishments over its first year, including the creation of a legal guide for citizen media creators, the development of a database of legal threats directed at online expression, and recent litigation efforts on behalf of Wikileaks.org and others. We will also provide a first look at the threats in our database, which include lawsuits, subpoenas, cease-and-desist letters, and other legal threats directed at bloggers, website operators, and others. As an added bonus, we'll highlight a few of the more interesting entries, including the recent lawsuit against iBrattleboro.com, a community journalism site in Brattleboro VT, and the copyright lawsuit against the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The discussion will conclude with recent trends and preliminary thoughts on the legal climate for online publishers. We are hoping the talk will elicit suggestions and feedback on how we can best analyze the data in the database, improve user participation in the project, and generally how to open up the process of content creation.

The talk begins at 12:30pm. If you are in the Cambridge area, please drop by. If you can't make it in person, you can watch a live webcast here.

Back in January, we began rolling out the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide. So far, we've published major sections of the guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online, Dealing with Online Legal Risks, Newsgathering and Privacy, and Access to Government Information. This week we are excited to announce that we've published the section on Intellectual Property, which explains various intellectual property concepts, including copyright, trademark, and trade secrets, and provides practical advice about how to use the intellectual property of others and protect your own work from exploitation.

To give you a feel for what the Intellectual Property section contains, we've pasted the Trademark overview below:   read more »

Back in January, we began rolling out the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide. So far, we've published major sections of the guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online, Dealing with Online Legal Risks, and Newsgathering and Privacy. This week we published the section on Access to Government Information, which highlights the extensive amount of information available through government sources and explains how both traditional and non-traditional journalists can use various public access laws to gather and make effective use of this information.

To whet your appetite, I've pasted the overview to this new section below:

Access to Government Information   read more »