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As David posted, celebrity gossip site PerezHilton.com has battled ISP takedown over claimed copyright infringement. A key problem, the Houston Chronicle reports, is that site-owner Mario Lavanderia is already disputing those claims in federal court, where a judge refused to grant an injunction. Instead, as the judicial process properly works, Lavanderia must be proven a likely infringer before his speech is silenced.

The DMCA, however, offers copyright claimants an easy route around the niceties of judicial process -- make it too much of a nuisance for an ISP to deal with an accused infringer as a client, and get his site removed. And this underscores the precarious nature of our reliance on private infrastructure. Even though the DMCA insulates ISPs from liability once they've received counter-notification, copyright claimants can still shower them with complaints, and ISPs are still free to bow to risk aversion and refuse to do business with challenging customers. Those who challenge powerful copyright interests find themselves without practical ways to speak, even while they assert their legal rights.

From the Houston Chronicle:

Los Angeles photo agency X17 Inc. sued Lavandeira in federal court last year, asking for $7.6 million in damages. The suit claimed Hilton used 51 photographs without permission, payment or credit, including images of a pregnant Katie Holmes, Kevin Federline pumping gas and Britney Spears.   read more »

CNN is reporting (via the Associated Press) that Internet gossip columnist Perez Hilton's site was shut down for several hours after his hosting company received complaints that the site contained copyrighted photos of celebrities. According to CNN:

Popular Internet gossip columnist Perez Hilton had his Web site shut down for several hours after the company hosting it received a flurry of complaints about copyrighted photos being posted on PerezHilton.com. After being silenced on Tuesday, the site was back online Wednesday but hosted by a different Internet service provider.

Web Host Industry Review provides some additional detail on the backstory, noting that Hilton's hosting company had

warned Hoodlum Productions, the Los Angeles, California-based company that manages Hilton's site, that the site would be shut down if it received any more notices claiming copyright infringement, says Matt Lum, owner of Hoodlum Productions. While Hilton's site is currently up and running, it has limited inter-activity.

Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, is a defendant in several copyright infringement lawsuits filed by photo agencies and photographers who claim he posted their photos and video content on his site without their permission. According to Lavandeira, his use of the material constitutes "fair use" and is protected by copyright law.   read more »

Robert Ambrogi reports that:

The Massachusetts legislature's Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight today held a hearing on a number of open government bills and both the Senate and House chairs of the committee indicated support for measures that would add "teeth" to the law. In my capacity as executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, I testified in support of House Bill 3217, an MNPA-drafted bill that would allow fines against individual board members who violate the law and allow recovery of attorneys' fees by private citizens who bring actions to enforce the law.

Let's hope the Massachusetts legislature follows through on this. While state open meetings laws can provide useful leverage in the battle to get access to the workings of government, they typically lack any real enforcement mechanisms. Oftentimes the only recourse available when a meeting has been improperly closed is to get a "ruling" by a state official -- long after the fact -- that the meeting should have been open. Allowing fines and the recovery of attorneys' fees will add some real teeth to the Massachusetts act.

You can track the status of the Massachusetts bill at OpenMass.org.

 

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Not citizen media law related per se, but with Google's reach, it's recently opened Public Policy Blog, which offers "Google's views on government, policy and politics," is going to be must reading.   As Cory Doctorow reports:

Google's public policy team (led by the wonderful Andrew McLaughlin) has opened up its internal blog, and it's great reading. I worry a lot about Google being evil -- and about whether Google is evil today. But people like Andrew and his team go a long way to setting my mind at ease. This is going straight into my daily reads. Link (via Michael Geist)

Well, Dell Computer is learning about the web. See the confession at Consumerist, in which the company admits its mistake in demanding that the site take down a posting about its kiosk sales operation. Some things do change.

The president of Steelback Brewery, based in Ontario, Canada, filed a $2 million lawsuit against an Ottawa-based blogger that he claims libeled him on his sports website.  The Ottawa Citizen reports:

Filed late last week in court in Newmarket, Ont., Frank D'Angelo alleges Neate Sager damaged his reputation and his image in comments posted on Sager's blog between August 2006 and January of this year.  In his statement of claim, D'Angelo argues that Sager's comments - which described D'Angelo as a "huckster" and a "two-bit shyster" - are derogatory in that they paint a picture of him as a "peddler," a "con man" and an "irritant."

Sager, who also works as a copy editor at the Ottawa Sun, told the Citizen that he has yet to file a statement of defence and hopes to resolve the matter out of court.

Yesterday our very own Mary-Rose Papandrea, a professor at Boston College Law School, testified before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary at the Massachusetts State House regarding a proposed shield law. For most of the hearing, the questions focused on the scope of the privilege (the bill proposes an absolute privilege for the identity of sources and a qualified privilege for newsgathering materials) and not on who would be covered under the privilege.

However, near the end of the hearing, Senator Robert Creedon expressed concern about extending the privilege to bloggers, describing them as "loose cannons." Papandrea, together with Lucy Dalglish, Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, responded that the term "bloggers" is ill-defined and includes many journalists from the mainstream media. Given that it would be unwise to place internet communications outside the scope of any shield law, Papandrea and Dalglish argued that the better answer would be to define those covered under the law by their function - i.e., whether they are disseminating information to the general public. Papandrea also pointed out that the proposed shield law would not immunize bloggers - or anyone else - from libel suits, which appeared to be Senator Creedon's primary concern.

You can track the status of the Massachusetts "Free Flow of Information Act" at OpenMass.gov.  read more »

UPDATE: Robert Ambrogi has posted a detailed report on what happened at the hearing.

An 18 year-old from Carlisle, Pennsylvania has been charged with a felony under Pennsylvania's wiretap statute -- for videotaping a police officer during a traffic stop.

Brian D. Kelly didn't think he was doing anything illegal when he used his videocamera to record a Carlisle police officer during a traffic stop. Making movies is one of his hobbies, he said, and the stop was just another interesting event to film. [...] Kelly, 18, of Carlisle, was arrested on a felony wiretapping charge, with a penalty of up to 7 years in state prison. [...] Kelly is charged under a state law that bars the intentional interception or recording of anyone's oral conversation without their consent.  read more »

A (Louisville) Courier-Journal reporter was stripped of his press credential at an NCAA Super Regional baseball game yesterday and asked to leave the stadium for live-blogging the game. Contrary to the views of some commentators (including, apparently, the newspaper's own lawyer in a prior story), this is not a copyright issue, as the NCAA does not appear to be claiming that the live-blogging infringed or otherwise violated its copyright in the game. (In probably the most widely quoted opinion addressing the issue, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the NBA v. Motorola case stated that sporting events are not original works of authorship subject to copyright protection.) Rather, the NCAA is claiming that as a condition of access to the press box or for receiving a press credential, a journalist must refrain from live-blogging or filing reports for publication during a game. While it is debatable whether a live blog is an adequate substitute for a television or radio broadcast, the NCAA is clearly trying to protect the value of the broadcast rights it licenses for TV, radio and other live media.   read more »

OpenCongress, a joint project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, recently launched a new tools section that should be useful for anyone who follows Congress.  The site draws on a variety of sources -- from official government resources to blogs -- to provide an in-depth view of "the real story behind what's happening in Congress."

According to the site, OpenCongress brings together information from:  read more »

• Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
• News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
• Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
• Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Avvo's attorney rating system draws fire. Setting up an online rating system that attempts to rank the best and worst attorneys, is kind of like dipping your toes in shark-infested waters. Sooner or later, you are bound to get bitten. That's the situation facing Avvo, the heavily funded Seattle startup that just four days ago unveiled a controversial Internet site that ranks lawyers on a scale of one ("extreme caution") to 10 ("superb"). John Henry Browne, a Seattle criminal defense attorney who in my story on Avvo Tuesday called the service a "joke," is now threatening to sue the company over what he calls a "ridiculously low rating" for him and other attorneys.

My question is whether his lawsuit will call more attention to his not-so-hot rating than if he'd just left it alone. The ratings, according to the posting, are suspect in any case.

Tom Boney, publisher of the Alamance News, a weekly newspaper in Graham, N.C., was arrested and charged with trespass after refusing to leave the Burlington-Alamance Regional Airport Authority's monthly meeting.  According to the Burlington Times-News, Boney refused to leave the meeting after the airport authority voted to hold a private meeting to discuss a possible economic development project at the airport. 

Under North Carolina's Meetings of Public Bodies Act, all official meetings of public bodies are presumed to be open to the public.  The law permits closure only under nine enumerated circumstances.  It is unclear whether the airport authority met any of these conditions when it closed the meeting.  Even the sheriff who arrested Boney commented that he respects him for sticking to his convictions. "He's got a valid point about having access to public meetings," the sheriff told the Burlington Times-News.

Boney, who has long campaigned for open government meetings, is scheduled to appear in court on June 25 to address the misdemeanor trespassing charge.

UPDATE: The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reported that the district attorney's office dismissed the charge on July 20, 2007, saying the incident between Boney and the authority was a "civil matter."

Yesterday Massachusetts' highest court rejected the Boston Herald's motion to reconsider its decision in a defamation case brought by Judge Ernest Murphy.  A month ago the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had voted unanimously to affirm a $2.1 million jury verdict against the Boston Herald for its publication of a story in which it quoted Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy as saying that prosecutors should tell a 14-year-old rape victim "to get on with her life and get over it."

Given that the SJC failed to understand the actual malice standard in its original ruling, it is not surprising that the court refused the motion for reconsideration. Although it seems clear that David Wedge, a Herald reporter, was sloppy in his reporting of Judge Murphy -- for example, he incorrectly reported that a witness had "tearfully" taken the stand when that witness never testified at all -- Judge Murphy's evidence that the Herald had published his "tell her to get over" comment with actual malice was woefully inadequate. Indeed, the fact that at least one prosecutor testified that he told Wedge that the judge had said "tell her to get over it" all but demolishes Judge Murphy's argument that the Herald published the story knowing that it was false, or with reckless indifference to its truth or falsity.  read more »

At the 60th World Newspaper Congress, which opened yesterday in Cape Town, South Africa, Gavin O'Reilly remarked that  read more »

in dozens of African nations, political transformation has been deeply flawed, if not stillborn, because of the failure to secure one of the absolutely fundamental conditions for full, living democracy and pluralism ­ I'm talking, of course, about freedom of the press, which continues to be violated on a daily basis across the length and breadth of this continent.

Editor & Publisher details a new venture between the Associated Press and Attributor, a service provider that will fingerprint and track the use of AP content on the web.

The Associated Press is moving to protect its content by partnering with the technology company Attributor, which will track AP material across the Internet. The arrangement will allow Attributor to "fingerprint" AP copy down to a level where it can be identified anywhere on the Web.

"Our goal is to get a feeling for some of the useful ways to monitor content," said Srinandan Kasi, vice president, general counsel and secretary at the AP. "We are looking at it not just to protect our rights but to derive some intelligence."

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Poynter Online has a useful article up on assessing the legal risks faced by sites that publish user comments.  The piece, while focused on traditional media organizations, provides some useful guidelines for anyone who runs a site that includes user submitted material.

According to attorney Robb Harvey, who is interviewed for the article,  read more »

The Boston Globe reported today that a pediatrician settled a medical malpractice case in the middle of trial when opposing counsel revealed that she had discovered the doctor's anonymous blog in which he had provided "unvarnished" commentary on the lawyers, jurors, and defense strategy of his case.

The plaintiff's lawyer was cross-examining Dr. Robert Lindeman in a case involving the death of a 12-year-old boy when she asked him if he had been blogging under the assumed name of "Lindeman Flea." Dr. Lindeman admitted that the blog was his, and by the following day, he had agreed to settle his case, no doubt due to concerns that the plaintiff's lawyer would present some of the material on his blog to the jury.

The Globe article notes that Lindeman's blog provided details of his meetings with jury consultants who told him, among other things, that the jurors would ultimately base their decisions on their view of his character.

Dr. Lindeman has since removed all content from his blog.

Shield legislation pending in Massachusetts would likely provide a qualified privilege to citizen journalists.  Subject to certain exceptions, the bill provides a qualified privilege to "any covered person, who is providing or has provided services for the news media."

It appears that the bill's protections would extend to citizen journalists.  According to the bill, a "covered person" is defined as

a person who engages in the gathering of news information and has the intent, at the beginning of the process of gathering news or information, to disseminate such news or information to the public.

Whereas "news media" is defined as  read more »

The Islamic Society of Boston has dropped its lawsuit against 16 defendants - including The Boston Herald and Fox 25-TV - for allegedly defaming the organization by linking it to terrorist groups.  According to the Boston Globe:

Both sides in the lawsuit claimed victory yesterday, the Islamic Society because the deal also brought to an end a related lawsuit that threatened construction of a mosque in Roxbury and the defendants because the Islamic Society never collected a penny for alleged libel from the media organizations and a Jewish group. 

The defendants offered nothing in return for the dismissal of the case, lending credence to their claims that ISB dropped the lawsuit because documents demonstrating the mosque's links to suspected terrorist organizations were about to come to light during the discovery phase of the litigation.

Last week I noted that the Texas Senate had approved the "Free Flow of Information Act" and sent the bill to the Texas House of Representatives.  Well, that was short lived, as the bill has now died in the Texas House.

According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the bill  read more »