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."

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

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.

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,

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

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

According to a recent article in Ars Technica, the Chinese government withdrew a proposal to require all bloggers in China to register their real identities.

The government-regulated Internet Society of China (ISC) said that real-name registration would now only be "encouraged" but not required, according to the Xinhua news agency. . . . The ISC's new code is still in draft, so changes might still be made before it is finalized.

While China has been the subject of some excellent studies concerning the government's use of technical measures to control access to information, including a recent report by the Open Net Initiative, there hasn't been a great deal of focus on the use of law to limit and censor citizen media within China and other countries that actively filter information.  If you are aware of countries that have, or are considering, registration requirements for bloggers or other citizen media, please let us know.

In addition, I've been receiving a lot of interest from people within and outside China to include Chinese law in our legal guide and other resources.  We will be adding that material to the site as soon as we can.

(Disclosure: The Open Net Initiative, like the CMLP, is a joint project of the Berkman Center.)

It must be Texas day, with two posts relating to the Lone Star State. 

The Texas Senate approved the "Free Flow of Information Act" on May 1 in a 27-4 vote and sent the bill to the Texas House of Representatives.  The bill would give "journalists" a qualified privilege to protect both their sources and their newsgathering materials.  Under the current language of the bill, a journalists is defined as follows:

"Journalist" means a person who for financial gain, for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood, or for subscription purposes gathers, compiles, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, processes, or publishes news or information that is disseminated by a news medium or communication service provider and includes: