Blogs

The New England First Amendment Institute – Applications Due By Sept. 15!

The CMLP's friends at the New England First Amendment Coalition will soon be selecting twenty-five New England journalists for an intensive course on freedom of information law and investigative reporting techniques at the inaugural First Amendment Institute to be held November 13-15, 2011, in Dedham, Massachusetts.

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Los Terroristas de Twitter?

Imagine you live in a country where criminal attacks on civilians are alarmingly familiar, and reliable reporting from the local media is regrettably unfamiliar.  You hear about an attack on your local school, so you take to the Internet to spread the word on Facebook and Twitter to warn people before it's too late.  Mercifully, the report you heard was mistaken, and everything's okay...

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Zen and the Constitutionality of Twitter 'Cyberstalking'

If you thought a spat between Buddhists couldn't devolve into a federal cyberstalking case of dubious constitutionality, consider the following.

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New California Law Prohibits Jurors' Social Media Use

UPDATE: Two years after the law went into effect, California's Judicial Council recommended that the statute be repealed, saying that that the possibility of criminal sanctions actually impeded courts' inquiries into improper online activity by jurors. The criminal provisions were repealed in 2014, 2014 Cal. Laws chap. 99, although civil penalties remain.

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A Victory for Recording in Public!

My apologies to Justin Silverman for bumping the second half of his excellent blog post about the BART phone blackout with this breaking news -- I urge you to read Justin's posts as well. 

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BART Phone Blackout: Did the S.F. Transit Agency Violate Free Speech Protections? Part 2

This is the second half of an analysis of the free speech issues implicated by the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)'s shutdown of mobile phone service on Aug. 11 in order to prevent scheduled protests.  The first part of the blog is available here.

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BART Phone Blackout: Did the S.F. Transit Agency Violate Free Speech Protections?

When the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) shut down cell phone service at various train platforms on Aug.

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New Survey on Public and Media Interest in Government Transparency

The CMLP's friends at the National Freedom of Information Coalition and the Media Law Resource Center have just released the results of a recent survey of citizen interest in government transparency and

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Baby Brady Photos Removed, But Did AG's Office Overstep Its Bounds?

If you've been living in Boston, you've undoubtedly heard the recent uproar over a local website publishing a photo of Ben Brady, the 20-month-old son of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Budchen, playing with his parents on a Costa Rican beach.

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A Look at Texas's New Anti-SLAPP Law

Back in mid-June, Texas's new anti-SLAPP law finally took effect. (Since the bill passed both houses of the Texas legislature unanimously, it took effect immediately when Gov. Rick Perry signed it.) The CMLP's legal guide is updated to reflect the new statute.

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ISP Gets Identity-Seeking Subpoena Vacated

Clapping by TheGiantVermin, on Flickr From the credit-where-credit's-due department (with the requisite hat-tip to David Ardia's Twitter account):

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Cameras Roll in New Federal Court Experiment

It lacks the drama of the various flavors of "Law and Order" or the intrigue of a John Grisham novel. But the video of a July 21 hearing on the plaintiff's request for a preliminary injunction in Gauck v. Karamian, Civil No.

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Welcome Andy Sellars, CMLP's New Staff Attorney

I am thrilled to welcome Andy Sellars, our new Staff Attorney, to the Citizen Media Law Project, and to welcome him back to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society as an Employee Fellow.

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At the Intersection of Anti-SLAPP and Anonymity

Slap! by Vermin Inc, on Flickr

Consider two cases: In Colorado, clothing company Façonnable is attempting to sue an anonymous Wikipedia editor (or, possibly, more than one; the number is sort of up in the air) over some unflattering edits to the company's Wikipedia page. But first, Façonnable has to figure out who the editors are--thus, a subpoena to the ISP allegedly attached to the editors' IP address.

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Changes Ahead for the Citizen Media Law Project

On May 20, 2007, I wrote my first blog post. It also happened to be the first post on this blog. Entitled "Time to Launch," I agonized for days over what to write and struggled with the fear of putting my words out to the entire world (if you remember your first time blogging, you know exactly how I felt). Fortunately, nobody came after me with a pitchfork and I gradually learned to control that fear. I also learned that if I surrounded myself with bright and talented lawyers they would make me look good.

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Newsgathering Law: A Guide for Reporting

I'm excited to announce the latest installment in a series of legal modules we are publishing in conjunction with Poynter's News University.

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A Tale of Two Breyers

So, the video game case came down today, Brown v. EMA. First off, a tip of the hat to SCOTUS for A) coming out the right way and declaring California's violent video games for minors ban unconstitutional and B) reaching the actual merits, rather than settling on the fairly obvious vagueness concerns.

UN Disapproves of Three Strikes Digital Executions

I am not a very big fan of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). In essence, the secret agreement looks like an attempt to institute a wide swath of changes related to intellectual property without all that pesky legislation, public comment, etc.

Second Circuit Rules: "Hot News" Claims Preempted

In a narrow, fact-bound decision, the Second Circuit today held that a group of investment firms' claims against a news-aggregation company were preempted by federal copyright law. (PDF of the opinion here.) The court stopped well short of reaching any larger 1st Amendment issues, however.

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