Intellectual Property Law

A federal judge last week ordered the disabling of Wikileaks.org, a muckraking Web site.

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

That's the second line of this NYT editorial. The editorial further notes:

... Wikileaks claims to have posted more than a million corporate and government documents that, it says, expose wrongdoing. It has posted, among other things, a 2003 operations manual from the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, military prison. Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Cayman Islands branch of a Swiss bank, sued Wikileaks charging that it had illegally posted documents stolen by a former employee. The site said the documents ?allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures? for money laundering, tax evasion and other misdeeds.

In a second order, the judge directed Wikileaks not to distribute the bank documents. That was a ?prior restraint? on speech, something the courts almost always find violates the First Amendment. If the employee did not have a right to the documents and the bank was injured as a result, a suit against the leaker for monetary damages should be sufficient. ...

For just one example of the kind of news story that can be silenced by this kind of activiity, go here. The South Carolina Bar Exam scandal story was "broke" by blogs, and that's probably the only reason what passes for mainstream news reporting in SC reported on it later.

It's true that innocent people can be badly hurt by Internet abuses, and making sure that the legal system provides remedies to them is extremely important. Governmental closing down of informational sites can't be the way the First Amendment evolves in cyberspace.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on February 23, 2008 (boomark / email).