Media Law

ESPN beauty Erin Andrews wants maximum sentence for her convicted stalker

2010-01-03T17:08:00.000-08:00

ESPN reporter Erin Andrews, with her attorney Marshall Grossman, broke down in tears after facing her convicted stalker Michael Barrett for the first time.

LOS ANGELES - Sportscasting siren Erin Andrews faced her convicted stalker in court for the first time and pleaded with a judge to show him no mercy.
The ESPN beauty broke down in tears Tuesday when she first spotted peephole perv Michael Barrett.
Minutes later, the Illinois insurance executive stood before a federal judge and admitted he hunted Andrews down at hotels in three cities and shot naked videos that he posted online.
"I am a victim of this sexual predator. I would like to see him immediately put in prison for as long as possible," Andrews, 31, told the judge.
She said she fears for her safety as long as he's free.
"I have nightmares," she told the court.
"I walk in crowds and I see him in my peripheral vision. When I'm alone in my house, I have fears that he's going to walk inside and hurt me.
"I don't know him. I've never met him. I don't know why he chose me. But I hope he never sees the light of day again."
Barrett, 48, faces up to five years in prison when he's sentenced Feb. 22. His plea agreement recommends about two years. Andrews wants the maximum.

Travel writer subpoenaed after publishing TSA security directive

2010-01-03T05:52:00.000-08:00

The author of a popular syndicated travel column was subpoenaed by the Department of Homeland Security after publishing a new security directive issued after the recent attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight into Detroit on Christmas Day. The Transportation Security Administration sent an agent to the house of Christopher Elliott to deliver a subpoena demanding “[a]ll documents, emails, and/or faxsimile transmissions (sic) in your control possession or control.
http://www.elliott.org/blog/full-text-of-my-subpoena-from-the-department-of-homeland-security/

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Department of Homeland Security
Transportation Security Administration
SUBPOENA DUCES TECUM
YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED BY THE ADMINISTRATOR, TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, to produce and permit inspection and copying of the records described below to Special Agent Robert Flaherty, TSA Office of Inspection, Transportation Security Admininistration, 580 T G Lee Blvd, Suite 610, Orlando, Florida 32822 (Phone #: 407-563-4096), email: Robert.M.flaherty@dhs.gov, no later than COB December 31, 2009, in furtherance of an official investigation:
All documents, emails, and/or faxsimile transmissions (sic) in your control possession or control concerning your receipt of TSA Security Directive 1544-09-06 dated December 25, 2009.
IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, the undersigned, an officer designated by the Transportation Security Administration, has hereunto set his hand in the county of Arlington, Virginia, this 29th day of December, 2009.
Dan Kuntz
Senior Counsel – Civil Enforcement
Transportation Security Administration
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
AUTHORITY
This subpoena is issued under the authority contained in 49 U.S.C. §§ 40113 and 46104; and 49 C.F.R § 1503.3.
Any person who neglects or refuses to produce records in obedience to this subpoena is subject to fines under Title 18, United States Code, imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, 49 U.S.C § 46313.

Shield Law Compromise Would Protect Reporters and Bloggers

2009-12-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - The Obama administration and key Democrats have reached a tentative agreement on a proposed law to provide greater protections to reporters against being fined or imprisoned if they refuse to identify confidential sources.

Under the proposed agreement, a so-called media shield law would allow federal judges to quash subpoenas against reporters if they determine that the public interest in the news outweighed the government’s need to uncover the leaker – including, in some circumstances, disclosures of classified national security information.
The proposal would also extend coverage to unpaid bloggers engaged in gathering and disseminating news information.

It’s too early to say if a package like this can pass Congress. Prospects for a shield law had dimmed significantly in September, when the administration – after intelligence agencies and prosecutors expressed concerns – had taken a harder line against protections for reporters in national-security-related leak cases.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/shield-law-compromise-would-protect-reporters-bloggers/

Supreme Court Takes Texting Case

2009-12-15T19:26:00.000-08:00

The New York Times & Wall Street Journal - WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a police department violated the constitutional privacy rights of an employee when it inspected personal text messages sent and received on a government pager.The case centers on whether a police officer in Ontario, Calif., had a right to privacy for the text messages he sent and received on a pager provided by the police department.

The case opens “a new frontier in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” according to a three-judge panel of an appeals court that ruled in favor of the employee, a police sergeant on the Ontario, Calif., SWAT team.

Orin S. Kerr, an authority on the Fourth Amendment at George Washington University’s law school, said the case was simultaneously significant and idiosyncratic. “This is the first case on Fourth Amendment protection in data networks,” Mr. Kerr said. But the case arose from unusual circumstances, making it fairly likely that the eventual Supreme Court ruling will be narrow.

The Supreme Court has given public employers wide latitude to search their employees’ offices and files. But it has also said that the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable government searches, has a role to play in any analysis of that latitude.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether government employers can read text messages that their workers send and receive on workplace devices.

The city said Sgt. Jeff Quon used his pager to send hundreds of personal messages to his wife, his girlfriend and another officer. Many of the messages were sexually explicit, the city said. The police department obtained transcripts of the officers' text messages while investigating officers who had repeatedly exceeded monthly character limits for the devices.

The San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the city's review of the messages was an unreasonable search, especially in light of an informal police department policy that it wouldn't scrutinize use of the pagers so long as officers paid the fees for usage that exceeded monthly limits.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126080680568090651.html

Britain, Long a Libel Mecca, Reviews Laws

2009-12-15T19:23:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - LONDON — England has long been a mecca for aggrieved people from around the world who want to sue for libel. Russian oligarchs, Saudi businessmen, multinational corporations, American celebrities — all have made their way to London’s courts, where jurisdiction is easy to obtain and libel laws are heavily weighted in favor of complainants.

Embarrassed by London’s reputation as “a town called sue” and by unusually stinging criticisms in American courts and legislatures, British lawmakers are seriously considering rewriting England’s 19th-century libel laws.

A member of the House of Lords is preparing a bill that would, among other things, require foreigners to demonstrate that they have suffered actual harm in England before they can sue here.
English libel law is the opposite of America’s in many ways. In the United States, the plaintiff, or accuser, must prove that the statement in question was false; public officials must also prove that it was made maliciously, with “reckless disregard” for the truth.

In England (Scotland has its own system), the burden of proof rests on the defendant, whose statements are presumed false and who has to establish that they are true.
It is not only news organizations that are running afoul of the law. Environmentalists, anticorruption campaigners, medical researchers and soccer fans posting criticisms of their teams on blogs have all been sued or threatened with legal action in recent years.
The justice secretary, Jack Straw, said recently that he was alarmed about “libel tourism.” And in the House of Commons, a committee has listened to a parade of witnesses denounce the current law as perverse, unfair, prohibitively expensive, contemptuous of free speech and an anachronism in an age when access to articles on foreign Web sites can be obtained anywhere.

“We all have substantial and increasing concern at the potential of the English law of defamation to affect our work unjustly and oppressively,” a consortium of foreign newspapers, publishers and human rights organizations, including The New York Times, said in a statement to the committee.

Noting that “one ‘hit’ in England is enough for a multimillion-pound libel action in London,” the statement called England’s libel laws “repugnant to U.S. constitutional principles.” It said that because of the threat of costly lawsuits, some American newspapers were considering abandoning distribution here and installing firewalls to block access to their Web sites in England.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/world/europe/11libel.html

Some Courts Raise Bar on Reading Employee Email

2009-11-30T07:58:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal - Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.

But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.

Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else's personal and financial information is easier than ever.
"Courts are more inclined to rule based on arguments presented to them that privacy issues need to be carefully considered," said Katharine Parker, a lawyer at Proskauer Rose who specializes in employment issues.

In past years, courts showed sympathy for corporations that monitored personal email accounts accessed over corporate computer networks. Generally, judges treated corporate computers, and anything on them, as company property.

Now, courts are increasingly taking into account whether employers have explicitly described how email is monitored to their employees.

That was what happened in a case earlier this year in New Jersey, when an appeals court ruled that an employee of a home health-care company had a reasonable expectation that email sent on a personal account wouldn't be read.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125859862658454923.html

New lawsuits asking proof for claims made in ads

2009-11-23T10:42:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - Companies that were once content to fight in grocery-store aisles and on television commercials are now choosing a different route — filing lawsuits and other formal grievances challenging their competitors’ claims. Longtime foes like Pantene and Dove, Science Diet and Iams, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, and Campbell Soup and Progresso have all wrestled over ads recently.

The goal is usually not money but market share. Companies file complaints to get competitors’ ads withdrawn or amended.

The cases themselves might seem a little absurd — an argument over hyped-up advertising copy that not many consumers even take at face value. Pantene has attacked Dove’s claim that its conditioner “repairs” hair better, and Iams has been challenged on one of its lines, “No other dog food stacks up like Iams.”
Dueling advertisers, however, argue that these claims can mislead consumers and cause a pronounced drop in sales. Since advertisers are required by law to have a reasonable factual basis for their commercials, their competitors are essentially demanding that they show their hand.

The increase in these actions may be a reflection of the dismal economy: in recessions, when overall spending lags, advertisers must fight harder for customers. “In this economy, where margins are a bit tighter, a lot of marketing departments have decided to become more aggressive in going after their competitors in the hopes that they can either protect their market position or capture additional market share,” said John E. Villafranco, a law partner at Kelley, Drye & Warren who specializes in advertising.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/business/media/22lawsuits.html

Protecting Offline Privacy

2009-11-19T16:54:00.000-08:00

Wall Street Journal - Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers' personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes

In recent years, marketers have grown more adept at culling consumer data from an array of online and offline sources—including real-estate and motor-vehicle records, consumer surveys, credit-card data and logs of Web visitors' online behavior—to identify the most receptive audiences for their ads.

At a hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee plans to explore the impact of these practices on consumer privacy, and will hear from witnesses including advertising giant WPP, database-marketing company Acxiom, privacy advocates and others. Separately, the Federal Trade Commission, which has taken a more active role in policing online privacy this year, is preparing to take a wider look at data-collection practices at a roundtable meeting in December with representatives of the ad, media and technology industries and consumer groups.

"Sometimes overzealous marketers just aren't presenting consumers with an adequate choice and a transparency about what they are doing with information, and we think that is very problematic," says FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. "If the industry doesn't step up to the plate with vigorous and consistent self-regulation, they are inviting a more regulatory approach," he says.

Mr. Leibowitz cites a settlement the FTC reached with Sears Holdings in June over allegations that the retailer had failed to adequately inform consumers of the extent to which it was monitoring their activities on the Web. A spokesman for Sears said in a statement that it takes the safety of its customers' private information seriously, and that the project in question ended in January 2008. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704533904574543400320693232.html?mg=com-wsj

Chicago's Camera Network Is Everywhere

2009-11-17T06:29:00.000-08:00

Workers in Chicago's Office Of Emergency Management

Wall Street Journal - A giant web of video-surveillance cameras has spread across Chicago, aiding police in the pursuit of criminals but raising fears that the City of Big Shoulders is becoming the City of Big Brother.

While many police forces are boosting video monitoring, video-surveillance experts believe Chicago has gone further than any other U.S. city in merging computer and video technology to police the streets. The networked system is also unusual because of its scope and the integration of nonpolice cameras.

The city links the 1,500 cameras that police have placed in trouble spots with thousands more—police won't say how many—that have been installed by other government agencies and the private sector in city buses, businesses, public schools, subway stations, housing projects and elsewhere. Even home owners can contribute camera feeds.

Rajiv Shah, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied the issue, estimates that 15,000 cameras have been connected in what the city calls Operation Virtual Shield, its fiber-optic video-network loop.

The system is too vast for real-time monitoring by police staffers. But each time a citizen makes an emergency call, which happens about 15,000 times a day, the system identifies the caller's location and instantly puts a video feed from the nearest camera up on a screen to the left of the emergency operator's main terminal. The feeds, including ones that weren't viewed in real time, can be accessed for possible evidence in criminal cases. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704538404574539910412824756.html

Prosecutors go after student journalists sources

2009-11-16T08:20:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - Since 1992, Prof. David Protess at the Medill school at Northwestern University has worked with undergraduate journalism students to investigate cases in which prosecutors appear to have taken aim at the wrong people. That might be about to happen again, only this time the students themselves would be the targets.

In one of the most recent cases, students working with the effort, which became the Medill Innocence Project in 1999, uncovered evidence that suggested Anthony McKinney had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for almost three decades for the murder of a security guard in 1978.

Mr. McKinney was running by the scene of the crime, was questioned and later charged. He confessed, but later said he had been beaten with a pipe — an interrogation technique not without precedent in Chicago — and forced to sign a confession.

The students found other witnesses who said that Mr. McKinney was not involved in the murder and published their findings on the project’s Web site. They also shared their work with a reporter who wrote an article about the case and forwarded their findings to the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, which filed a petition for hearing on Mr. McKinney’s behalf. The case is now before Judge Diane G. Cannon of the Circuit Court of Cook County.

And because of that investigative work — and perhaps work on other cases, which has led to the exoneration of 11 people, 5 of whom had been sentenced to death — the project and its students find themselves in the gun sights of Cook County prosecutors.

“I and some of my former classmates are now wondering if we are going to have to consider going to jail to protect our sources and our notes,” said Evan S. Benn, a writer and editor at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch who worked on the case in his final semester at Medill before graduating in 2004http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/media/16carr.html

Are Naked Halloween Streakers Sex Offenders?

2009-10-31T08:41:00.000-07:00

BOULDER, Colo. -- This city has always taken pride in its liberal-to-the-point-of-loony reputation. But this Halloween, one of its wackiest traditions is under siege: the Naked Pumpkin Run.

The event is exactly what its name implies. Scores of men and women pour into downtown streets for a late-night jog, wearing not a stitch between the jack-o'-lanterns on their heads and the sneakers on their feet.

For nearly a decade, naked pumpkin runners did their thing unmolested, stampeding through the frigid dark past crowds of admirers who hooted, hollered and tossed candy. But last year the run attracted more than 150 participants, and Police Chief Mark Beckner fears things are getting out of hand. "It's a free-for-all," he says.

So he intends to stop it.

He will station more than 40 officers on the traditional four-block route tonight, with two SWAT teams patrolling nearby. All have orders to arrest gourd-topped streakers as sex offenders.

Runners and their fans are outraged. This is not the free-spirited Boulder they know and love. "It kind of reminds me of what's happening in Tehran," says Andy Schmidt, a lawyer. "They're pre-emptively outlawing a gathering."

The American Civil Liberties Union has fired off a letter accusing the police of violating citizens' constitutional rights to express whatever it is they're expressing when they slip hollowed-out pumpkins over their heads and race buck naked down the Pearl Street pedestrian mall.

The annual rite "seems somewhat quixotic," concedes Judd Golden, chairman of the ACLU's Boulder County chapter, "but our Bill of Rights does not judge the content of free expression."

At a recent forum for city council candidates, all 10 participants said they disapproved of the threatened crackdown.

Even Mayor Matt Appelbaum, who supports the police, admits to a tinge of worry that arresting Halloween streakers will tarnish Boulder's reputation as, well, Boulder.

Casting about for a law to apply, since nudity per se is not illegal, police hit upon the state's indecent exposure statute, which makes it a Class 1 misdemeanor for anyone to knowingly expose his or her genitals in circumstances "likely to cause affront or alarm."http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125693458626119361.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth

New military policy prohibits photos of troops killed in action

2009-10-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

The agreement journalists must sign to become embedded with a military unit in Afghanistan now includes a prohibition against any photographic or video coverage of U.S. troops killed in action, according to a copy of the latest agreement.

As recently as July, the ground rules journalists agreed to in order to receive a media badge at Regional Command East stated that "media will not be prohibited from covering casualties" as long as the images were not released prior to Department of Defense officials notifying the service member's next of kin.

A new version of ground rules released in September states that "media will not be allowed to photograph or record video of U.S. personnel killed in action" and can only publish written reports of casualties after a DOD announcement has been made.

The debate over the publication of photographs of troops killed in action was reignited in September when the Associated Press published a picture of a fatally wounded Marine. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote a letter of protest to AP President Tom Curley about the photo, and the new policy was released soon afterward.

First Task for Law-Firm Hires: Finding an Interim Job First

2009-10-07T17:51:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - When Rosemary McKenna completed a summer associate job with Blank Rome LLP in Philadelphia, she was happy to receive an offer of full-time employment. But instead of starting her new position last month as planned, Ms. McKenna, who graduated from Temple University's Beasley School of Law in May, will be working as a hostess at a local restaurant.

Law firms are asking new hires to defer their employment start dates, an unprecedented step for many firms that have weathered previous economic downturns without wide-scale postponements. Large firms such as Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP have delayed the start dates for their new associates for a full year or more. Summer internships -- usually the surefire way to land a job -- produced fewer offers than ever before, law firms and students say. And because law firms budget for hiring a year or two in advance, law-school classes of 2010 and 2011 face an equally difficult environment.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125478012114565787.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_careerjournal

Google, Publishers to Submit Amended Book Pact

2009-10-07T09:00:00.001-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - Google Inc. and a group of authors and publishers will submit an amended version of their settlement over digital copies of copyrighted books on the Internet in November, a judge said Wednesday.

At a hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan set Nov. 9 as the date for the parties to submit an amended settlement that addresses concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice and others about the deal.

Michael Boni, a lawyer for the authors, said the parties hope to seek final approval of the amended pact in December or early January. "We have been working around the clock," Mr. Boni said.

Mr. Boni also said they would hope to have a shorter period for objectors to raise concerns about the changes in order to move the settlement forward.

Under the original settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers reached last year, Google would have paid $125 million to establish a registry to allow authors and publishers to register their works and get paid when their titles are viewed online. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703298004574459042709660608.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

Google Working to Revise Digital Books Settlement

2009-09-21T04:44:00.000-07:00

For months, Google and its partners in a class-action settlement that would allow the company to create a vast digital library appeared unmoved by a rising tide of opposition.

Google and its settlement partners — the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers — argued that the agreement would not harm competition, and said they were confident that it would be approved in its current form by a federal court.

But the Justice Department, in a filing on Friday, made clear that the parties were busily negotiating modifications that would address some of the concerns raised. Those negotiations are likely to accelerate now that the Justice Department has said that it too believes the settlement raises serious legal issues and has urged the court not to approve it without changes.

Legal experts say the new round of discussions, and the government’s intervention, are almost certain to delay an agreement that Google and the other parties were eager to see ratified quickly. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/technology/internet/21google.html

F.C.C. Seeks to Protect Free Flow of Internet Data

2009-09-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - In a move to make good on one of President Obama’s campaign promises, Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, will propose Monday that the agency expand and formalize rules meant to keep Internet providers from discriminating against certain content flowing over their networks, according to several officials briefed on his plans.

In 2005, the commission adopted four broad principles relating to the idea of network neutrality as part of a move to deregulate the Internet services provided by telephone companies. Those principles declared that consumers had the right to use the content, applications, services and devices of their choice using the Internet. They also promoted competition between Internet providers.

In a speech Monday at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Genachowski is expected to outline a proposal to add a fifth principle that will prevent Internet providers from discriminating against certain services or applications. Consumer advocates are concerned that Internet providers might ban or degrade services that compete with their own offerings, like television shows delivered over the Web.

Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Genachowski will propose that the net neutrality principles be formally adopted as commission rules, a lengthy procedure that involves several rounds of public comment. His predecessor, Kevin Martin, avoided making formal rules, arguing that the industry changes too quickly. He preferred to respond to complaints when they were filed.

The commission relied on its net neutrality principles when it sanctioned Comcast last year for impeding the Internet connections of some customers who were using certain file-sharing software. The cable company has appealed that ruling, challenging the principles as invalid because the commission adopted them without a formal rule-making process.

Other cable and phone companies have distanced themselves from Comcast’s actions. They argue that vague guidelines are preferable to formal rules. Some lobbyists see Mr. Genachowski’s move in part as a way to prevent a court from diminishing the commission’s powers as a result of Comcast’s suit. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/technology/internet/19net.html

Copyright Office Assails Google’s Settlement on Digital Books

2009-09-11T06:23:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - SAN FRANCISCO — The nation’s top copyright official made a blistering attack Thursday on a controversial legal settlement that would let Google create a huge online library and bookstore.

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Marybeth Peters, the United States register of copyrights, said the settlement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers amounted to an end-run around copyright law that would wrest control of books from authors and other right holders.

Ms. Peters, the first government official to address the settlement in detail, said it would allow Google to profit from the work of others without prior consent and that it could put “diplomatic stress” on the United States because it affected foreign authors whose rights are protected by international treaties.

But David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, who also testified at the hearing, defended the agreement saying it let authors retain control of their books and would expand access to millions of out-of-print books that are largely hidden in libraries.

In a concession that appears intended to allay complaints that the class-action settlement would grant Google quasi-exclusive rights to profit from millions of books, Mr. Drummond said that Google would allow rivals like Amazon or Barnes & Noble to sell online digital copies of out-of-print books that Google has scanned from libraries.

The $125 million settlement, which is subject to court approval, would resolve suits filed in 2005 by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google over its plan to digitize millions of books from libraries without approval from copyright holders.

The settlement would protect Google from liability and would establish a registry administered by authors and publishers. In concert with Google, the registry would sell access to those books to individuals and libraries. The revenue would be split among Google, authors and publishers.

Ms. Peters said that in granting something like a “compulsory license,” a requirement that rights owners license works to others, the settlement essentially usurped the authority of Congress and skirted deliberationshttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/technology/internet/11books.html

Harvard Backs Off Media Policy

2009-09-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Harvard Medical School is backing off a new student policy that would have restricted interaction with the news media after students complained it would chill their ability to talk about current issues in medicine, school officials said Tuesday.

“We need to be very careful,” said Dr. Nancy E. Oriol, the dean of students, who helped develop the policy. Promising it would be revised, she said the policy was intended to help students, rather than limit speech or control what they say on controversial topics.

But several students said the policy was an attempt to keep them quiet about issues like medical conflicts of interest.

“This is one of many ways that medical education implicitly teaches behaviors that differ significantly from the values that we hope physicians will uphold,” Nate Favini, a Harvard medical student and chairman of the Student Council Advisory Board, said in an e-mail message Tuesday. “Instead of limiting students, we should encourage bold thinking and allow them to advocate for the reforms that our health care system so badly needs.”

Mr. Favini and some Harvard Medical faculty said they were encouraged by the decision Tuesday to retract the policy.

“The policy was extremely ill advised,” Dr. Marcia Angell, a Harvard lecturer and former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, said Tuesday.

The policy says: “All interactions between students and the media should be coordinated with the Office of the Dean of Students and the Office of Public Affairs. This applies to situations in which students are contacted by the media as well as instances in which students may be seeking publicity about a student-related project or program.”

In an interview Tuesday, Dr. Oriol said, “The wording is problematic and it doesn’t really capture our intent.”

She did not deny that the policy was prompted in part by student remarks earlier this year about the influence of pharmaceutical companies on medical education. But she said, “I could give you a nice long litany of prompts.”

Other factors, Dr. Oriol said, included concern about patient privacy and the growing prevalence of Twitter. But she conceded the policy applies to “the media” rather than new media like Twitter.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/business/media/02harvard.html

Tobacco Firms Sue to Block Marketing Law

2009-09-01T04:59:00.000-07:00

Most of the nation’s largest tobacco companies filed a free-speech lawsuit on Monday in Kentucky to try to stop a landmark federal law from curtailing their marketing or forcing them to print graphic warnings on the top half of cigarette packages next year.

The first lawsuit against the new law, which was signed in June by President Obama, is likely to end up before the United States Supreme Court, lawyers on all sides of the issue said on Monday. In 2001, the Supreme Court rejected outdoor advertising restrictions in tobacco regulations in Massachusetts, ruling 6-3 that it violated free speech rights.

“The case is likely to proceed quickly,” Floyd Abrams, a constitutional lawyer who is representing the Lorillard Tobacco Company, said in a phone interview on Monday. “Tobacco is a legal product for adults, and the Supreme Court has said that the industry has an interest which the First Amendment protects to communicate information about its products, and adults have the right to receive that information.”

Anti-tobacco lawyers said the federal legislation was carefully worded to withstand just such a legal test.

“It was perfectly clear there was going to be a constitutional challenge, and I think it will survive the challenge,” Richard A. Daynard, a professor at the Northeastern School of Law in Boston and chairman of its Tobacco Products Liability Project, said in a phone interview.

The 46-page complaint seeks declaratory judgments and injunctions against the federal government and officials in the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services. It was filed in the United States District Court in Bowling Green, Ky.

Mr. Abrams said the lawsuit is not challenging the government’s right to regulate cigarette contents, but focuses on speech and marketing restrictions. Congress did not ban cigarettes or addictive nicotine despite a death toll estimated by the government at 400,000 a year, partly because public-health advocates say smokers would turn to a black market.

The parts of the law that are at issue restrict tobacco marketing after decades of revelations about how the industry hid health hazards, secretly manipulated nicotine levels to hook smokers, advertised to children and falsely claimed low-tar or light cigarettes were safer.

The law requires new warnings by June 22, 2010, to cover the top half of the front and back of packages and to contain “color graphics depicting the negative health consequences of smoking.” The companies in their lawsuit said “shocking color graphics” would force them “to stigmatize their own products through their own packaging” and leave no room in display cases to show their desired branding.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/business/01tobacco.html

Shrinking Newsrooms Wage Fewer Battles for Public Access to Courtrooms

2009-09-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - You don’t see newspapers fighting to open court proceedings the way they used to, and people are starting to notice.

“The days of powerful newspapers with ample legal budgets appear to be numbered,” a public defender in Georgia, Gerard Kleinrock, wrote in a recent Supreme Court brief. “Will underfunded bloggers be able to carry the financial burdens of opening our courtrooms?”

The brief concerned the case of Eric Presley, a Georgia man convicted of cocaine trafficking. The judge closed the courtroom during jury selection in Mr. Presley’s case, on the theory that it was too small to accommodate both potential jurors and the public. Citing the public’s lack of access to the jury selection, Mr. Presley appealed, and the Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear his case.

Thanks to The Press-Enterprise, a newspaper in Riverside, Calif., the press and the public have nearly an absolute constitutional right to attend jury selection in criminal cases. In the 1980s, the paper fought ferociously to establish that principle, taking two access cases to the Supreme Court.

News organizations used to consider those kinds of lawsuits a matter of civic responsibility.

“For the last four decades, maybe longer, citizens have been able to rely on small, medium and large news organizations, mostly newspapers, to fight their access battles on their behalf,” said Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which has filed a supporting brief in Mr. Presley’s case.

These days, she said, “the access litigations have dried up.”

It is notable, for instance, that the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups have taken the leading role in trying to shake loose information about the Bush administration’s policies and actions, while news organizations have largely sat on the sidelines.

There are exceptions, of course. Jane E. Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, singled out The Associated Press for its efforts. In general, though, she said, “we’ve shifted our emphasis from principle to survival.”

Companies that still have ample resources do not always share a journalistic commitment to open government.

Consider the aftermath of a recent settlement in a lawsuit against Amtrak. After the railroad lost a $24 million jury verdict and while its appeal was pending, it agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to the plaintiffs, two trespassing teenagers who suffered severe electric burns after climbing onto a parked train.

As part of the settlement, the parties asked Judge Lawrence F. Stengel of Federal District Court in Philadelphia not only to vacate eight of his decisions in the case but also to “direct LexisNexis and Westlaw to remove the decisions” from “their respective legal research services/databases.”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/us/01bar.html

Bloggers getting themselves in trouble with libel

2009-08-24T20:33:00.000-07:00

Seattle Times - Words matter. Words are malleable and can be used to illuminate or obscure. Words can hurt. Because of the heaviness of words, newspaper journalists take seriously the power we wield through our publications.

Journalists spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating and discussing what to write and how to write it. This contemplating and discussing encompasses everything from topics, to word choice, to what is appropriate to be spun off the press.

Journalists have the right to write pointed critiques or damaging stories. This is never done lightly and must be backed up with fact. What we do can alter somebody's life for better or worse. Almost every professional journalist is careful not to abuse this right of free speech.

There is nothing wrong with pushing the limits of the First Amendment, but there is a line where free speech can go too far and real damage is done. Bloggers are writing past this line and finding themselves in trouble.

The common refrain from bloggers is that they have a right to say what they want, especially if it is their opinion. Whatever that opinion is, it needs to be grounded in fact. If it is not then the writer runs the risk of being sued for libel, which is a false statement that damages a person's reputation.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she is receiving more and more calls from bloggers.

"They don't seem to understand that if you are going to spout off, that spouting off has consequences," she said.

The average blogger doesn't have the same understanding as trained journalists do of the difference between fact and opinion and the use of "red flag words."

"As more citizens are out there blogging away many of them don't have a grasp of what the law is," Dalglish said.http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2009716909_ryan23.html

Ads Follow Web Users, and Get More Personal

2009-08-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - For all the concern and uproar over online privacy, marketers and data companies have always known much more about consumers’ offline lives, like income, credit score, home ownership, even what car they drive and whether they have a hunting license. Recently, some of these companies have started connecting this mountain of information to consumers’ browsers.

The result is a sea change in the way consumers encounter the Web. Not only will people see customized advertising, they will see different versions of Web sites from other consumers and even receive different discount offers while shopping — all based on information from their offline history. Two women in adjoining offices could go to the same cosmetic site, but one might see a $300 Missoni perfume, the other the house-brand lipstick on sale for $2.

The technology that makes the connection is nothing new — it is a tiny piece of code called a cookie that is placed on a hard drive. But the information it holds is. And it is all done invisibly.

Advertisers and marketers say this specificity is useful, taking out the guesswork involved in online-only profiling, and showing products to the people most likely to be interested. Retailers including Gap and Victoria’s Secret are using this tactic.

But consumer advocates say such unseen tracking is troubling. On the old Internet, nobody knew you were a dog. On the new targeted Internet, they now know what kind of dog you are, your favorite leash color, the last time you had fleas and the date you were neutered.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/business/media/31privacy.html

Newspaper Apologizes for Inventing a Scandal

2009-08-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - OTTAWA — “It’s a Scandal,” an exceptionally large front-page headline in The Saint John Telegraph-Journal proclaimed last month above an article about what the prime minister of Canada did, or did not, do with a communion wafer.

Last week, the wafer issue resurfaced on the front page of the newspaper. But this time as more of an embarrassment. In a lengthy correction, the New Brunswick newspaper said that “there was no credible support” for the article’s claim that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had pocketed the wafer during the funeral of a former governor-general or that a Roman Catholic priest was demanding an explanation from his office.

Unusually, the newspaper apologized not just to Mr. Harper but also to the two reporters whose names appeared on the article, adding that the errors were introduced “in the editing process” and were included “without the knowledge ofthe reporters and without any credible support for them.”

The fallout did not stop there. Shortly after the article appeared, the publisher, a member of New Brunswick’s most powerful family whose holdings include The Telegraph-Journal, and the newspaper’s editor were removed from their jobs.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/business/media/03paper.html

A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?

2009-07-31T05:34:00.000-07:00

In June, Dr. James Heilman posted all 10 plates on the site, along with research about the most popular responses to each.

The New York Times - There are tests that have right answers, which are returned with a number on top in a red circle, and there are tests with open-ended questions, which provide insight into the test taker’s mind.

The Rorschach test, a series of 10 inkblot plates created by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach for his book “Psychodiagnostik,” published in 1921, is clearly in the second category.

Yet in the last few months, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been engulfed in a furious debate involving psychologists who are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each. For them, the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT.

They are pitted against the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia’s users, who share the site’s “free culture” ethos, which opposes the suppression of information that it is legal to publish. (Because the Rorschach plates were created nearly 90 years ago, they have lost their copyright protection in the United States.)

“The only winners seem to be those for whom this issue has become personal, and who see this as a game in which victory means having their way,” one Wikipedia poster named Faustian wrote on Monday, adding, “Just don’t pretend you are doing anything other than harming scientific research.”

What had been a simmering dispute over the reproduction of a single plate reached new heights in June when James Heilman, an emergency-room doctor from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, posted images of all 10 plates to the bottom of the article about the test, along with what research had found to be the most popular responses for each.

“I just wanted to raise the bar — whether one should keep a single image on Wikipedia seemed absurd to me, so I put all 10 up,” Dr. Heilman said in an interview. “The debate has exploded from there.”

Psychologists have registered with Wikipedia to argue that the site is jeopardizing one of the oldest continuously used psychological assessment tests.

While the plates have appeared on other Web sites, it was not until they showed up on the popular Wikipedia site that psychologists became concerned.

“The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it,” said Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, who has posted under the user name SPAdoc. He quickly added that he did not mean that a coached subject could fool the person giving the test into making the wrong diagnosis, but rather “render the results meaningless.”

To psychologists, to render the Rorschach test meaningless would be a particularly painful development because there has been so much research conducted — tens of thousands of papers, by Dr. Smith’s estimate — to try to link a patient’s responses to certain psychological conditions. Yes, new inkblots could be used, these advocates concede, but those blots would not have had the research — “the normative data,” in the language of researchers — that allows the answers to be put into a larger context.

And, more fundamentally, the psychologists object whenever diagnostic tools fall into the hands of amateurs who haven’t been trained to administer them. “Our ethics code that governs the behavior of psychologists talks about maintaining test security,” Steve J. Breckler, the executive director for science at the American Psychological Association, said in an interview. “We wouldn’t be in favor of putting the plates out where anyone can get hold of them.”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/technology/internet/29inkblot.html

Who owns the electronic book you just bought?

2009-07-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - Buying electronic books on the Internet is easy -- but so is taking them away.

That became clear last week when Amazon.com Inc. used its wireless technology to reach into customers' Kindle e-readers and deleted some e-books written by George Orwell. Amazon, which returned the cost of the e-books, said it made the move when it realized that the publisher didn't have the proper rights to sell the book in the U.S.

That didn't satisfy Antoine J. Bruguier, a 28-year-old engineer in Milpitas Calif., who was stunned to find his copy of "Nineteen Eighty Four" missing from his Kindle on Friday.

"They have the technical ability to do this, but I'm not sure if they have the legal right to do it," he says. "I love my Kindle, but if they can take back a book after I buy it, that bothers me."

After angry customers called the company an Orwellian "Big Brother," Amazon promised to change its system and "not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances," according to a spokesman.

Regardless, the incident raises some difficult questions about what it means to "own" books in the digital age. The same legal conundrums came up with music. Consumers raised on sharing records and CDs suddenly found themselves challenged in court by music companies for violating intellectual-property rights when doing the same thing through computers. Books have a more entrenched culture of sharing -- libraries exist for lending dog-eared volumes -- raising potentially knottier legal issues. Some experts say that, barring a creative industry solution, these matters can only be remedied by passing new laws that clearly define digital ownership.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124830307703373747.html

U.S. Wiretapping of Limited Value, Officials Report

2009-07-23T17:12:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - WASHINGTON — While the Bush administration had defended its program of wiretapping without warrants as a vital tool that saved lives, a new government review released Friday said the program’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism was unclear.

The report, mandated by Congress last year and produced by the inspectors general of five federal agencies, found that other intelligence tools used in assessing security threats posed by terrorists provided more timely and detailed information.

Most intelligence officials interviewed “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists, the report said.

While the program obtained information that “had value in some counterterrorism investigations, it generally played a limited role in the F.B.I.’s overall counterterrorism efforts,” the report concluded. The Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence branches also viewed the program, which allowed eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of Americans, as a useful tool but could not link it directly to counterterrorism successes, presumably arrests or thwarted plots.

The report also hinted at political pressure in preparing the so-called threat assessments that helped form the legal basis for continuing the classified program, whose disclosure in 2005 provoked fierce debate about its legality. The initial authorization of the wiretapping program came after a senior C.I.A. official took a threat evaluation, prepared by analysts who knew nothing of the program, and inserted a paragraph provided by a senior White House official that spoke of the prospect of future attacks against the United States.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/us/11nsa.html

Copyright Law Hurts Wikipedia When it Comes to Photos

2009-07-20T05:31:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Some may wonder: Could there be a bad picture of Halle Berry or George Clooney?

Just visit Wikipedia. There you’ll find a fuzzy shot of Ms. Berry from the mid-1980s, when she was part of a U.S.O. tour with other Miss USA contestants. She is out of focus and wearing a red-and-white baseball cap — in short, she is barely recognizable. Mr. Clooney, in his Wikipedia entry, is shown in Chad wearing a khaki vest and a United Nations cap. Smiling, he is ruggedly handsome in the company of two women who work for the United Nations; still this is hardly a glamour shot.

Then there are big names like Howard Stern or Julius Erving who have no photograph at all on Wikipedia.

At a time when celebrities typically employ a team of professionals to control their images, Wikipedia is a place where chaos rules. Few high-quality photographs, particularly of celebrities, make it onto this site. This is because the site runs only pictures with the most permissive Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use an image, for commercial purposes or not, as long as the photographer is credited. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/20funny.html

A Privacy Law That Protects Students, and Colleges, Too

2009-07-16T06:09:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - A law designed to keep college students' grades private often is used for a much different purpose -- to shield universities from potentially embarrassing situations.

Some critics say a number of schools are deliberately misreading the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in order to keep scandals and other unflattering news from hitting the media. "Some schools have good-faith misunderstandings of the law, but there are others that simply see this as a handy excuse to hide behind," says Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which provides student journalists with legal help.

Legal experts say part of the problem is that the law is loosely defined. In addition, the potential consequences of violating the law -- namely, that schools would lose their federal funding -- prompt university officials to be conservative in their decisions about releasing information.

Those complaints rankle advocates of student privacy, who say that, if anything, the three-decade-old law should be expanded. "Most of these kids are adults, and they should be able to make their own decisions," says Daren Bakst, president of the Council on Law in Higher Education.

Congress already reworked the law to clarify when universities can disclose student information, especially involving health and safety matters. Those changes, adopted in January, followed the 2007 shooting rampage at Virginia Tech by a mentally troubled student.

But advocates for disclosure say the federal law, known as Ferpa, remains nebulous enough that colleges can use it to avoid revealing potentially embarrassing information. In March, Roger Williams University in Rhode Island was criticized for hiring the university president's 26-year-old son for a fund-raising job, which required a bachelor's degree. Citing the federal act, the university declined to say whether the son, Chris Nirschel, finished his undergraduate education at Roger Williams -- or anywhere else.

"From my understanding, we are allowed to disclose information on whether someone has graduated, but it isn't mandatory," said a Roger Williams spokeswoman. Mr. Nirschel, who left the job a short time later following an arrest in an unrelated matter, couldn't be reached for comment.

Such expansive interpretation of the law has some experts and politicians pressing Congress for further clarification. Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray believes the statute needs to be refocused. He recently wrote a letter to the Department of Education, urging it to spell out more clearly how schools should comply with the law.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124770187218048509.html

Tobacco Regulation Is Expected to Face a Free-Speech Challenge

2009-06-29T05:26:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - The marketing and advertising restrictions in the tobacco law that Congress passed last week are likely to be challenged in court on free-speech grounds. But supporters of the legislation say they drafted the law carefully to comply with the First Amendment.

The law’s ban on outdoor advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds would effectively outlaw legal advertising in many cities, critics of the prohibition said. And restricting stores and many forms of print advertising to black-and-white text, as the law specifies, would interfere with legitimate communication to adults, tobacco companies and advertising groups said in letters to Congress and interviews over the last week.

The controversy, legal experts say, involves tension between the right of tobacco companies to communicate with adult smokers and the public interest in preventing young people from smoking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/business/16tobacco.html

Opponents of the new strictures, including the Association of National Advertisers and the American Civil Liberties Union, predict that federal courts will throw out the new marketing restrictions. They say, for example, a 2001 Supreme Court decision struck down a Massachusetts rule that had imposed a similar ban on advertising within 1,000 feet of schools.

A Fight to Protect Americans From British Libel Law

2009-06-07T12:32:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - PARIS — The American Civil Liberties Union may not often see eye to eye with the American Center for Democracy, a research group with neoconservative credentials. But the two organizations are united on at least one thing: their distaste for British libel laws, which they say are being exploited to suppress free speech in Britain and beyond.

British courts have always been friendlier to libel claimants than their American counterparts. Until recently that did not matter much to American authors or publishers. But now the Internet makes anything published in the United States almost immediately available in Britain, too.

Some free-speech advocates in the United States say that so-called libel tourists — people with little connection to Britain — are using the global-distribution argument to justify suing for libel there.

London has gained a reputation as the libel capital of the world. Saudi businessmen have sued there to complain about American reports that they engaged in terrorist financing; Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs have sued in Britain over accusations of unsavory business activities; and Hollywood celebrities have gone to London to seek redress over reports of wayward kisses.

To try to insulate American authors and publishers, groups like the A.C.L.U. and the Center for Democracy have persuaded lawmakers in New York and Illinois to pass state laws that block enforcement of British libel decisions in the United States. Similar bills are advancing in other state legislatures, and stronger measures, allowing American defendants to fight back against adverse foreign libel rulings, have been proposed in the United States Congress.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/business/media/25libel.html

Abortion Doctor Is Shot to Death in Kansas Church

2009-06-01T05:05:00.000-07:00

WICHITA, Kan. — George Tiller, one of only a few doctors in the nation who performed abortions late in pregnancy, was shot to death here Sunday in the foyer of his longtime church as he handed out the church bulletin.
The authorities said they took a man into custody later in the day after pulling him over about 170 miles away on Interstate 35 near Kansas City. They said they expected to charge him with murder on Monday.

The Wichita police said there were several witnesses to the killing, but law enforcement officials would not say what had been said, if anything, inside the foyer. Officials offered little insight into the motive, saying that they believed it was “the act of an isolated individual” but that they were also looking into “his history, his family, his associates.”

A provider of abortions for more than three decades, Dr. Tiller, 67, had become a focal point for those around the country who opposed it. In addition to protests outside his clinic, his house and his church, Dr. Tiller had once seen his clinic bombed; in 1993, an abortion opponent shot him in both arms. He was also the defendant in a series of legal challenges intended to shut down his operations, including two grand juries that were convened after citizen-led petition driveshttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01tiller.html

President Obama Announces Supreme Court Nominee

2009-05-27T05:22:00.001-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - WASHINGTON -- Judge Sonia Sotomayor has built a record on such issues as civil rights and employment law that puts her within the mainstream of Democratic judicial appointees.

Among the cases she has heard during her 15 years on the federal bench -- and one that will be examined closely through her confirmation process -- is one now pending before the Supreme Court.

U.S. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor was announced Tuesday as President Obama's pick to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter on the Supreme Court. See other notable Supreme Court firsts.

Judge Sotomayor was on a three-judge panel at the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld a decision by the city of New Haven, Conn., to invalidate a firefighter promotional exam after no black applicants scored high enough to qualify. Those who aced the exam said it was unfair to penalize them because others didn't do as well.

"We are not unsympathetic to the plaintiffs' expression of frustration," the panel said in an unsigned opinion, referring to white firefighters who accused the city of reverse discrimination. "But it simply does not follow" that they have a claim under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In recent Supreme Court arguments, liberals expressed sympathy for the Second Circuit's ruling, while conservatives questioned it. A ruling is expected soon.

Judge Sotomayor would be succeeding Justice David Souter, generally a liberal vote on social issues, and her selection isn't likely to change the outcome on cases where the Supreme Court typically splits 5-4.

The question is whether Judge Sotomayor would, like Justice Souter, be a solid judicial craftsman, or emerge as a leader who can mold majorities. Liberals have long sought such a jurist since the departures of William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall nearly two decades ago.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124338260937756559.html

New Yorker Under Siege - Sued for $10 million

2009-05-25T18:48:00.000-07:00

The story has everything: murder, tribal warfare, a famous writer, and a lawsuit involving him and one of the world’s most prestigious magazines. So why are so few media watchers paying attention to the suit recently brought against Pulitzer winner Jared Diamond and the New Yorker? At the very least, it raises questions about how this particular article was cleared by the magazine’s venerable fact-checking department.

First, some background. The $10-million defamation suit was filed in April on behalf of two men in New Guinea, Henep Isum Mandingo and Hup Daniel Wemp. They were the focus of an April 2008 New Yorker article entitled “Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?” It was written by UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond, who won the Pulitzer for his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. The story was removed from the free section of the magazine’s Web site months before the suit was filed, but here’s a relevant passage:

In 1992, when Daniel Wemp was about twenty-two years old, his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan… And Soll had been very good to Daniel, who recalled him as a tall and handsome man, destined to become a leader. Soll’s death demanded vengeance… As it turned out, it took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before Daniel succeeded in discharging this responsibility.

Aside from its claims of mass murder, the story also reported that Mandingo, the main target of Wemp’s vengeance, was confined to a wheelchair as a result of an attack. The story was based on Diamond’s detailed notes of a conversation between him and Wemp. The two met years ago in New Guinea when Wemp worked as Diamond’s driver during a bird research trip.

When the lawsuit was filed late last month, the Associated Press and New York Post picked up the story, but since then it has generated little interest among media reporters. However, one press watchdog dedicated time and resources to untangle the allegations.

The Art Science Research Laboratory, which is run by Rhonda Roland Shearer, operates StinkyJournalism.org. It published a lengthy and detailed examination of the New Yorker story around the same time the lawsuit was filed. (Disclosure: Shearer’s site interviewed me when my book, Regret The Error, came out in 2007 and she hosted a reception for me at her offices. We have kept in touch since then but have never worked together.)

But let’s set aside the lawsuit for a moment and rewind to when the magazine was checking the story. It had what was basically a single-source story, and it wasn’t able to check the article with the source, Daniel Wemp. The story itself also contained some very serious criminal allegations against the source in question. The dilemma is obvious: should you publish without getting some level of confirmation from the source or another party with specific knowledge of the events in question?http://www.cjr.org/regret_the_error/new_yorker_under_siege.php?page=all

TV reporter ordered to hand over tapes of war protests

2009-05-14T17:14:00.000-07:00

A reporter for a cable-access show in Chicago was ordered by a federal magistrate judge last week to hand over every video recording he made documenting anti-war protests from 2003 to 2005.

The reporter, Martin Conlisk, was subpoenaed by the city of Chicago during the course of its defense of a civil rights lawsuit filed by a local man who was arrested during a March 2005 anti-war protest. The protester, Andy Thayer, sued the city in 2007, alleging that his constitutional rights were violated by the arrest and claiming that the city’s policy of sending cops in riot gear to protests was a means to suppress speech.

Conlisk had been on the street corner filming the day Thayer was arrested and had testified in the man's disorderly conduct criminal trial.

But in the lawsuit, the city’s subpoena requested much more than the video from the day of Thayer’s arrest. It ordered Conlisk to hand over all tapes and material that documented the planning and implementation of all anti-war protests in the city from March 2003 to the present, including everything on his computer hard drive. It also ordered him to testify about those videos.

In the April 30 ruling, the magistrate judge, Arlander Keys, refused to apply a reporter’s privilege, holding that courts in the Seventh Circuit have “rejected the notion of a federal reporter’s privilege.”

http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=10745

Court reinstates Yahoo lawsuit over fake profiles

2009-05-14T17:11:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday reinstated a breach of contract claim against Yahoo Inc by an Oregon woman who said the company failed to remove nude photos and fake profiles posted by her estranged boyfriend after promising to do so.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that Cynthia Barnes could sue Yahoo for agreeing, then failing to stop the "dangerous, cruel, and highly indecent" use of its site by the ex-boyfriend.

"Contract liability here would come not from Yahoo's publishing conduct, but from Yahoo's manifest intention to be legally obligated to do something, which happens to be removal of material from publication," the opinion said.

The appeals court remanded the case to the district court for further action on the state law claim for breach of contract but did not rule on whether the claim was viable.

The appellate decision also affirmed the lower court's dismissal of a claim for negligent undertaking.

Yahoo said in a statement that it was pleased that part of the dismissal stood, and "evaluating the opinion on the remaining claim and looking forward to swift resolution in the district court."

Barnes' attorney Thomas Rask of Kell, Alterman & Runstein LLP in Portland, Oregon, said his client sued only after repeatedly asking Yahoo to remove the profiles, then relying on a promise by a Yahoo employee that they would be taken down.

"What an (Internet service provider) has to understand is this is not the wild wild West," Rask said. "There has to be some rational logic to it. Don't promise to do something and then not do it."

'BIG IMPLICATIONS'

The ruling could have a "big implications" for Internet companies that enjoy immunity from lawsuits involving user-posted content under the Communications Decency Act (CDA), said attorney Jeff Neuburger, co-chair of the Technology, Media and Communications practice group at Proskauer Rose LLP.http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE54801B20090509?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews

Google Book-Search Pact Draws Antitrust Scrutiny

2009-05-14T17:03:00.000-07:00

The Department of Justice is looking into whether Google Inc.'s proposed book-search settlement with authors and publishers violates antitrust laws, according to people familiar with the matter.

In recent weeks, the DOJ has contacted Google and some of its critics to ask about the settlement, which is designed to give Google the right to include millions of additional works in its searchable archive of digitized books, known as the Google Book Search service, these people say.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice declined to comment. Representatives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild did not return requests for comment.

Whether the Justice Department would seek to block the settlement, which is pending court approval, remains unclear. The investigation is Google's second tangle with the Justice Department in the past year. Last year, Google was forced to abandon an advertising agreement with Yahoo Inc., after regulators said it would sue to stop the deal on the grounds that it would give Google too much control over the online advertising market.

The settlement, unveiled in October, seeks to resolve a class-action lawsuit that stems from cases filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in 2005 to stop Google from scanning books and making them searchable online. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleged that Google's book search project violated copyrights.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124095639971465549.html

TV Audiences Falling Faster Than Newspapers

2009-05-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

Newspapers sell fewer copies than they used to, and network television news draws fewer viewers. But as that trend unfolded, newspapers and television gave starkly different accounts, a University of Pennsylvania study released last week shows.

Papers found a lot to report about declining news audiences, while national television news shows had little to say. And though the problems of print and broadcast have been similar in scope, both media dwelled primarily on what was happening to newspapers.

“The television networks have basically not been very interested in talking about television’s problems,” said Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the university’s Annenberg School of Communication and one of the study’s authors. The authors combed through reports from 2000 through early 2009 from 26 major newspapers, the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, and the prime-time lineups of CNN, CNBC, Fox News and MSNBC.

In the newspapers, they found 900 articles about the drop in newspaper circulation and 95 about the shrinking audience for the broadcast networks’ newscasts. The TV news shows had 38 reports on falling newspaper readership and only 6 about the falling audience for national news broadcasts.

(The broadcast networks’ evening news shows have lost audience more rapidly than printed newspapers, to about 23 million people each night now from 32 million in 2000. At the same time, the audience for prime-time cable news has roughly tripled, to about four million. Newspaper sales have dropped to about 47 million a day from 56 million in 2000. And all media have new — but not very lucrative — audiences online.)

Of the 26 newspapers studied, three — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — accounted for almost half the articles about either newspaper circulation or broadcast national news ratings. On television, about half the reports came from two cable networks — CNBC and Fox.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/business/media/11paper.html

Court Backs Fines for On-Air Expletives

2009-04-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON -- A 5-4 Supreme Court ruling Tuesday upheld the Bush administration's rule penalizing radio and television broadcasters over isolated utterances of an expletive before 10 p.m.

The court reversed a lower-court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission skirted rule-making procedures in adopting the regulation against so-called fleeting expletives in 2004. But the opinion, by Justice Antonin Scalia, left open the underlying constitutional issue -- whether the First Amendment permits the FCC to punish such speech.

The decision effectively sends the issue to the Obama administration, which has three vacancies to fill on the five-member FCC. With broadcasters pledging to press the free-speech argument next, the commission will have to decide whether to continue a defense of the Bush administration rule or, as many in the entertainment and communications industries have urged, drop it altogether.

The commission's chances for success on First Amendment grounds are uncertain. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, which struck down the fleeting-expletives rule in 2007, seemed doubtful that fining broadcasters for an occasional vulgarity over the airwaves could be constitutional. One member of the Supreme Court majority in Tuesday's ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas, suggested that he saw little reason to restrict broadcast speech when other media face few limits.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124091903135863347.html

Twitter Faces First Libel Lawsuit

2009-04-14T05:33:00.000-07:00

Twitter gets a lot of attention these days. In recent weeks, we've seen jurors twittering from the jury box, lawmakers twittering during Obama's first address to Congress, and celebrity ghost twitterers, to name just a few examples of the growing visibility of the micro-blogging platform. There's been enough hoopla for John Stewart to report the outbreak of a "Twitter Frenzy." While Stewart expresses mock luddite skepticism ("I have no idea how it works, or why it is"), the New York Times hails it as "an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal."

Now, at least as far as CMLP is concerned, Twitter has come of age. Why? Because Twitter has sparked its very first defamation lawsuit. (A colleague cleverer than me suggested we call it a "twibel" claim.) Making a good story better, the first defendant to be sued for tweeting is not some egg-headed techie type, but loose-canon-rock-star Courtney Love.

Fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir, who works under the label "Boudoir Queen," sued Love last week in California state court over statements made on Twitter, on Love's MySpace blog, and on Simorangkir's feedback page on etsy.com, an online marketplace for independent designers. Simorangkir alleges that, after a business dispute arose between them over some very expensive clothing, Love used Twitter to publish "not only delusional accusations and lies, but threats of harm." Cmplt. ¶ 20. The complaint, which includes claims for libel, false light invasion of privacy, breach of contract, and other claims, pulls no punches:

Whether caused by a drug induced psychosis, a warped understanding of reality, or the belief that her money and fame allow her to disregard the law, Love has embarked in what is nothing short of an obsessive and delusional crusade to terrorize or destroy Simorangkir, Simorangkir's reputation and her livelihood.

Cmplt. ¶ 1. I've perused the detailed allegations in the complaint. Many of the allegedly defamatory statements look like statements of opinion or wild and largely incoherent rants, for example characterizing Simorangkir as a "nasty lying hosebag thief." Cmplt. ¶ 24(c). The most aesthetically satisfying chestunut of this sort is the one Simorangkir cites as an alleged threat: "oi ve dont fuck with my wardrobe or you willend up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted til your dead." Cmplt. ¶ 24(g) (typos not mine!). Not that terribly nice, but somehow I doubt that even Simorangkir could take this seriously.

But, unfortunately for Love, a good many of the statements are factual in nature, accusing Simorangkir of a variety of bad behavior, including dealing drugs, assault, burglary, prostitution, and losing custody of her child. See Cmplt. ¶ 24(b), (f), (h), 26(c), (j), (n), (bb). This could make it hard for Love to defend against the suit and could neutralize a promising legal argument based on the extreme informality of the Twitter platform. As I've explained before, courts must consider context, including the nature of the platform, when deciding whether a statement is fact or opinion. One could argue that reasonable readers of most Twitter feeds -- which allow "people [to] 'follow' each other's informal idea drops" -- do not understand "tweets" to be conveying factual information. But this argument only goes so far, and it doesn't sound convincing when many of the damaging statements look undeniably like facts.

In anticipation of Twitter fights to come, we've updated our legal threats database to add "micro-blog" to our "publication medium" category. You can monitor the progress of this case in our entry, Simorangkir v. Love. http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2009/first-twitter-libel-suit-starring-courtney-love

Truth No Longer Defense in Some Libel Cases

2009-04-14T05:27:00.000-07:00

Truth is no longer a defense in some private-figure libel cases in Massachusetts where the "ill will" of the speaker is established -- at least according to a federal appellate opinion issued last week. The court was interpreting Massachusetts state law, not federal law.

The decision in Noonan v. Staples took a unique approach to libel law by ruling that true statements can be libelous if published maliciously. The court also interpreted the term “actual malice” to mean an intentional ill will, finding that a state statute that predated U.S. Supreme Court precedent had a different meaning than the "actual malice" standard of New York Times v. Sullivan.

The Feb. 13 ruling issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston (1st Circuit) counters years of precedent holding that truth is an absolute defense to libel and that “actual malice” means reckless disregard for the truth.

“It is the most dangerous libel decision in decades. The decision puts a crack in the bedrock that threatens to undermine free speech,” Robert Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, wrote on his blog.

The case involved a lawsuit brought by a former Staples employee against his employer. Alan Noonan sued Staples for libel after the company’s executive vice president sent an e-mail to 1,500 employees alerting them that Noonan had been fired for violating the company’s travel and expense policy.

Noonan acknowledged that everything written in the e-mail was true, but still claimed he had been libeled because it was sent with malicious intent.

In finding that a reasonable jury might find that the Staples e-mail was sent maliciously, the court pointed to a century-old Massachusetts statute that allows true statements to be considered libelous “if the plaintiff can show that the defendant acted with ‘actual malice’ in publishing the statement.” According to Ambrogi's blog, the Massachusetts statute was held unconstitutional by a 1998 state court decision.

The court held that the statute's use of the term ''actual malice" did not have the same meaning as the U.S. Supreme Court's definition of the term in the landmark First Amendment case New York Times v. Sullivan. Instead of interpreting actual malice to mean that the plaintiff acted with reckless disregard for the truth, as New York Times held, the Court of Appeals ruled that it means ill will or malevolent intent, a much lower standard for the plaintiff to prove.http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=9958

Houses passes federal shield bill

2009-04-14T05:24:00.000-07:00

A federal shield bill that would give reporters a qualified privilege from revealing confidential sources was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday night.

H.R. 985, known as the Free Flow of Information Act of 2009, was passed by a voice vote under a suspension of the rules, a typical procedure used to pass non-controversial bills. The bill is identical to the bill that was passed in 2007 by a vote of 398 to 21.

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va) sponsored the bill with Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind), Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va), and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mi). The sponsors and Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex) all spoke out in favor of the bill.

“This is protecting the public’s right to know,” Pence said during the debate.

Despite the law’s swift passage, there was some criticism of the law during the debate. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex) voiced stern opposition to the bill, saying that there is “no evidence of a need” for a shield law and that the law would improperly “allow reporters to avoid a civic duty.”

In a letter circulated to House members today, Smith urged a rejection of the law.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) also voiced opposition during the debate, arguing that privileges should only protect “skilled” and licensed professions such as priests, doctors and attorneys.

The law will provide a qualified privilege for journalists with exceptions for national security, the prevention of death or bodily harm, or information that is deemed essential in a criminal case or critical in a civil suit.

The bill defines a journalist as someone who regularly reports and writes for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood or for substantial financial gain.http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=10682

Amazon Error Removes Gay, Health Books From Search

2009-04-14T05:21:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - Amazon.com Inc. said an internal cataloging glitch inadvertently removed more than 57,000 books from its sales rankings and main search page.

The Seattle company was hit by criticism in recent days from the authors of affected books, mainly those focusing on gay themes. But Amazon said the problem was global, and affected other categories such as health, mind and body, reproductive and sexual medicine and erotica.

"This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection," wrote Drew Herdener, Amazon's director of communications, in an email.

Amazon declined to explain its cataloging process or what had gone wrong with it.

"Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future," added Mr. Herdener.

Books by E.M. Forster and Gore Vidal were among those with gay themes whose rankings had been missing but were later restored. Books whose rankings were still missing included a lesbian love story by Sylvia Brownrigg and a biography of Ellen DeGeneres by Lisa Iannucci.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123964842562214381.html

Digital photography complicates issue of "fair use."

2009-03-16T05:54:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - Technology makes it easy to lift parts of someone else's music, video or other digital creations, tweak it, and call the result one's own. This usually causes no harm, but the case of a photo-turned-poster of Barack Obama is a reminder that just because technology makes something possible doesn't make it right.

Until the digital age, the common view of copyright law was that it served overreaching corporations against creative little guys. Groucho Marx once generated publicity for the Marx Brothers film "A Night in Casablanca" by playing on this cynicism. Warner Bros. asked for the plot of the film, fearing it would spoof its Humphrey Bogart classic, "Casablanca." Groucho Marx responded with a letter threatening a counterclaim against Warner for using the word "Brothers.

Now disputes are as likely to be little guy versus little guy, with artists and photographers split over the Obama case. One side defends poster artist Shepard Fairey, while the other cries foul on behalf of freelance photographer Mannie Garcia, who took a striking photo in 2006 while on assignment for the Associated Press of then Sen. Barack Obama gazing off to one side. Mr. Fairey discovered the photo on Google and used it, without crediting the photographer, to create the "Hope" poster. With Mr. Fairey's permission, the Obama campaign widely used this image to support the candidate.

Earlier this year, New York gallery organizer James Danziger was planning a show featuring Obama campaign art, including the Fairey poster. He wondered whose photo had been used, but Mr. Fairey refused to say. Online searching found it to be Mr. Garcia's photo. When the AP learned the poster was based on its photo, it sought standard licensing terms from Mr. Fairey, who refused. Instead, Mr. Fairey sued the AP, which has counterclaimed.

It's not clear who wins as a matter of law. The concept of "fair use" is broad, but photographers argue that the lighting, angle and much of the art of the poster, which seems to have been digitally created, was in the photo. Mr. Garcia, a veteran war photographer, worked hard for the image. "I'm on my knees, I'm down low, and I'm just trying to make a nice, clean head shot," he told National Public Radio. "I'm looking and waiting. I'm waiting for him to turn his head a little bit. . . . Boom. I was there. I was ready."http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123716866712036921.html

Many See Privacy on Web as Big Issue, Survey Says

2009-03-16T05:49:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - As arguments swirl over online privacy, a new survey indicates the issue is a dominant concern for Americans.

More than 90 percent of respondents called online privacy a “really” or “somewhat” important issue, according to the survey of more than 1,000 Americans conducted by TRUSTe, an organization that monitors the privacy practices of Web sites of companies like I.B.M., Yahoo and WebMD for a fee.

When asked if they were comfortable with behavioral targeting — when advertisers use a person’s browsing history or search history to decide which ad to show them — only 28 percent said they were. More than half said they were not. And more than 75 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “The Internet is not well regulated, and naïve users can easily be taken advantage of.”

The survey arrives at a fractious time. Debate over behavioral advertising has intensified, with industry groups trying to avoid government intervention by creating their own regulatory standards. Still, some Congressional representatives and the Federal Trade Commission are questioning whether there are enough safeguards around the practice.

Last month, the F.T.C. revised its suggestions for behavioral advertising rules for the industry, proposing, among other measures, that sites disclose when they are participating in behavioral advertising and obtain consumers’ permission to do so.

One F.T.C. commissioner, Jon Leibowitz, warned that if the industry did not respond, intervention would be next.

“Put simply, this could be the last clear chance to show that self-regulation can — and will — effectively protect consumers’ privacy,” Mr. Leibowitz said, or else “it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by our commission.”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/technology/internet/16privacy.html

A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors

2009-03-13T11:44:00.000-07:00

Songs about a mythical alpaca-like creature have taken hold online in China.

The New York Times - BEIJING — Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon.

A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”

“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.”

Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said in an interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the futility of censorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they want to express, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is like a water flow — if you block one direction, it flows to other directions, or overflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”

China’s online population has always endured censorship, but the oversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracy movement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released an online petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign, ostensibly against Internet pornography and other forms of deviance. By mid-February, the government effort had shut down more than 1,900 Web sites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic sites, but also online discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphone text messages in which political and other sensitive issues were broached.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html

Goggle Spends Millions Looking For Copyright Holders

2009-03-04T09:59:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - Last month an e-mail message washed up at the offices of The Cook Islands News in the South Pacific. It was a request to place a half-page advertisement in the newspaper, which has a circulation of 2,500. The cost was $370.

“We were amazed — it came from out of nowhere,” the newspaper’s editor, John Woods, said in a telephone interview. “We are very skeptical of ads like that.”

Even more surprising was who was paying for it: Google.

Google, the online giant, had been sued in federal court by a large group of authors and publishers who claimed that its plan to scan all the books in the world violated their copyrights.

As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.

But first they must be found.

Since the copyright holders can be anywhere and not necessarily online — given how many books are old or out of print — it became obvious that what was needed was a huge push in that relic of the pre-Internet age: print.

Under the proposed settlement, reached on Oct. 28 and still subject to court approval, there must be an effort the court finds “reasonable and practicable” to find authors and publishers — especially copyright holders of so-called orphan books, which are still in copyright but long out of print. So the task means placing at least one ajavascript:void(0)dvertisement in every country in the world.

One reason courts have required such heroic efforts to reach the people covered by a settlement is that unless parties opt out of the settlement, they are automatically opting in. The least that must be done, the argument goes, is let those affected know about it.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/books/04google.html

Supreme Court to Revisit a Case on Breach of Copyright

2009-03-03T07:18:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to revisit a case it decided eight years ago in favor of freelance writers who said that newspapers and magazines had committed copyright infringement by making their contributions available on electronic databases.

In that 2001 decision, New York Times Company v. Tasini, the Supreme Court seemed to contemplate and even encourage a settlement of the case, saying that the parties “may enter into an agreement allowing continued electronic reproduction of the authors’ works.”

After the Tasini decision, many freelance works were removed from online databases. Most publishers these days require freelance writers to sign contracts granting both print and online rights.

In an effort to settle the original copyright infringement claims, authors, publishers and database companies undertook four years of what they said were intensive, complex and costly negotiations. In the end, the defendants agreed to pay $18 million for a global settlement of all claims in four class actions to two groups of authors — those who had registered copyrights in their works and those who had not.

The second group was by far the more numerous. But the federal copyright law allows suits claiming copyright infringement only after works are registered.

In November 2007, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, declined to approve the settlement, saying it did not have jurisdiction over the claims of the second group of authors.

The question for the Supreme Court this time is whether courts may approve global class action settlements that include claims they would not have had jurisdiction to decide.

Many authors supported the settlement, but some objected. The objectors said that authors who had not registered their works were treated unfairly because their share would be reduced if there was not enough money to go around.

But all concerned urged the court to hear the case, Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, No. 08-103.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/03bizcourt.html

Defense Chief Lifts Ban on Pictures of Coffins

2009-02-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

In a reversal of military policy, the news media will now be allowed to photograph the coffins of the war dead.

The New York Times - WASHINGTON — In a reversal of an 18-year-old military policy that critics said was hiding the ultimate cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the news media will now be allowed to photograph the coffins of America’s war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States, but only if the families of the dead agree.

The decision, which Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Thursday, lifts a 1991 blanket ban on such photographs put in place under President George Bush. It chiefly affects coffins arriving from Iraq and Afghanistan that go through Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

“I think that foremost in our thinking about issues like this should be the families and giving them choices,” Mr. Gates said in a news conference at the Pentagon.

Renewed as recently as a year ago by the administration of President George W. Bush, the ban has long been a source of intense debate.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27coffins.html

The military said the ban protected the privacy and dignity of families of the dead. But others, including some of the families as well as opponents of the Iraq war, said it sanitized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was intended to control public anger over the conflicts.

Facebook Withdraws Changes in Data Use

2009-02-18T08:06:00.000-08:00

After a wave of protests from its users, the Facebook social networking site said on Wednesday that it would withdraw changes to its so-called terms of service concerning the data supplied by the tens of millions of people who use it.

The about-face was made known to many users in a message posted on the Facebook home page saying : “Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

The posting invited users to click on a link to get more details.

Terms of service generally outline appropriate conduct and grant a license to companies to store users’ data. Unknown to many users, the terms frequently give broad power to Web site operators.

Earlier this month, Facebook deleted a provision from its terms of service that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. It added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/technology/internet/19facebook.html

Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information

2009-02-17T05:37:00.000-08:00

Reacting to an online swell of suspicion about changes to Facebook’s terms of service, the company’s chief executive moved to reassure users on Monday that the users, not the Web site, “own and control their information.”

The online exchanges reflected the uneasy and evolving balance between sharing information and retaining control over that information on the Internet. The subject arose when a consumer advocate’s blog shined an unflattering light onto the pages of legal language that many users accept without reading when they use a Web site.

The pages, called terms of service, generally outline appropriate conduct and grant a license to companies to store users’ data. Unknown to many users, the terms frequently give broad power to Web site operators.

This month, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/technology/internet/17facebook.html

New Rules Push Colleges to Rethink Tactics Against Student Pirates

2009-02-15T08:55:00.000-08:00

Colleges are about to be told how to fight piracy. They have deployed various tactics over the years to deter illegal file sharing, usually of commercial music and movies, by their students. But this month, the U.S. Department of Education will begin crafting regulations that specify strategies. That prospect is making some campus officials wonder if plans they have already invested in will pass muster.

The regulations will interpret three antipiracy provisions in the Higher Education Act renewed by Congress last year. The law requires colleges to inform students of institutional and criminal penalties for unauthorized file sharing, to "effectively combat" copyright violations with "a variety of technology-based deterrents," and to offer alternatives to illegal downloading. Because the requirements are simultaneously strict and vague, colleges are attentively awaiting their interpretation.

Many are in good shape. "To a large extent, the Higher Education Act codifies what colleges are doing already," says Steven L. Worona, director of policy and networking programs for Educause, the college-technology group. About 90 percent of four-year colleges and universities have policies to deter illegal file sharing, according to an October survey by the Campus Computing Project, which tracks information-technology trends.

Still, community colleges and other institutions that largely escaped the Recording Industry Association of America's mass lawsuits against students accused of violating copyrights may not have developed those policies as fully. And some that do have policies are unsure whether their approaches will comply with the new rules.http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i23/23a01901.htm

Shoe Thrower Targets Wen At Cambridge

2009-02-03T05:14:00.000-08:00

CAMBRIDGE, England -- A protester threw a shoe at China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao on Monday while he was giving a speech at the University of Cambridge, police said.

The protester seated near the back of the auditorium stood up during Mr. Wen's speech and shouted: "How can you listen to this unchallenged?" before throwing a shoe that landed some distance from the premier.

Mr. Wen looked unruffled, paused a few seconds and then continued with his remarks. One of his aides quietly stepped on the stage, picked up the gray athletic shoe and removed it.

University officials quickly escorted the protester from the auditorium. He was taken to a local police station for questioning, police spokeswoman Shelly Spratt said.

After the protest, Mr. Wen continued his speech, saying: "We come in peace. This is not going to obstruct China-U.K. friendships. History shows harmony will not be obstructed by any force, so would you let me continue."

About 80 people, both supporters and critics of China, had earlier gathered outside the venue. There was a large police presence in the city and security guards within the building.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123360341785040427.html

Color This Area of the Law Gray

2009-02-03T05:10:00.000-08:00

Post courtesy of Stephanie Toth

The Wall Street Journal - Beauty, it is often said, is in the eye of the beholder, and so might be copyright infringement. Artist Richard Prince never denied that he made use of some photographic images he found in a 2000 book by Patrick Cariou called "Yes Rasta," documenting the community of Rastafarians the French photographer encountered in the mountains of Jamaica, for collage paintings that were exhibited last fall at New York's Gagosian Gallery and reproduced in a book published by Rizzoli.

The question is whether Mr. Prince's use of these images was "transformative" -- borrowing in the process of creating something entirely new -- or just stealing. A lawsuit filed by Mr. Cariou in New York District Court in late December against the appropriationist Mr. Prince -- as such artists are known -- likely will be one more front in the battle over what constitutes copyright infringement in these days of "sampling" and point-and-click downloading.

According to Mr. Cariou's lawyer, Daniel Brooks, Mr. Prince scanned several of Mr. Cariou's images of people and landscapes into his computer and printed them directly onto his canvases. He then defaced them in limited ways (placing an electric guitar in one Rastafarian's hands and daubing paint onto the face, for instance), as well as adding other elements to the paintings. Mr. Prince "didn't transform these photographs -- he just used them," said Mr. Brooks. But it is Mr. Prince's contention that he took the photographer's images as raw material -- the way an assemblage sculptor uses "found objects" -- in order to create something that not only comments on the photographs' previous meaning but also gives them new meaning. Mr. Brooks noted that Mr. Prince could have avoided the problem altogether by traveling to Jamaica to take his own photographs for his canvases, but the entire point of Mr. Prince's art is commentary on images that already exist in the world.

Other artists have stumbled into this gray area of the law. "It's meant to be a gray area, because the copyright law is designed to be flexible," said John Koegel, a lawyer who successfully represented artist Jeff Koons in an infringement lawsuit by a commercial photographer, Andrea Blanch, in 2005. "The law states that the use of a copyrighted image is transformative based on the ordinary lay observer's sense of if the new work is different and how different it is. It is very much of a visual thing, and there is no bright line that artists can go by."http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123319795753727521.html

Fix for Music Piracy: Tack a Fee on Broadband

2009-01-26T06:07:00.000-08:00

Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man, which wants all broadband customers to pay a fee in exchange for rights to music online.

The New York Times - PARIS — Two generations ago, the Isle of Man gave the world the Bee Gees. Now it says it wants to help the wounded music industry stay alive.

The island, a rainy outpost in the Irish Sea, is promoting an offbeat remedy for digital piracy, which the music labels blame for billions of dollars in lost sales. Instead of fighting file-sharing, the local government wants to embrace it — and it is trying to enlist a skeptical music industry’s help.

Under a proposal announced this month, the 80,000 people who live on the Isle of Man would be able to download unlimited amounts of music — perhaps even from notorious peer-to-peer pirate sites. To make this possible, broadband subscribers would pay a nominal fee of as little as £1, or $1.38, a month to their Internet service providers.

Ron Berry, director of inward investment for the Isle of Man, said the music industry needed radical approaches because of the “utter failure” of its current strategies. Global music sales have fallen nearly 25 percent since 2000.

Despite nearly a decade of campaigning against piracy, the industry’s international trade group estimates, 95 percent of tracks distributed online are pirated, generating no revenue for the recording companies.

“A lot of people in the business are concerned with how much money they are losing, but not with how much money they could make,” Mr. Berry said.

Under his proposal, the money collected by the Internet providers would be sent to a special agency that would distribute the proceeds to the copyright owners, including the record labels and music publishers. They would receive payments based on how often their music was downloaded or streamed over the Internet, as they now do in many countries when it is performed live or on the radio.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/business/worldbusiness/26music.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

F.B.I. Spied on George Carlin

2009-01-23T18:36:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - While countless comedy fans spent the 1960s and ’70s poring over the rebellious routines of George Carlin, above, so too did J. Edgar Hoover, according to F.B.I. records released by the comedian’s family and reported by The Associated Press. Among the documents Carlin obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request before his death in June was an F.B.I. memo that noted his 1969 appearance on “The Jackie Gleason Show,” when he lampooned Hoover and the F.B.I. “His treatment was in very poor taste and it was obvious that he was using the prestige of the bureau and Mr. Hoover to enhance his performance,” the memo said, according to The A.P. The F.B.I. previously told The A.P. that it had no file on Carlin; an F.B.I. spokeswoman told The A.P. that she was looking into the apparent contradiction.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/arts/23arts-FBIKEPTTABSO_BRF.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Child Pornography Law Dies Amid Legal Fight

2009-01-22T05:51:00.000-08:00

The Associated Press - WASHINGTON -- A federal law intended to restrict children's access to Internet pornography died quietly Wednesday at the Supreme Court, more than 10 years after Congress overwhelmingly approved it.

The Child Online Protection Act would have barred Web sites from making harmful content available to minors over the Internet. The law had been embroiled in challenges to its constitutionality since it passed in 1998 and never took effect.

Also Wednesday, the court ruled unanimously in favor of a Massachusetts schoolgirl and her parents in their effort to sue a local school district under both a 1972 law against sex discrimination in education and a post-Civil War civil rights law.

Federal courts had said that the newer law, Title IX, barring sex discrimination at schools that receive federal money, was the only avenue open to the parents.

The high court disagreed, although several justices commented when they heard arguments in December that the family probably would lose their lawsuit, even if they won the right to pursue it.

Their daughter was a 5-year-old kindergarten student when she told them said she was subjected to repeated harassment by a third-grade boy on their school bus.

The Internet blocking law didn't make it as far as a high court hearing. The justices rejected the government's final attempt to revive the law, turning away the appeal without comment.

The American Civil Liberties Union led the challenge to the law on behalf of writers, artists and health educators. "For over a decade the government has been trying to thwart freedom of speech on the Internet, and for years the courts have been finding the attempts unconstitutional," said Chris Hansen, the ACLU's lead attorney on the case. "It is not the role of the government to decide what people can see and do on the Internet. Those are personal decisions that should be made by individuals and their families."

A federal appeals court in Philadelphia earlier ruled that the law would violate the First Amendment, saying filtering technologies and other parental control tools are a less restrictive way to protect children from inappropriate content online.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123255112538902535.html

Keeping in touch with the Mob - On Facebook

2009-01-20T05:29:00.000-08:00

ROME — Your college roommate is on Facebook. So are your cousins and colleagues and friends. But guess who else may find Facebook a great way to stay in touch?

Some people in Sicily who know a few things about networking.

In recent weeks, the Italian authorities have begun investigating Facebook discussion groups devoted to convicted Mafiosi, concerned that some members might be more than fans.

At the same time, a campaign calling on Facebook to remove pro-Mafia pages has been gaining momentum, while thousands of Facebook members have joined new anti-Mafia groups.

The debate spilled over from civil society to online society after recent news reports revealed that more than 2,000 people had joined Facebook interest groups hailing Salvatore Riina, the so-called boss of bosses, known as Totò, who was arrested in 1993 after more than two decades on the run; and his successor, Bernardo Provenzano, arrested in 2006 after four decades in hiding. Both are serving multiple life sentences.

Such groups “are like sites that laud Hitler or Nazism,” said Rita Borsellino, whose brother, the magistrate Paolo Borsellino, spent his life investigating the Cosa Nostra before he was killed in 1992 in a car bombing that Mr. Riina was later convicted of ordering.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/world/europe/20italy.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Ms. Borsellino said she thought Facebook was “damaged” by sites that glorified the Mafia. “These are people who are accused of serious crimes and are in prison,” she added.

Ruling on Records Delivers a Win to Cheney

2009-01-20T05:25:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post - A federal judge yesterday rejected the claim by a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups that Vice President Cheney intended to illegally discard some of his official records, and instead accepted the pledge of a senior White House aide that key Cheney documents and other materials will be transferred as required to the National Archives.

The decision, announced on the eve of the Bush administration's handover of power, capped a long legal battle over how much discretion Cheney had to decide which documents he must preserve for history. On virtually every important legal issue in the case, including whether courts even have jurisdiction to review the matter, the Justice Department -- representing Cheney -- lost.

But the groups, including the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Archivists, were unable to convince the court that Cheney intended to destroy or keep much of his records under what they called a strained interpretation of the governing law.

The Justice Department provided what U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly called "constantly shifting arguments" in the case, but, she said, "That confusion is not evidence" that would undermine the sworn deposition of Claire M. O'Donnell, a Cheney aide who handles record-keeping and other administrative tasks.
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"The Court expects," she said, that White House officials "will, in good faith, comply with the representations that their officials have made, by way of testimony, in this case." As a result, she granted summary judgment on the White House's behalf and lifted a five-month-old injunction mandating the preservation of Cheney's records.

One of the plaintiffs, Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said he remains worried that "when the Archives goes to open Cheney's papers, they are going to find empty boxes."

Cheney "spent most of his time making sure he left no footprints," said Kutler, who has written two books on Watergate and President Richard M. Nixon's White House tapes. "Why did he fight this order so much if he did not have the intent to leave with these papers? I'm guessing that a lot of it will not be there." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/19/AR2009011903042.html?hpid=topnews

Intelligence Court Rules Wiretapping Program Legal

2009-01-15T06:14:00.000-08:00

The New York TImes - WASHINGTON — A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans’ private communications may be involved.

The court decision is expected to be disclosed as early as Thursday in an unclassified, redacted form. It was made in December by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which has issued only two prior rulings in its 30-year history.

The decision marks the first time since the disclosure of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program three years ago that an appellate court has addressed the constitutionality of the federal government’s wiretapping powers. In validating the government’s wide authority to collect foreign intelligence, it may offer legal credence to the Bush administration’s repeated assertions that the president has constitutional authority to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping.

The appeals court is expected to uphold a secret ruling issued last year by the intelligence court that it oversees, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, or FISA, court. In that initial opinion, the secret court found that Congress had acted within its authority in August of 2007 when it passed a hotly debated law known as the Protect America Act, which gave the executive branch broad power to eavesdrop on international communications, according to someone familiar with the ruling.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/washington/16fisa.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Student newspaper in Faribault (MN) goes to Web to avoid censorship

2009-01-14T07:32:00.000-08:00

FARIBAULT -- About a month after the Faribault High School student newspaper was shut down by the district's superintendent, student journalists are taking their stories to the Internet.

The owner of a company that creates websites for student publications is offering student editors of the Echo a free site.

"We wanted to make sure they had a chance to keep publishing," said Jason Wallestad, owner of School Newspapers Online. "Our goal is to help student journalism as much as we can."

Superintendent Bob Stepaniak stopped the paper from being printed Dec. 14 after student editors refused to let him see an article before publication about the investigation into a middle-school teacher.

The website, truthwithecho.com, is under development and will likely have its name changed, Echo editor Christen Hildebrandt said. It will cover school news and events, but won't have any association with the district or use any of its resources, he said.

Hildebrandt said the website will be updated more frequently than the newspaper -- the Echo was published monthly. In addition, it will include creative writing, columns and photography.

Because the website isn't funded by the district, administrators have no control over content.

Stepaniak said he wasn't surprised a website was created.

"It's well within their right," he said. "Any group of students could put together a website like that. That's the way life is in this electronic age."

Kelly Zwagerman, a teacher at the high school and adviser for the Echo, will help the students outside of her school duties. The site, she said, will be run by the students and her role will be minimal -- she'll attend meetings and edit stories or offer guidelines for ethics.http://www.startribune.com/local/37393754.html

The surveillance-industrial complex

2009-01-11T11:06:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: Author James Bamford who has made a career out of writing about America's super-secret intelligence gathering community has a new book out - The Shadow Factory, The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9-11 to Eavesdropping on America.

The New York Times - Probably the best place within the entire region to install a listening post is the Indian city of Mumbai,” James Bamford writes in “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America,” his latest book about the all-seeing, all-hearing National Security Agency. Without question, he says, Mumbai, India, “represents the kind of location where the N.S.A. would seek to establish a secret presence.” And such a place, he notes elsewhere in his book, “presents an extremely tempting target for terrorists.

As it happened, I read those lines at precisely the same time that Mumbai became the scene of a bloody three-day siege that killed more than 170 people and wounded many hundreds. Telecoms were not attacked, and whether there was some symbolic connection between the N.S.A.’s ambitions and the terrorists’ targeting is not a question that can be answered definitively here and now or, perhaps, ever. But it’s a fair bet that Bamford will find a way to work the bloodbath at the Taj Mahal hotel into the long N.S.A. narrative that he began with “The Puzzle Palace” in 1982, followed up with “Body of Secrets” in 2001, and may well continue with paperback updates and further sequels after the present book. These are the kinds of details, or coincidences, that Bamford loves. In “The Shadow Factory” he piles one on top of another — events, addresses, room numbers — in a slapped-together text that often blends facts with speculation to evoke a pervasive atmosphere of conspiracy.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/books/review/Dickey-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Apple Drops Copyright Protection on Songs

2009-01-07T06:58:00.001-08:00

The New York Times - SAN FRANCISCO — In moves that will help shape the online future of the music business, Apple said Tuesday that it would remove anticopying restrictions on all of the songs in its popular iTunes Store and allow record companies to set a range of prices for them.

Beginning this week, three of the four major music labels — Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — will begin selling music through iTunes without digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which controls the copying and use of digital files. The fourth, EMI, was already doing so.

In return, Apple, whose dominance in online music sales gives it powerful leverage, agreed to a longstanding demand of the music labels and said it would move away from its insistence on pricing all individual song downloads on iTunes at 99 cents.

Instead, the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in April, while the biggest hits and newest songs will go for $1.29. Others that are moderately popular will remain at 99 cents.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/companies/07apple.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

China Criticizes Google and Others on Pornography

2009-01-06T06:52:00.000-08:00

HONG KONG — The Chinese government broadened its recent effort to limit pornography on the Internet by criticizing 19 Internet companies by name on Monday, including the two market leaders in China, Google and Baidu.

A statement posted on a government-run news site said the Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies would work together “to purify the Internet’s cultural environment and protect the healthy development of minors.” A similar statement had been issued on Dec. 5, but attracted little attention.

Monday’s statement went a step further in saying that 19 companies had failed to do enough to stop the spread of pornography. Early Monday evening, the names of the companies were also posted on the same official Web site, along with a terse statement of why each company was on the list.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/world/asia/06pornography.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Google Scans Books, Puts Them Online

2009-01-05T06:15:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase “you’re not the boss of me.” Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.

But while using Google’s book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story contained in “The Church,” a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

Ever since Google began scanning printed books four years ago, scholars and others with specialized interests have been able to tap a trove of information that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of libraries and in antiquarian bookstores.

According to Dan Clancy, the engineering director for Google book search, every month users view at least 10 pages of more than half of the one million out-of-copyright books that Google has scanned into its servers.

Google’s book search “allows you to look for things that would be very difficult to search for otherwise,” said Mr. Zimmer, whose site is visualthesaurus.com.

A settlement in October with authors and publishers who had brought two copyright lawsuits against Google will make it possible for users to read a far greater collection of books, including many still under copyright protection.

The agreement, pending approval by a judge this year, also paved the way for both sides to make profits from digital versions of books. Just what kind of commercial opportunity the settlement represents is unknown, but few expect it to generate significant profits for any individual author. Even Google does not necessarily expect the book program to contribute significantly to its bottom line. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/technology/internet/05google.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Reporters Committee files brief in FISA eavesdropping suit

2008-12-20T17:27:00.000-08:00

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a brief in federal district court in Manhattan today asking the court to find that the FISA Amendments Acts of 2008 violates the First Amendment rights of journalists to gather news.

The FISA Amendments Act, signed into law this summer, amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the government to intercept communications between U.S. citizens and people abroad without first obtaining a judicial warrant. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the government, in Amnesty International v. McConnell, on behalf of a group of journalists, authors, attorneys and activists, arguing that the law violates the constitution.

The Reporters Committee argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that the law specifically violates the First Amendment rights of journalists by eliminating the ability for journalists and their international sources to communicate confidentially. The law also violates the constitutionally protected role of the news media as a watchdog on government action.

“The FISA Amendment dramatically reduces the ability of American reporters to inform their readers, viewers and listeners about valuable international news,” said Reporters Committee Executive Director Lucy Dalglish.http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=9856

CNN Pitches a Cheaper Wire Service to Newspapers

2008-12-15T17:06:00.000-08:00

CNN, in the afterglow of an election season of record ratings for cable news, is elbowing in on a new line of business: catering to financially strained newspapers looking for an alternative to The Associated Press.

For nearly a month, a trial version of CNN’s wire service has been on display in some newspapers. But this week editors from about 30 papers will visit Atlanta to hear CNN’s plans to broaden a service to provide coverage of big national and international events — and maybe local ones — on a smaller scale and at a lower cost than The A.P.

“The reality is we don’t have a lot of relationships with newspapers,” said Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide. “We have relationships with TV stations around the world.” Mr. Walton said the meeting this week, which CNN has billed the “CNN Newspaper Summit,” is “kind of a get-to-know-you.”

With its CNN Wire, the company is going up against the largest news-gathering operation in the world in The A.P., and it must convince editors that it can offer something that is well outside its broadcast expertise — which may not be a tough task given the dire circumstances newspapers face. In addition, a number of newspapers are unhappy with the cost of The A.P., a nonprofit corporation that is owned by the 1,400 papers that are its members. Some newspapers have even given notice that they intend to leave The A.P. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/business/media/01cnn.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Can Reporters Sue Sources For Defamation?

2008-12-12T07:30:00.001-08:00

The New York Times - A classical music critic who was removed from his post at The Cleveland Plain Dealer after a history of negative reviews of the Cleveland Orchestra’s music director struck back on Thursday with a lawsuit.

The critic, Donald Rosenberg, charged that orchestra officials had waged a “campaign of vilification” against him and that his bosses at the newspaper had caved in to demands that he be ousted.

“It’s key that people realize that journalists have to be given the freedom to operate without pressure from outside sources,” Mr. Rosenberg said in a telephone interview. Mr. Rosenberg stressed that his complaint was directed at the orchestra’s management and not its musicians.

Mr. Rosenberg remains at the paper as a music reporter and dance critic and writes some music reviews, but not of the Cleveland Orchestra. The paper in September assigned a former intern who had worked with Mr. Rosenberg to do that job.

Mr. Rosenberg’s suit, filed in the Court of Common Pleas of Cuyahoga County, names the newspaper and the orchestra’s parent, the Musical Arts Association, as defendants. Also named are Susan Goldberg, the newspaper’s editor; Gary Hanson, the orchestra’s executive director; Richard Bogomolny, its chairman and president; and James Ireland III, a board member and former president.

Mr. Rosenberg, 56, charged the defendants with defamation. He accused orchestra management of tortious interference with his job, and the paper and Ms. Goldberg of age discrimination and violating Ohio’s free speech principle. The suit seeks damages of at least $50,000. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/business/media/12plain.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Study: Nearly half of world's jailed journalists come from Web

2008-12-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

More than print, TV or any other medium, online journalists are now the most-jailed category of journalists worldwide. A study by the Committee to Protect Journalists said that the online reporters, editors and bloggers make up 45% of the 125 journalists it found behind bars, the first time the Web category has eclipsed print (42%) since the study began in 1997.

CPJ director Joel Simon observed that without organizational support, online journalists are easier targets. "The image of the solitary blogger working at home in pajamas may be appealing, but when the knock comes on the door, they are alone and vulnerable," Simon said in a news release.

The study notes that in China, which leads the world in captive journalists, 24 of the 28 currently behind bars did their work online. Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan round out the top five countries on the list of journo jailers.

Read more about the report at the CPJ web site.http://www.cpj.org/imprisoned/cpjs-2008-census-online-journalists-now-jailed-mor.php

New Machines Cheaply Reproduce Books On Demand

2008-12-02T07:48:00.000-08:00

Editors Note: Another advance in technology poses challenges for copyright holders - this time it is not music being downloaded, but easy, quick publishing of books for 1 cent per page. - MT

Chronicle of Higher Education - If you wonder what the future of book publishing might look, smell, and sound like, head north to the University of Alberta's bookstore in Edmonton. There a $144,000 machine is churning out made-to-order paperbacks at a cost of a penny a page.

It's the Espresso Book Machine, which converts digital files into bound books, one order at a time, in under 15 minutes. The contraption smells like glue, looks like a couple of copy machines attached to a cabinet, and emits its share of clunking and thunking sounds, said Jacqui Wong, the machine's operator, who calls it her "baby."

At least seven Espressos are in operation, several on college campuses. Instead of publishers' printing thousands of books and hoping some of them will find buyers — and losing money when they don't — the machine prints on demand. Customers can submit an order for, say, an old textbook or a copy of a 19th-century classic, and walk out with it several minutes later.http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i15/15a00103.htm

You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?

2008-11-30T09:35:00.000-08:00

About 100 students at M.I.T. are trading privacy for a smartphone that tracks their calls, messages and movements

The New York Times - HARRISON BROWN, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at M.I.T., didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: in exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone.

Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.

Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network.

The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

U.S. Court Allows Abuse Case vs. Vatican

2008-11-25T06:09:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: A national scandal of epic proportions that the Catholic Church didn't deal with for decades. It shuffled priests who abused children and young adults to other parishes instead of dealing with the problem. Some were actually shipped overseas. I know this through my own personal experience. Many of the Catholic dioceses are running out cash. If these cases are allowed to proceed against the Vatican it could open a new chapter in the scandal. -MT

The Wall Street Journal - A federal appeals court has permitted a lawsuit over alleged sexual abuse to proceed against the Vatican, creating potential liability for the seat of the Roman Catholic faith for the activities of Catholic clergy in the U.S.

Monday's ruling, issued by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, marks the first time a court at so high a level has recognized that the Vatican could be liable for the negligence in sexual-abuse cases brought in the U.S.

The ruling is seen as a breakthrough by those allegedly abused by priests. Investigators and grand juries have found several instances where the church failed to report alleged abusers and covered up alleged misdeeds to protect them.

Jeffrey S. Lena, the attorney for the Holy See, said he was not "presently inclined" to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision.

It remains to be seen whether the Vatican, which is a sovereign state recognized by the U.S. government, will make further arguments that it is immune from U.S. civil proceeding.

Catholic dioceses in the U.S. have paid out at least $1.5 billion to alleged abuse victims, most of this since the scandal broke open nationwide in 2002.

The appeals court found that the church government may be held liable for actions taken in the U.S. based on the Vatican's policies or directives.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122756420187954231.html

New Jersey appellate court narrows fair report privilege

2008-11-23T07:21:00.000-08:00

A New Jersey appellate court ruled last week that journalists can be subject to libel lawsuits for reporting the contents of a legal complaint.

Though the fair report privilege has long provided journalists with a defense to libel suits for stories that quote from official proceedings, the court held that the privilege only applies when journalists quote from court decisions -- not from court pleadings filed by individual parties.

Last week’s ruling reversed a lower court decision dismissing a libel claim against The Record and The Glen Ridge Voice. Thomas John Salzano, whose father was the CEO of a bankrupt telecommunications firm called NorVergence, filed the lawsuit after the newspapers reported that the bankruptcy trustee in New Jersey had filed a complaint against him for allegedly misappropriating roughly $500,000 from NorVergence.

The lower court judge, ruling from the bench, dismissed the suit and said Salzano had not proven actual malice – the standard that is applied in defamation claims involving public figures or matters of public concern.http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=7146

Lawyers looking aboard as job picture worsens

2008-11-23T05:56:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - As the economic downturn continues, a growing number of lawyers are starting to look overseas for work.

Major American law firms have long had a presence abroad, staffed by a combination of local counsel and lawyers from the home office. But as the economic downturn continues to cause upheaval in corporate America and the law firms that serve it, many firms are relying on their international outposts to keep profits up — and a growing number of lawyers are starting to look overseas for work. Not long ago, the City of London was New York’s primary competitor for financial talent, and Britain was often one of the first choices for lawyers deciding to head abroad.

But with Wall Street in tatters and London struggling as the credit crisis plays out, lawyers and analysts say that the most promising places for legal careers are such far-flung locales as Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong. Even though Dubai’s booming economy has cooled sharply recently, lawyers say demand for their services remains strong there, and other overseas markets are still beckoning lawyers despite the global impact of the credit crisis — at least for now.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/business/23law.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

The NSA - a spy agency so secret it even redacts its feats

2008-11-16T17:49:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON -- For much of its history, the government's most-secretive intelligence agency sought to conceal its very existence.

So it was a surprise last year when university researchers persuaded the National Security Agency to hand over a top-secret, 1,000-page account of its Cold War spying.

George Washington University plans to release the report today, giving historians a rare look inside the agency that gathers intelligence through eavesdropping. But one thing appears to be missing: Many of its biggest successes.Not wanting to reveal too much, NSA blanked out sensitive chunks of the account that, according to intelligence experts, appear to chronicle espionage breakthroughs. What remains makes it appear that the world's largest ear has been a bit deaf.

According to the declassified report, government eavesdroppers generated half of their intelligence reports just after World War II from listening in on the French. Code breakers missed a key tip-off in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The report also suggests that, for the most part, the government couldn't crack high-grade Soviet communications codes between World War II and the 1970s.

"This was a perfect opportunity for NSA to put its best foot forward," says Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian who pressed the agency to release the report and plans to publish his own NSA history next year. "Instead what you're left with is a fair to middling picture of this agency."http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122660908325125509.html

Dallas DA Reviews Old Cases and Frees Prisoners

2008-11-15T10:38:00.000-08:00

Dallas Prosecutor Craig Watkins

The Wall Street Journal - DALLAS -- Craig Watkins may be the only prosecutor in America who is making his name getting people out of prison.

As district attorney of Dallas County, Mr. Watkins is using DNA evidence to investigate more than 400 guilty verdicts notched up by his predecessors. His office's Conviction Integrity Unit, launched last year for this purpose, has so far cleared six men wrongly convicted of rape, murder or robbery.

In the past two decades, more than 200 convicts nationwide have been freed thanks in part to DNA testing. The tests involve taking biological material such as blood from the person convicted and comparing it to a sample left at the crime scene. These efforts are usually spearheaded by defense lawyers, not prosecutors.

Mr. Watkins, who became the first African American district attorney in Texas when he was elected in 2006, said in a recent interview that he has been accused of being "a criminal-loving DA, a hug-a-thug DA." But he says such criticism of him and his office misses the point: "We have the constitutional obligation to seek justice."

Each exoneration has pushed Mr. Watkins further into the spotlight. He has been interviewed by television crews from around the globe. The Democratic party in Texas considers him a rising star, though Mr. Watkins says he hasn't made any decisions about running for statewide office.

But the exonerations have also brought intense scrutiny of the 40-year-old Mr. Watkins, who spent most of his career as a small-time defense lawyer. Critics, including some fellow prosecutors, say he seems too eager to besmirch his predecessors' reputations for the sake of a little publicity. They note that politically, these cases are easy targets: None of them were tried by him.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122669736692929339.html

Tough Times For Law Firms

2008-11-12T06:19:00.000-08:00

Douglas E. Davidson, managing partner of the New York office of Thelen. The law firm’s partners chose to dissolve the firm.

Editor's note: Law firms are facing troubles just like every other industry. It used to be that law was a recession-profession that shined in both good and bad times. But a hiring boom in the 1980s and 1990s has left a glut of lawyers. Now, businesses are contracting and one area they want to trim is legal expenses. Consequently, some law firms probably won't make it through a protracted downturn. This should be a cautionary word for those thinking about going to law school. - MT

The New York Times - You know things are bad when even lawyers are getting laid off.

In downturns of years past, law firms exploited corporate failures and bitter, protracted lawsuits to keep busy and keep billing. But in this still-unfolding crisis, the embittered and the bankrupt have been relatively slow to appear, at least in court.

Law firms in turn are feeling the strain. Thelen and Heller Ehrman, two firms whose deep San Francisco roots extend back decades, have collapsed outright, in part because of the business slowdown. Each firm left several hundred lawyers out in the cold. Many others, including Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and Katten Muchin Rosenman, two Chicago firms ranked among the nation’s hundred most profitable by American Lawyer magazine, and the international giant Clifford Chance have jettisoned dozens of associates.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/business/12law.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Could Fairness Doctrine Be On The Way Back?

2008-11-03T08:07:00.001-08:00

The Wall Street Journal - WASHINGTON -- Could Democrats be planning to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, a rule that requires broadcasters to air both sides of controversial issues? Conservatives believe so and have been taking to radio shows and blogs to denounce the idea.

Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico raised the prospect on a talk show recently, saying, "For many, many years we operated under a Fairness Doctrine in this country, and I think the country was well-served." Since then, conservative media have brought up the issue repeatedly, worried about likely Democratic congressional gains and a the possibility that Sen. Barack Obama will win the White House.

"They don't want balanced programming on a radio station," Rush Limbaugh said on his Oct. 22 radio show, according to a transcript. "They want no conservative programming on a radio station."

Sen. Obama's campaign has said repeatedly that it doesn't want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. But conservatives question how far he would go to stop it, if a Democrat-controlled Congress were to pass legislation to bring it back.

The doctrine rose from efforts in the 1950s by the Federal Communications Commission to ensure broadcasters were acting as public trustees and using the airwaves to air issues important to their communities.

During the Reagan administration, the Republican-controlled FCC held a different view. In 1985, the agency issued a report that said the doctrine could actually have a "chilling effect" on free speech. The FCC dumped the rule two years later, after a federal appeals court found Congress hadn't mandated the Fairness Doctrine and that it was up to the agency to decide if it was still needed.

Should the doctrine be reinstated, a broadcaster could theoretically have trouble getting its FCC license renewed if it didn't give time for the opposite side of an issue to respond.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122567220332991853.html

Bush pushes new deregulation rules before exiting office

2008-11-01T09:15:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: We talked about the difference between administrative rules and statutes in class. The following is an example of how government officials, such as the president, make rules that have the force of law. - MT

The Washington Post - The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.

Once such rules take effect, they typically can be undone only through a laborious new regulatory proceeding, including lengthy periods of public comment, drafting and mandated reanalysis.

"They want these rules to continue to have an impact long after they leave office," said Matthew Madia, a regulatory expert at OMB Watch, a nonprofit group critical of what it calls the Bush administration's penchant for deregulating in areas where industry wants more freedom. He called the coming deluge "a last-minute assault on the public . . . happening on multiple fronts."

As many as 90 new regulations are in the works, and at least nine of them are considered "economically significant" because they impose costs or promote societal benefits that exceed $100 million annually. They include new rules governing employees who take family- and medical-related leaves, new standards for preventing or containing oil spills, and a simplified process for settling real estate transactions.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/30/AR2008103004749.html

Candidate Palin - Working Class hero with $150,000 wardrobe

2008-10-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Sarah Palin’s wardrobe joined the ranks of symbolic political excess on Wednesday, alongside John McCain’s multiple houses and John Edwards’s $400 haircut, as Republicans expressed fear that weeks of tailoring Ms. Palin as an average “hockey mom” would fray amid revelations that the Republican Party outfitted her with expensive clothing from high-end stores.

Cable television, talk radio and even shows like “Access Hollywood” seemed gripped with sartorial fever after campaign finance reports confirmed that the Republican National Committee spent $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue in September for Ms. Palin and her family.

Advisers to Ms. Palin said on Wednesday that the purchases — which totaled about $150,000 and were classified as “campaign accessories” — were made on the fly after Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, was chosen as the Republican vice-presidential candidate on Aug. 29 and needed new clothes to match climates across the 50 states. They emphasized, too, that Ms. Palin did not spend time on the shopping, and that other people made the decision to buy such an array of clothes.

Yet Republicans expressed consternation publicly and privately that the shopping sprees on her behalf, which were first reported by Politico, would compromise Ms. Palin’s standing as Senator McCain’s chief emissary to working-class voters whose salvos at the so-called cultural elite often delight audiences at Republican rallies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/us/politics/23palin.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Is Press Baron Rupert Murdoch Turning Liberal ?

2008-10-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

Editors note: Wolff has a new book that has riled Mr. Murdoch. Apparently the book, or at least leaks about it, says Murdoch has made friends with liberals and that he had soured on Fox News and Mr. Ailes. (A 10,000-word excerpt from the book will be published in the December issue, due out early next month.) This could, of course, just be a ruse to boost book sales. But Wolff has been writing up a storm about Murdoch in Vanity Fair, a magazine known for its fawning coverage of the stars and power barons. Posted below is part of Wolff's most recent saga that appears in Oct. 2008 Vanity Fair. Even with all the hype, the piece is worth a look, particularly because it is about Murdoch whose press empire continues to expand. His most recent acquisition - the Wall Street Journal, a national journalistic treasure that was horribly mismanaged by its former owners, the Bancroft family. -MT

by Michael Wolff October 2008 - Vanity Fair - For nine months, I’ve been interviewing Rupert Murdoch, in an unlikely spirit of openness precipitated by his great satisfaction in having bought The Wall Street Journal, about journalism, his business, politics, his family, and the future for a new biography. I was warned about his charm by many other journalists—warned not to fall victim to it. So the surprise was his lack of it. He’s without introspection and self-analysis and doesn’t like to talk about the past. What’s more, he mumbles terribly (and with a heavy Aussie accent) and seldom finishes a sentence. For the first three months of our interviews, he never addressed a word to or even looked at my research assistant, Leela de Kretser, who was at each of the sessions, and ignored her questions—perhaps because it’s not necessary to acknowledge a girl, or possibly because it was embarrassing for him that she was, at the time, a pregnant girl. (She had the baby. He eventually warmed up.)

The great fear about Rupert Murdoch, among journalists and proper liberals everywhere, beyond even his tabloidism and his right-wing politics, is that he acknowledges no rules. He does it, without mercy, his way. If you watch him up close, this certainly seems true. He sits in his office and plots and schemes and figures out ways to get (to take) what he wants.

Although he’d agreed with the Bancroft family, Dow Jones’s former owners, to accept a strict structure for protecting The Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence, I watched how blithely he paid no attention to it. It barely figured into his plans or consciousness. Except that he seemed briefly tickled to have figured out that if he merely called his chosen editor, Robert Thomson, the publisher, then he’d have his choice. He was only slightly confounded (and a bit bemused) that it took Journal editor Marcus Brauchli four months to get the message that he was out.

Still, up close, such lack of restraint doesn’t necessarily seem so threatening. It seems, in fact … fun. There’s no artifice. There’s no bureaucracy. There’s no pretense. There’s no corporate this and that—Murdoch’s truly the anti-corporate man. It’s all determination and enthusiasm. It’s all about his passions and the effect he can have. (Of course he was going to replace the Journal’s editor. What was everybody thinking?)http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/10/wolff200810

Personal Genomes Going Public - What are your rights?

2008-10-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: This is what I talked about in class - the push to publicly release genetic information - either to your insurance company, employer, medical provider, or in this case - for research purposes. Is this a violation of a person's privacy? This project mentioned in the NYT guards against violating individual's privacy. But as more information about personal genomes is circulated - when will you lose control of such information? It's true there is a new federal law - but like credit scoring - life insurance companies will probably find a way around it so they can get access to such information for the underwriting health and life insurance. The most likely scenario would be to get applicants to opt out of this or not underwrite them. - MT

The New York Times - BOSTON — Is Esther Dyson, the technology venture capitalist who is training to be an astronaut, genetically predisposed to a major heart attack?

Did Misha Angrist, an assistant professor at Duke University, inherit a high risk of breast cancer, which he may have passed on to his young daughters?

On Monday, they may learn the answers to these and other questions — and, if all goes according to plan, so will everyone else who cares to visit a public Web site, www.personalgenomes.org. The three are among the first 10 volunteers in the Personal Genome Project, a study at Harvard University Medical School aimed at challenging the conventional wisdom that the secrets of our genes are best kept to ourselves.

The goal of the project, which hopes to expand to 100,000 participants, is to speed medical research by dispensing with the elaborate precautions traditionally taken to protect the privacy of human subjects. The more genetic information can be made open and publicly available, nearly everyone agrees, the faster research will progress.

In exchange for the decoding of their DNA, participants agree to make it available to all — along with photographs, their disease histories, allergies, medications, ethnic backgrounds and a trove of other traits, called phenotypes, from food preferences to television viewing habits.

Including phenotypes, which most other public genetic databases have avoided in deference to privacy concerns, should allow researchers to more easily discover how genes and traits are linked. Because the “PGP 10,” as they call themselves, agreed to forfeit their privacy, any researcher will have a chance to mine the data, rather than just a small group with clearance.

The project is as much a social experiment as a scientific one. “We don’t yet know the consequences of having one’s genome out in the open,” said George M. Church, a human geneticist at Harvard who is the project’s leader and one of its subjects. “But it’s worth exploring.”

A new federal law prohibits health insurers and employers from discriminating against individuals on the basis of their genetic profile. But any one of the PGP 10 could be denied life insurance, long-term care insurance or disability insurance, with no legal penalty. And no law can bar colleagues from raising an annoyed eyebrow at a PGP participant who, say, indulges in a brownie after disclosing on the Internet that she is genetically predisposed to diabetes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/us/20gene.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Can You Libel a President?

2008-10-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: The President is a public figure. Can he sue for libel? Why doesn't he?

The Wall Street Journal - Oliver Stone goes for the juggler vein in "W.," an exuberant account of the life and times of George W. Bush. He juggles genial mockery and moist empathy without venturing any judgments on his hero's presidency. It's exciting to watch what Josh Brolin does with a character who has sometimes seemed to be playing characters on his own. Still, excitement has its limits in a film that tells us lots of things we already know, plus one thing Mr. Stone insists on until his patchwork drama turns into a hapless Oedipal parody of "The Making of the President."

It's the Poppy thing, the notion that W.'s life -- and therefore much of the nation's recent life -- has been driven by nothing more or less than a son's desperate search for approval from a father who doesn't approve of him. Maybe that's simplistic nonsense, maybe not, but it's far from an original thought, and the movie, which was written by Stanley Weiser, keeps coming back to it like some psychobabbling brook of revelation. "You disappoint me, Junior, you deeply disappoint me," Bush Senior says sternly at one point. (He's played, by James Cromwell, like the Ghost of President's Day Past.) At another, Poppy administers a patrician tongue-lashing to his ne'er-do-well heir unapparent: "What are you cut out for? Partying? Chasing tail? Driving drunk? You think you're a Kennedy? You're a Bush!" And in one of several singularly inept dream sequences, Bush 41 reclaims his old desk in the Oval Office, taking back the presidency from Bush 43.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122420113425542917.html

Joe the Plumber - Media Sensation

2008-10-17T07:17:00.000-07:00

One week ago, Joe Wurzelbacher was just another working man living in a modest house outside Toledo, Ohio, and thinking about how to buy the plumbing business where he works. But when he stopped Senator Barack Obama during a visit to his block last weekend to complain about taxes, he set himself on a path to becoming America’s newest media celebrity — and as such suddenly found himself facing celebrity-level scrutiny.

As it turns out, Joe the Plumber, as he became nationally known when Senator John McCain made him a theme at Wednesday’s final presidential debate, may work in the plumbing business, but he is not a licensed plumber.

Thomas Joseph, the business manager of Local 50 of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters and Service Mechanics, based in Toledo, said Thursday that Mr. Wurzelbacher had never held a plumber’s license, which is required in Toledo and several surrounding municipalities. He also never completed an apprenticeship and does not belong to the plumber’s union, which has endorsed Mr. Obama. On Thursday, he acknowledged that he does plumbing work even though he does not have a license.

His full name is Samuel J. Wurzelbacher. And he owes back taxes, too, public records show. The premise of his complaint to Mr. Obama about taxes may also be flawed, according to tax analysts. Contrary to what Mr. Wurzelbacher asserted and Mr. McCain echoed, neither his personal taxes nor those of the business where he works are likely to rise if Mr. Obama’s tax plan were to go into effect, they said.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/us/politics/17joe.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Joe the Plumber's House - Private or Public Figure?

2008-10-17T07:13:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: Is Toledo's Joe the Plumber a private or a public figure? Joe is a figure who was first recognized during the recent presidential and has become nothing short of a celebrity. What are your thoughts?

Suits over Lennon song dropped

2008-10-08T05:13:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - Yoko Ono and EMI Group Ltd. have dropped copyright infringement lawsuits against the makers of a documentary that used a portion of John Lennon's "Imagine" without permission. But the development, which was announced Tuesday in a news release from Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, comes too late to keep the song in the DVD release of the movie, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," according to a lawyer for the filmmakers.

The documentary argues that American academia discriminates against people who espouse "intelligent design" theory -- a proposed alternative to evolution that would allow for the participation of a supernatural force in biological processes.

About 15 seconds of "Imagine" -- including the lyrics "Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too" -- are played in the movie over footage of Joseph Stalin, as a putative illustration of atheism's pernicious effects on culture.

Executives at Premise Media Corp., the production company that made "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," acknowledged all along that they didn't seek permission to use the song. But they argued that under "fair use" rules, they didn't need to, since the film used only a brief portion of the song, to comment on it.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122342324279413277.html

Skype spies on users for Chinese government

2008-10-03T05:35:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - The revelation that a Skype joint venture in China has been monitoring its users' communications is adding impetus to an industrywide effort to establish an international human-rights code of conduct for Internet companies.
China Journal

Canadian researchers reported Wednesday on an investigation of TOM-Skype -- a China-based version of the Internet-based phone-and-messaging service -- which is run by a joint venture of the Skype unit of eBay Inc. and TOM Online, a unit of Hong Kong-based TOM Group Ltd. Probing unsecured servers run by the joint venture, researchers said they found evidence of a system that monitored users' text chats, kept track of who participated in voice calls and stored messages that contain politically sensitive content.

Jennifer Caukin, a spokeswoman for Skype, said practices related to a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages had been changed "without our knowledge or consent and we are extremely concerned. We deeply apologize for the breach of privacy on TOM's servers in China and we are urgently addressing this situation with TOM."

The report was published by the Information Warfare Monitor and by the OpenNet Initiative-Asia, groups that promote Internet freedom. The groups said Chinese authorities may use the system to track users but offered no evidence of government involvement.

Foreign researchers, rights activists and others say China operates one of the world's most extensive efforts to censor and monitor information on the Internet.
[Skype's China Practices Draw Ire]

Some Chinese users believe Skype, which advertises itself as having encryption to "protect users from unauthorized eavesdropping," is safe from government monitoring, and it has been widely used by dissidents. TOM-Skype has 69 million registered users.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122291621892397279.html

Hollywood Sues RealNetworks over Piracy Concerns

2008-10-01T05:11:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - The major movie studios jointly sued RealNetworks Inc. for releasing a new program that lets consumers copy DVDs onto computers, in the latest legal tussle between the entertainment and technology industries over the boundaries between consumer rights and copyright laws.

In the suit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles, the Hollywood studios alleged that RealNetworks' RealDVD program, which went on sale Tuesday, illegally bypasses copy-protection measures intended to prevent duplication of DVDs. The plaintiffs -- including Walt Disney Co., Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., News Corp.'s Fox, NBC Universal Inc.'s Universal City Studios, Viacom Inc.'s Paramount and Sony Corp. -- asked the court for a temporary restraining order preventing RealNetworks from selling the software, along with financial damages.

"RealNetworks RealDVD should be called StealDVD," Greg Goeckner, executive vice president and general counsel of the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of the movie studios, said in a statement. "RealNetworks knows its product violates the law and undermines the hard-won trust that has been growing between America's movie makers and the technology community."

Representatives of the individual movie studios declined to comment or couldn't be reached. News Corp. owns Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

RealNetworks, which filed its own suit against the studios in federal court in San Francisco just before their action, accused them of continuing an entertainment-industry pattern of trying to crush technologies that give consumers flexibility in how they enjoy music, video and other media. The Seattle company said it wanted to protect consumers' "fair-use rights" to make copies of their own purchased DVDs.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122279886728691167.html

Government to Proceed with Satellite Spying Program

2008-10-01T05:09:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - WASHINGTON -- The Department of Homeland Security will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn't yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws.

Congress provided partial funding for the program in a little-debated $634 billion spending measure that will fund the government until early March. For the past year, the Bush administration had been fighting Democratic lawmakers over the spy program, known as the National Applications Office.

The program is designed to provide federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery -- but no eavesdropping -- to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.

Since the department proposed the program a year ago, several Democratic lawmakers have said that turning the spy lens on America could violate Americans' privacy and civil liberties unless adequate safeguards were required.

A new 60-page Government Accountability Office report said the department "lacks assurance that NAO operations will comply with applicable laws and privacy and civil liberties standards," according to a person familiar with the document. The report, which is unclassified but considered sensitive, hasn't been publicly released, but was described and quoted by several people who have read it.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122282336428992785.html

Elementary Student Suspended For Anti-Obama Shirt

2008-09-23T19:11:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Thanks for law students Stefanie Toth and Maria Fisher for this item.

AURORA (MyFOXColorado.com) - An 11-year-old in Aurora says his first amendment rights are being trampled after he was suspended for wearing a homemade shirt that reads "Obama is a terrorist's best friend."

The sixth grader at Aurora Frontier K-8 School wore it on a day when students were asked to wear red, white and blue to show their patriotism.

The boy's father Dann Dalton describes himself as a "proud conservative" who has taken part in some controversial anti-abortion protests. Dalton says the school made a major mistake by suspending his son for wearing the shirt.

"It's the public school system," Dalton says. "Let's be honest, it's full of liberal loons."

According the the boy's father, the school district told the student, Daxx Dalton, that he had the choice of changing his shirt, turning his shirt inside out or being suspended. Daxx chose suspension.

Don't Buy That Textbook, Download it for Free

2008-09-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Editors note: No copyright violation here - if the author decides to offer the book for free - or is there?

The New York Times - SQUINT hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers. They both make money from doing obvious good — healing, educating — and they both have customers who may be willing to sacrifice their last pennies to buy what these companies are selling.

It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost and thus usually don’t think twice about it.

“The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always O.K. to add $5.”

In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/technology/15link.html?ex=1379217600&en=a7d0f04caf0a7e6a&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Fake story causes market panic.

2008-09-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Is there a libel or defamation if a company accidentally republishes an old story setting off a market panic. This is one issue being explored as a result of a slipup at Google and the Tribune Co.

The New York Times - SAN FRANCISCO — The swift, sharp and short-lived collapse of United Airlines shares last Monday was followed by a week of finger-pointing.

Investors wiped out $1 billion of the market value of UAL, United’s parent, within minutes of an erroneous news flash on Bloomberg screens about a United bankruptcy. Google and the Tribune Company, the owner of The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, whose Web site was the source of the article that led to the headline, soon blamed each other for causing the fiasco.

The stock plunge was instigated by a series of cascading human and machine errors, and it raised new questions about the reliability of automated news services like Google News and the struggles of some traditional media companies to adapt to the Internet age.

New-media analysts say there is plenty of blame to go around. They say that the problem had its roots in the still-clumsy dance between the Web sites of traditional news outlets and the search engines whose attention they covet. It was then amplified by a researcher at a financial information service who had failed to verify information retrieved from the buyer-beware world of the Web.

Legal experts, meanwhile, said that while UAL investors might want to recover their losses in court, Tribune is unlikely to be vulnerable to libel charges, and the Communications Decency Act of 1996 generally protects companies like Google that simply transmit electronic information first published by others.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/technology/15google.html?ex=1379217600&en=96366ff6da465b7e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Spit parties: Will your lover get cancer or give birth to cyclops?

2008-09-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

Medicine has advanced - but after you take the test - what happens to the information that is collected? This raises interesting medical privacy issues, especially since the participants cannot opt out of anonymous sharing of the results for "research purposes." Please Read on. - MT

The New York Times - IT was a funny thing to be doing in a cocktail dress.

Debra Netschert, a financial analyst, was sitting next to her husband, K. C. Dustin, an equities salesman, and spitting into a test tube at a party last week in Chelsea to promote a DNA testing company.

As a soundtrack that included “Whole Lotta Love” blasted, the couple were submitting samples for tests that could reveal disturbing news, like his propensity to develop throat cancer or the chances of her having pregnancy complications.

But Ms. Netschert adopted the party mood, focusing, at first, on the less consequential details about her heredity. “I want to figure out why I have freckles,” she said.

It was taking a few minutes to fill the tube with the required amount of saliva, so Ms. Netschert had a dry-mouthed moment to consider what the couple might do if her husband turned out to be carrying a gene that could doom his offspring.

“Then maybe we’ll adopt instead,” she said. “Really.”

Some people might fear a world where widespread DNA testing would remove the mysteries of their futures or even strip them of privacy. But the testing company 23andMe, which was the host of what it billed as a “spit party” in the middle of New York Fashion Week, filled with celebrities, wants people to think of their genomes as a basis for social networking. As in: You are invited to join the group Slow Caffeine Metabolizers.

Co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of a founder of Google, the company, which has token financial backing from Harvey Weinstein and Wendi Murdoch, hopes to make spitting into a test tube as stylish as ordering a ginger martini.

“It’s fun to learn about your own genome,” the 23andMe Web site says.

Typically, customers register and pay online — the price of a test was cut by nearly two-thirds to $399 last week — and are sent a testing kit. A customer spits into a tube, mails it in, and about a month later receives results via a Web account. The information on 89 genetic markers include details of customers’ ancestry as well as what current research suggests are proclivites to certain diseases and other genetic traits like one’s appetite for sugar and responsiveness to antidepressants.

Customers have been able to share their results with whomever they choose online, or keep the information private, since shortly after the company began offering the tests in November. A new feature allows customers to post DNA-related questions in a community forum.

A select group, which included family and friends of the owners, began using the forum in recent weeks, and some customers have begun networking with others who share their traits, such as lacking a sense of smell. Others are posting notices, seeking those who share a mutation in the gene called ACTN3, which is associated with muscle response, wondering if their fellows share a lack of musical talent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/fashion/14spit.html?ex=1379044800&en=b99ab98bac5bad10&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Bush Press Secretary McClellan Tells All

2008-09-13T19:22:00.000-07:00

PBS - Bill Moyers Journal - Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Scott McClellan, formerly White House press secretary and one of President George W. Bush's closest advisors, has published a tell-all book with little new information about the propaganda campaign and the role of the press in selling the war.

On this week's JOURNAL, Bill Moyers talks to three prominent journalists to find out why the book is such big news and whether anything has changed.http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06062008/profile.html

This is one of the first times, I think, that a member of the President's inner circle, one of the Texans who came to Washington with him and was regarded as being very close to him, has gone this far in denouncing what the administration did with respect to Iraq and has come right out and said that they deceived the American people.

FCC Likely to Cut Back on Phone Data

2008-09-06T09:35:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - Federal regulators are on the verge of cutting back on the amount of information they collect from the country's largest phone companies about service quality and customer complaints.

On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to approve a request from AT&T Inc. to allow the company to stop filing yearly reports on service quality, customer satisfaction and infrastructure investment. Similar requests by Verizon Communications Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc. are also expected to be approved soon.

Consumer groups and state regulators have objected to the proposal, saying the quality data are valuable. The FCC will open up a related notice of proposed rulemaking that looks at how to improve the collection of data on complaints and other issues from phone companies, including wireless and Internet phone providers.

The decision highlights a broader issue at the FCC, where data collection from phone and cable companies hasn't kept up with changes in the marketplace, as more consumers have switched to wireless and Internet phone services. Earlier this year, the agency revamped the information it collects from broadband providers and increased its definition of high-speed broadband to speeds of 768 kilobits per second or higher -- which is at the low end of what many consumers get from local cable or phone companies.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122048636736397179.html

How to Get Free Music and Stay Out of Trouble

2008-09-05T06:51:00.000-07:00

EVERYBODY likes free music but nobody likes to be sued. For people seeking free music online, therein lies the rub.It’s simple to get free music from online services like LimeWire, but it could also bring an unfriendly letter from a lawyer.

The legal concept regarding copying is called fair use. But what is fair to do without the copyright holder’s permission? The legal precedent that lets people transfer CDs to their iPods was established in Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, known as the Betamax case. Essentially, the ruling said that people could record copyrighted material for personal, noncommercial use.

But that’s where it gets tricky. Suppose you have a vinyl record and you want to hear it on your iPod. Does the recording have to come from your own album, or can you download a copy from LimeWire, which provides access to a whole world of legal and illegal content? After all, you have paid for the right to hear the song; does it matter where your specific copy comes from? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/technology/personaltech/04basics.html?ex=1378353600&en=78ae0e326a248f8e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

FCC to Decide in Battle for TV Spectrum

2008-08-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal -- After eight months of testing, a plan to employ unused TV channels to provide cheap, high-speed wireless Internet networks still faces determined opposition and an uncertain future.

The Federal Communications Commission will have the final say in the battle between the broadcasters -- which fear interference on the airwaves they'll still be using -- and the companies including Google Inc. and Motorola Inc. that want to share the television airwaves, using them for high-speed wireless service that could spur the development of new wireless gadgets.
[Kevin Martin]

In September, the FCC is expected to report its findings on tests of prototype "smart radios" that can pinpoint which local broadcast channels are being used and then avoid them. Shortly after that, its five commissioners are expected to take up the issue of whether those TV airwaves can be shared, with an eye to setting rules for their use by year end. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121902086259648443.html?mod=hps_us_at_glance_technology

Pirates Poised To Win Round In Filing-Sharing Case

2008-08-16T15:02:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal - A coming federal-court decision holds consequences for the Recording Industry Association of America and the thousands of people it is suing over shared music files.

Last year, a jury in federal district court in Duluth, Minn., found Jammie Thomas liable for copyright infringement based on songs the RIAA said it found in her computer. Ms. Thomas was told to pay up, to the tune of $222,000.

But the judge in the case, Michael Davis, says his instructions to the jury might have been wrong.Judge Davis told the jury that making songs available online for distribution to others was copyright violation and that the record companies did not have to prove distribution took place. He has since learned of a federal district-court case in Phoenix that ruled that making songs available was not copyright violation. He is weighing granting Ms. Thomas a new trial.

If one is granted, one outcome could be a higher bar for what record labels need to prove to demonstrate that copyrights have been violated. For example, evidence that more than a handful of songs on a shared file folder were distributed to others may be needed.

Ruling Could Ease Restrictions on DVR Recording

2008-08-16T14:54:00.001-07:00

New York Times - Television recording — and the ad skipping that comes along with it — may have just become a whole lot easier to do.

In a ruling on Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York approved a plan by Cablevision to introduce “remote storage DVR” for its customers. Most digital video recorders rely on an internal hard drive to record and preserve television episodes. But the ones in Cablevision’s system — also referred to as network DVRs — record programs on the company’s centralized servers. The consumer still decides what to record, when to watch it and whether to skip the ads.

The court essentially ruled that network DVRs are no different from the standalone DVRs that exist in the living rooms and bedrooms of nearly 25 percent of American households. Craig Moffett, an analyst for Bernstein, called the ruling a “huge win for cable operators” and said it could have “seismic implications across the media landscape.http://tvdecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/court-ruling-could-make-dvrs-more-pervasive/

F.B.I.’s Use of Phone Records Shows Need to Protect the Press, Senators Say

2008-08-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON — Two leading senators said Monday that they were troubled by the F.B.I.’s collection of the phone records of four reporters at The New York Times and The Washington Post and that the episode showed a “pressing need” for legislation pending in the Senate that would provide greater legal protection for journalists.

Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation disclosed to the two newspapers that it had improperly obtained the phone records of reporters in their Indonesian bureaus in 2004 by using emergency records demands from telephone providers as part of an investigation. Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the bureau, made personal calls to Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, and Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Post, to apologize. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/us/12fbi.html?ex=1376280000&en=03ad57490c69b496&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Web Privacy on the Radar in Congress

2008-08-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - As advertisers grow more sophisticated about behavioral targeting, and as online privacy standards vary, regulators and privacy advocates are becoming concerned. Questions about data collection and privacy policies are attracting the attention of Congress. There is no broad privacy legislation governing advertising on the Internet. And even some in the government admit that they do not have a clear grasp of what companies are able to do with the wealth of data now available to themhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/technology/11privacy.html?ex=1376193600&en=168e6617d4fa7591&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink