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...
Kimberley Isbell says that you can pry her Gmail account out of her cold, dead hands.
And You Thought Today's Google Outage Was Bad...
Andrew Moshirnia resists the lure of the Google Street View animated short.
Anthropomorphizing Intrusion: Google Street View and the Armies of Cute
Sam Bayard approves of a recent Canadian decision, eh?
Canadian Court Rejects Defamation Liability for Hyperlinks: Crookes v. Newton
Kimberley Isbell continues her campaign to get lawmakers to actually pay attention to the Lanham Act.
Shameless Self-Promotion: Updating the Lanham Act for the Internet Age
Eric P. Robinson reminds you that what Google giveth, Google can taketh away.
Mi Casa Es Su Casa — But I Set the Rules
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Recent threats added to the CMLP database...
American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine v. Wikimedia
Posted Sept. 25, 2009
National Marketers, LLC v. SMC Promotions
Posted Sept. 24, 2009
ACORN v. O'Keefe
Posted Sept. 23, 2009
United States v. Turner
Posted Sept. 21, 2009
Connecticut v. Turner
Posted Sept. 21, 2009
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Other citizen media law news...
Federal Shield Law Stalled in Senate Judiciary Committee
Newsroom Law Blog - Thurs. 09/24/09
Why ACORN's suit against 'pimp,' 'hooker,' and Breitbart.com is probably doomed
Copyrights & Campaigns - Wed. 09/23/09
'Elmer Fudd' poster has deadline for unmasking
TheSunNews.com - Wed. 09/23/09
East Texas 'Troll Tracker' Defamation Lawsuit Settles
Legal Blog Watch - Tues. 09/22/09
Scribd Cries Foul on Unusual Infringement Lawsuit
Wired/Threat Level - Tues. 09/22/09
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The full(er) Brief...
"Twitter has been awash today in the typical gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes that accompanies any Gmail outage, no matter how short the duration. If yesterday's court ruling holds, however, one unlucky Gmail user may wake up one morning soon to an even worse fate. According to MediaPost, it all started a little over a month ago, when an employee of Rocky Mountain Bank in Wilson, Wyoming, inadvertently sent a file containing the names, addresses, social security numbers, and loan information for more than 1,300 customers to a Gmail address. When the account holder failed to respond to a subsequent email from the bank asking him or her to please, please, please destroy the file, Rocky Mountian Bank asked Google to provide information about the Gmail account holder. Google, per its privacy policy, told Rocky Mountain Bank that it needed a court order to obtain the information. That's when things really got interesting. Off Rocky Mountain Bank went to court. The bank asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order prohibiting any further dissemination of the file and ordering Google to turn over the account holder's information. But Rocky Mountain Bank didn't stop there. They asked the court to order Google to deactivate the account. And Judge James Ware agreed. . . ."
Kimberley Isbell, And You Thought Today's Google Outage Was Bad...
"A basic lesson of history: a spoonful of cute helps the social medicine go down. Bert the Turtle prepared us for Global Thermo-Nuclear War. Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck helped us hate the Nazis and (briefly) like Stalin. Now Google has harnessed the power of cute to sell Google Street View. I think the approach will work in Japan and America, for Europe I'm not so sure. Brief background: Google has decided (apparently) to photograph every inch of the Earth. To accomplish this feat, it has enlisted a fleet of camera-laden vans to create Google Street View. This approach occasionally captures private individuals in private settings (think the sexual and the scatological, or better yet, think both). Americans, aside from some crazy homeowners, have generally embraced this possible invasion of privacy. Europeans and the Japanese have been less receptive. In Japan, the height of the cameras was problematic, because it allowed Google to see over fences and to capture too many private moments. Google responded by lowering the cameras and junking the film for the twelve Japanese cities it had already canvassed. But even that wasn't enough to sate Japanese privacy groups. So Google, beset by opponents in a land obsessed with the cute, has broken out the big guns: Adorable Stop Motion Animation! My God, I'm not sure this could get more cute: A mix of the anthropomorphic, the old-timey (love the ancient telephone and paint-brush), and the new fangled. . . ."
Andrew Moshirnia, Anthropomorphizing Intrusion: Google Street View and the Armies of Cute
"IP Osgoode alerts us to an interesting decision from the Court of Appeal for British Columbia that has important implications for online speech in Canada. In an opinion issued earlier this month, the Canadian court held that Jon Newton of p2pnet news could not be held liable for linking to allegedly defamatory articles written by others about politician Wayne Crookes. The appellate ruling upheld a lower court decision last fall dismissing Crookes' case against Newton. In much the way CMLP often does, in 2006 Newton published a blog post about a defamation lawsuit brought by Crookes against Michael Pilling, who runs OpenPolitics.ca. In his post about the lawsuit, Newton linked to the allegedly defamatory articles in question on OpenPolitics.ca, as well as to an article posted on another website. Newton did not reproduce or comment on any of the allegedly defamatory material. Here's the important passage: 'Under new developments, thanks to the lawsuit, I've just met Michael Pilling, who runs OpenPolitics.ca. Based in Toronto, he, too, is being sued for defamation. This time by politician Wayne Crookes.' . . My underlines represent Newton's original hyperlinks to the allegedly defamatory articles. The Canadian decision focuses on whether providing a link to defamatory material can constitute 'publication' of that material, one of the essential elements of a defamation claim. All three Justices agreed, 'the mere fact [Mr. Newton] hyperlinked the impugned sites does not make him a publisher of the material found at the hyperlinked sites.' . . . But, they also agreed that a hyperlink could constitute 'publication' of third-party content under some circumstances. . . ."
Sam Bayard, Canadian Court Rejects Defamation Liability for Hyperlinks: Crookes v. Newton
"The rise of the Internet has facilitated an increasingly interconnected world, allowing for the widespread dissemination of information, and giving unprecedented access to the ideas and experiences of people across the globe -- as when a student in New York can follow in real time the dispatches of a demonstrator in Tehran. In the years since the introduction of Netscape Navigator, a host of third-party intermediaries have arisen to facilitate, catalog and archive this explosion of information on the Internet, including the likes of Blogger, its parent company Google, Twitter, and the Internet Archive. As others have documented, the cross-border exchange of knowledge, goods, and services made possible by the Internet has exposed some of the limitations of national laws crafted during a time when most communication and commerce was local in nature. . . . This is especially true with respect to intellectual property rights, which have come under increasing pressure from online activities. In 1998 the US Congress attempted to address some of these issues by passing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ('DMCA') (17 U.S.C. § 1201 et seq.). Coming at the start of the so-called 'dot com bubble,' the DMCA included provisions intended to encourage the growth of new ventures by granting internet service providers a safe harbor from copyright liability for hosting third-party content (17 U.S.C. § 512). (Congress had previously provided a similar safe haven for non-intellectual property claims in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.) The following year, Congress attempted to address some of the challenges posed by the Internet to the trademark laws, passing the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (15 USC § 1125(d)). However, several challenges remain and are currently being tackled on an ad hoc basis by the courts as each new conflict arises. The time has come for Congress to deal with these issues by updating the Lanham Act to balance the interests of trademark holders with the public benefits of encouraging a robust discourse and the dissemination of information online. . . ."
Kimberley Isbell, Shameless Self-Promotion: Updating the Lanham Act for the Internet Age
"Paul Klocko got a surprise in the mail in April: a letter on official stationary from Weston, Wisconsin administrator Dean Zuleger, demanding that Klocko stop posting comments on the web criticizing him. The letter also asked that Klocko 'come out from behind the cloak' and meet Zuleger in person. The letter was surprising because Klocko had posted his comments on the web site of the Wausau Daily Herald using a pseudonym, 'juanmoore.' But when Zuleger contacted the newspaper, demanding that it identify his anonymous critic, the Daily Herald gave him Klocko's real e-mail address, which Klocko had provided when registering as a commenter on the site and which contained his true name. The newspaper apologized to Klocko over the summer, and its parent company, Gannett, clarified that its policy was to release information on anonymous commenters only when ordered by a court or when a comment threatens imminent harm. This episode offers a lesson for all commenters, bloggers, and others who post material on the web: you're subject to the policies of the platform(s) you use to host your material, including whether the stated policies (you know, the terms of use/service and privacy policy that you are bound by, even if you never read them) are actually followed. . . ."
Eric P. Robinson, Mi Casa Es Su Casa — But I Set the Rules
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