Venkat Balasubramani and Eric Goldman, over on Eric's blog, have highlighted a rather interesting if fundamentally flawed decision from the Eastern District of Virginia. 

I'm not all that worried about YouTube's legal fate as such (I'm pretty sure Google can afford plenty of lawyers), but when the Second Circuit speaks on the DMCA, I listen.

For the past few years here in Seattle, a fascinating debate has been brewing about the balance between government transparency and citizens' privacy, particularly at the intersection of the state Public Records Act and the state Privacy Act.

From the ever-growing file of trademark cases that are bad for free speech, Eric Goldman and Techdirt bring us an interesting case concerning

Jurisdiction: 

• New York

“RTs do not = endorsements.”

We’ve all seen it on Twitter bios, usually bios belonging to members of the media.

These kinds of disclaimers, disassociating the tweets from the people who retweet them, are common. The Twitter bio belonging to Brian Stelter of the New York Times (@brianstelter) notes, “RT & links aren’t endorsements.”

So this case slipped by me when it first came down in January, but it raises my ire enough to come back to a bit late. It's Sandholm v. Kuecker, the Illinois Supreme Court's attempt to make sense of the state's anti-SLAPP statute, and it's an impressively terrible piece of work.

Thanks to its ongoing war against the drug cartels, Mexico is one of the most dangerous places in the world for a journalist to work. 

The following is cross-posted with permission from our good friends at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. The original post can be found here. 

A Note from the Staff of the CMLP: This post contains a candid discussion of First Amendment issues, including the use of terms that some readers might find offensive. We do not censor such terms in a blog contributor's post when relevant to the topic discussed, because we believe that an analysis of the constitutional right to use certain language requires the freedom to discuss that language plainly and openly.