Week of June 27, 2008 [1]
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.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The latest from the Citizen Media Law Project blog...
David Ardia reports on a not-so-creative approach to getting around CDA 230's immunity provisions.
Lawyer Attempts End Run Around CDA 230, Finds a Stronger Defense Than He Expected [2]
Jason Crow comments on the BBC's crowdsourcing of parliamentary debates in the UK.
Holding Government Accountable One Click at a Time [3]
Matt Sanchez looks at a state bill that reforms Rhode Island's open records practices.
RI Bill Will Strengthen Citizens' FOI Rights
[4]
Arthur Bright discusses a new study on blogger arrests.
WIA Releases Report on Arrests of Bloggers, Does It Overcount? [5]
David Ardia analyzes the court's sanction of attorney Shoemaker for abusing the legal process in Sykes v. Bayer.
Judge Sanctions Lawyer for Issuing Subpoena to Blogger Kathleen Seidel [6]
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Recent threats added to the CMLP database... [7]
Posted June 27th, 2008
AnswerThink Consulting Group v. Hackett [7]
Posted June 26th, 2008
AnswerThink Consulting Group v. Doe [9]
Posted June 26th, 2008
Quixtar, Inc. v. Does 1-30 [10]
Posted June 25th, 2008
Bally Total Fitness v. Faber [11]
Posted June 24th, 2008
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Other citizen media law news...
OpenEducation.Net [12] - Wed. 6/25/2008
President Sues Online News Site for Libel
The Korea Times [13] - Wed. 6/25/2008
What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer
New York Times [14] - Tue. 6/24/2008
Records missing at Utica City Hall
Utica Observer-Dispatch [15] - Mon. 6/23/2008
Judge sets Facebook hearing status to 'private'-hmm
CNET News [16] - Mon. 6/23/2008
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The full(er) Brief...
"Following on the heels of a Virginia lawyer being sanctioned for improperly using a subpoena to silence a critic, we hear about a lawyer in California who is threatening to use a meritless lawsuit to force Julia Forte, who runs a forum for consumer complaints about telemarketers, to remove user-submitted comments that are critical of his client. . . . As important as CDA 230 is, . . . these types of threats highlight that the statute's protections are effective only to the extent site operators and their lawyers know about them. The fact of the matter is that most website operators don't have the knowledge or the resources to stand up to lawyers who threaten litigation if they don't comply with a demand to take material down. When a lawyer who should know better threatens to make it expensive for a website operator to extricate itself from a lawsuit in which it has no liability in the first place, it undermines not just CDA 230, but our legal system generally."
David Ardia, Lawyer Attempts End Run Around CDA 230, Finds a Stronger Defense Than He Expected [2]
"'Laws are like sausages. You should never watch them being made.' This adage, generally attributed to Otto von Bismarck,
rings true to anyone who has had the opportunity to watch Congress make
public policy. Just tune into C-SPAN sometime for a taste. Across the pond in England, a website, TheyWorkForYou.com (TWFY), aims to change this by offering a new service that allows users to watch archived BBC coverage of parliamentary debates and tag the video. . . . Video tagging of all sorts has been around for sometime (see these proprietary platforms: Viddler, Gotoit, VeoTag, MovieChapterizer),
but this is the first implementation I have seen that uses an open
platform and public contributors to do the tagging. If one can tag
video in order to synchronize text and video, as is the current
iteration at TWFY, a modification of the code may allow the addition of
comments and links. In the context of government, one can envision
video of a Senator debating proposed legislation accompanied by an
embedded PDF of the legislation with links to a background primer on
the subject. TWFY's open platform allows for programmers to riff on
their current setup to make this a reality. I applaud the BBC and TWFY for their efforts to inform the citizens
of England by using an open platform. I am a big fan of civic
engagement. However, . . ."
Jason Crow, Holding Government Accountable One Click at a Time [3]
"After passing state bill H7422 last week, Rhode Island is set to join the growing list of states – including Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Oregon – that have strengthened their freedom of information laws
in the past year. . . . From a citizen media perspective, the bill's most useful upgrade of Rhode Island's existing FOI law
is that it will bar agencies from requiring that requestors provide
personally identifiable information or specific reasons for their
request. If passed, these provisions will help prevent agencies from
denying open records requests based upon the characteristics of the
individual requestor. For instance, it would be more difficult for an
agency to refuse an open records request from a citizen speaker who has
been known to criticize the state government. . . ."
Matt Sanchez,
RI Bill Will Strengthen Citizens' FOI Rights
[4]
"According to a new report
by the World Information Access ('WIA') Project, 64 independent
bloggers have been arrested since 2003, suggesting governments around
the world are growing more aware of blogs and more likely to act to
silence bloggers. . . . Unfortunately, while acknowledging the survey’s undercounting of
arrested bloggers, the researchers appear to have inadvertently
overcounted the arrests instead. Despite the report’s stated intent to 'record[] only bloggers who were arrested for using electronic media .
. . to discuss or record political issues and events,' it often seems
to fudge the distinction between arrests for blogging, the survey’s purported goal, and arrests of bloggers,
where blogging was not itself the grounds for arrest. . . . Is it helpful to include [these] arrests . . . in the WIA survey? I’d argue no. While it is commendable
to analyze the efforts of governments around the world to muzzle
bloggers, it is the repression of free speech that is the concern. By
including the arrests of those who happen to be bloggers in their
count, the WIA researchers diminish the impact of their report, because
they blur the value of that which they mean to defend. . . ."
Arthur Bright, WIA Releases Report on Arrests of Bloggers, Does It Overcount? [5]
"A federal magistrate judge in New Hampshire has sanctioned Clifford Shoemaker, a Virginia attorney, for abusing the legal process by issuing a subpoena to Kathleen Seidel. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity,
where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v. Bayer,
in
which the plaintiffs Lisa and Seth Sykes sought to link exposure to
mercury to their son's autism. . . . On March 24, 2008, Shoemaker, an attorney for the Sykes, served Seidel with a subpoena
in connection with the Sykes v. Bayer lawsuit. The subpoena demanded
that Seidel appear for a deposition on April 30, 2008, and that she
produce a shockingly broad collection of information, including her bank statements, tax returns,
communications with religious organizations, and personal
correspondence with other bloggers. . . . Shoemaker and his client have a right to disagree with Seidel and, if
they think they've been the victims of a conspiracy, to sue her. But
they don't have a right to misuse the legal system to coerce a critic
to 'shut up.' As I've noted before, we all lose when we
allow that to happen."
David Ardia, Judge Sanctions Lawyer for Issuing Subpoena to Blogger Kathleen Seidel [6]
