Week of December 11, 2009 [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.
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News from the Citizen Media Law Project...
This will be our last installment of the Citizen Media Law Brief this year. We here at the Citizen Media Law Project will be taking the next three weeks off to celebrate the holidays.
Here's wishing all of our wonderful readers happy holidays and a joyous and prosperous new year!
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The latest from the Citizen Media Law Project blog...
Kimberley Isbell reports on the latest Congressional rallying cry: Off with WikiLeak's heads!
WikiLeaks in the Crosshairs [2]
CMLP helps you get your Twitter on.
CMLP Publishes Guide to Live-Blogging and Tweeting from Court [3]
Sam Bayard reports that a comedy star is offended now that the joke's on him.
Office Space Star Ron Livingston Sues Wikipedia Prankster, Community Norms At Issue [4]
[5]
Andrew Moshirnia issues a call to the digital barricades (again).
The Library Police: Why a Shortage of Bandwidth is Turning Librarians into Traffic Cops [5]
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Recent threats added to the CMLP database...
Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce v. "Elmer Fudd" [6]
Posted Dec. 11, 2009
Abshire v. Pearl [7]
Posted Dec. 10, 2009
International Olympic Committee v. Giles [8]
Posted Dec. 10, 2009
Lemkins v. Lexington Herald-Leader [9]
Posted Dec. 9, 2009
Lemkins v. Doe [10]
Posted Dec. 9, 2009
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Other citizen media law news...
Is it Legal for an Editor to Unmask an Anonymous Commenter?
MediaShift [11] - Thurs. 12/10/09
British Lawmakers Looking at Rewriting Libel Law
New York Times [12] - Thurs. 12/10/09
TSA puts 5 employees on leave over online postings
Associated Press [13] - Wed. 12/09/09
KOIN-TV Threat: 'Delete Tweet or Face Legal Action,' Oregon Media Central Claims
Huffington Post [14] - Tues. 12/08/09
Guardian.co.uk [15] - Tues. 12/08/09
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The full(er) Brief...
"The holiday season is in full swing, as evidenced by the marked uptick in the number of gift-giving guides clogging up my browser. We here at CMLP, ever the helpful sort, wanted to get in on the action. But rather than offer yet another list of plastic doodads that are sure to be relegated to the bottom of the sock drawer by January 1 (but how cool are the R2D2 lights?), we thought we'd offer a helpful suggestion for the WikiLeaks editor in your life: a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Why, you might ask? Because, after the past few weeks, they're going to need all the help they can get. Unless you've been under a rock for the past few months, you've probably heard about some of the recent high-profile 'releases' on WikiLeaks. . . . All of this has certainly raised the profile of the three year old whistle-blower site. But WikiLeaks is about to learn what happens to those that rise above the crowd: they become a target to have their head chopped off. . . . Always ones to shoot the messenger, various Congresscritters are calling for an investigation and considering potential criminal sanctions against WikiLeaks and other sites that repost such material in the future."
Kimberley Isbell, WikiLeaks in the Crosshairs [2]
"As part of our legal guide series on documenting public proceedings and events, today we published a guide to Live-Blogging and Tweeting from Court. . . . As we've noted in our blog many times, the popularity of Twitter and live-blogging has introduced a new dimension into a journalist's coverage of court proceedings. The use of these real-time communications technologies has been met with a mixture of both acceptance and criticism from judges and lawyers. While some judges allow electronic devices in their courtrooms, many others don't. In fact, some local rules prohibit the use of electronic devices anywhere within the courthouse! To help folks navigate these issues, we've written a guide chock full of practical advice on how to avoid legal trouble if you intend to provide live coverage from inside a courthouse. . . ."
David Ardia, CMLP Publishes Guide to Live-Blogging and Tweeting from Court [3]
"Last week, [actor Ron] Livingston filed a libel lawsuit against a ‘John Doe' defendant in California state court, alleging that an unknown Internet user repeatedly edited Livingston's Wikipedia entry to falsely claim that he is romantically involved with a man named ‘Lee Dennison.' Livingston also claims that John Doe created fake Facebook profiles for Livingston and ‘Dennison' and used them to create the false impression that the two were ‘in a relationship.' . . . California courts, like most courts across the nation, require plaintiffs to make a substantial legal and factual showing before ordering the disclosure of an Internet speaker's identity. . . . [T]he allegedly defamatory statement must hurt the plaintiff's reputation in his/her community, or at least ‘an important and respectable body of the community.' . . . As this excellent Slate article points out, community norms can change from place to place and from one generation to the next. Or, as one court put it, whether a statement is defamatory ‘depends, among other factors, upon the temper of the times, the current of contemporary public opinion, with the result that words, harmless in one age, in one community, may be highly damaging to reputation at another time or in a different place.' . . . When it comes to falsely claiming that someone is gay, the courts appear to be split, but it is hard to say for sure because of the evolving nature of the inquiry. There are some cases saying that labeling someone a homosexual is defamatory per se under one state's law or another. . . ."
Sam Bayard, Office Space Star Ron Livingston Sues Wikipedia Prankster, Community Norms At Issue [4]
"For a time, few issues could rally nerds as effectively as net neutrality. Whenever we heard those dreaded five syllables, we immediately ceased our latest exegesis of Watchmen and girded our neglected loins for battle. But for some of us, after so many false alarms, the threat of losing net neutrality has become something of a digital boogey man. . . . [F]or the poorest users in the United States, net neutrality is already gone. Our woefully supported public libraries suffer from a critical bandwidth shortage, which practically compels a regime of Internet rationing. . . . A short time ago, the American Library Association (ALA) released the latest update to the Public Library Funding & Technology Study, a long running survey of public access to the Internet. The survey reveals that public libraries are the only point of free Internet access in the great majority of communities, and many libraries do not have enough bandwidth to meet the needs of their patrons.... In response, libraries are either capping the bandwidth of certain kinds of content (no longer just a euphemism for porn) or cutting public access altogether. . . . There are several reasons to be concerned by this development. Paramount among them is that libraries are providing a model of the ‘congestion forces throttling' argument that telecoms regularly trot out. . . ."
Andrew Moshirnia, The Library Police: Why a Shortage of Bandwidth is Turning Librarians into Traffic Cops [5]
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