Intellectual Property Law

Prior restraints

By Susan Crawford

The odd story of the Wikileaks.org injunction is described here by the Berkman Center’s Citizen Media project. We still don’t know exactly why the site was ordered taken down - it seems like a trade secret issue - or why this was done ex parte, or why the court initially ordered wikileaks.org’s registrar/host to “immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.” (That part of the order seems to have been revised - now it’s just a takedown order.) We’d like to know more about this court action.

Speaking of prior restraints, don’t tell EFF that retroactive immunity for the telcos is necessarily constitutional. As Cindy Cohn of EFF told Farber’s IP list, “[t]here are serious due process and separation of powers problems with the bill, which effectively grants the Executive the power to demand that pending court cases come out a particular way that favors the Executive. This is an extraordinary thing to do, especially when the constitutional claims of millions of Americans are at issue.” EFF has a chart of its responses to common arguments in favor of immunity, and has posted a set of documents relevant to the allegations made in its lawsuit.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on February 18, 2008 (boomark / email).