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Citizen Media Law Project

Legal training and resources to protect free online speech. Advocacy for citizen participation in online media.
By Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Center for Citizen Media

Post Frequency: 3.9/day

Last Entry: July 20, 2010 at 10:11:43

Google's "Oprah" Moment, Gwyneth Paltrow's Rave, and Two Tests for FTC's Endorsement Guides

Posted on January 12, 2010
It could have been a moment right out of The Oprah Winfrey Show. But instead of the entire audience getting Pontiac G6s (click here for a fun mash-up video of that big event), all the reporters attending the unveiling of Google's new Nexus One mobile phone on January 5 were given a special offer: they could get one of the phones for free, or to opt for a free, 30-day trial, after which the phone will be returned (loan agreement)...

What?s in the Box?! Piercing the Pointless Secrecy of ACTA

Posted on January 11, 2010
I could tell you but then I?d have to kill you. ? Tom Cruise, Top Gun By and large, Internet users are an unstable amalgam of apathy and curiosity. When it comes to policies restricting Internet freedom, the easiest way to attract attention is to try to hide your shifty schemes...

Massachusetts High Court Applies Fair Report Privilege to Anonymous Account of Closed Meeting

Posted on January 08, 2010
As both a journalist and a techie, I'm pretty keen on the free flow of information, and thus pretty keen in turn on the importance of protecting journalists, both professional and citizen, who are in the business of facilitating that flow. So it was reassuring to see that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled on the side of the angels this week in the case of Howell v...

Avast! The Pirate Bay's Intellectual Property's Been Boarded!

Posted on December 18, 2009
If you haven't heard of The Pirate Bay by now, you may want to emerge from that cave, wipe the sleepies from your eyes, and start getting caught up on your backed up WIRED magazines in the bathroom. The Pirate Bay (TPB) is a website run by a few Swedish intellectual property anarchists...

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Former Rep Ted Klaudt claims "common law copyright" in his name to try and suppress news stories about him raping his kids

Posted on December 17, 2009
We sure do see a lot of intellectual property abuse around here. This has to be the best one yet. Former South Dakota State Representative Ted Klaudt claims that he has a "common law copyright" in his name, and thus any news organization or other publication that uses his name must pay him a licensing fee of $500,000...

CMLP Publishes New Guide to FTC Disclosure Requirements for Product Endorsements

Posted on December 16, 2009
As part of our legal guide series on Risks Associated with Publication, today CMLP published a guide to Publishing Product or Service Endorsements. The new legal guide section takes on the Federal Trade Commission's controversial "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising" (the "Guidelines") that took effect on December 1, 2009...

Man Bites Dog: Prosecutor Pays a Price for Chasing Commenters

Posted on December 14, 2009
When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news. ? attributed to New York Sun city editor John B. Bogart (1848- 1921) Unfortunately, it's become an increasingly common occurrence: a public official, outraged over something posted about him/her anonymously on the Internet, asks a court to issue a subpoena to find out the identity of the poster(s)...

WikiLeaks in the Crosshairs

Posted on December 11, 2009
The holiday season is in full swing, as evidenced by the marked uptick in the number of gift-giving guides clogging up my browser. We here at CMLP, ever the helpful sort, wanted to get in on the action. But rather than offer yet another list of plastic doodads that are sure to be relegated to the bottom of the sock drawer by January 1 (but how cool are the R2D2 lights?), we thought we'd offer a helpful suggestion for the WikiLeaks editor in your life: a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People...

CMLP Publishes Guide to Live-Blogging and Tweeting from Court

Posted on December 10, 2009
As part of our legal guide series on documenting public proceedings and events, today we published a guide to Live-Blogging and Tweeting from Court. Over the past year, we've published guides addressing how to stay out of legal trouble while documenting activities at polling places and covering the Presidential Inauguration, as well as a series of videos on newsgathering and privacy...

Office Space Star Ron Livingston Sues Wikipedia Prankster, Community Norms At Issue

Posted on December 09, 2009
Maybe I'm a big dork, but I think Office Space is a totally hilarious movie. And based on his starring role in the film, I would assume that actor Ron Livingston has a pretty good sense of humor. But apparently not so, at least when it comes to web 2...

The Library Police: Why a Shortage of Bandwidth is Turning Librarians into Traffic Cops

Posted on December 07, 2009
For a time, few issues could rally nerds as effectively as net neutrality. Whenever we heard those dreaded five syllables, we immediately ceased our latest exegesis of Watchmen and girded our neglected loins for battle. But for some of us, after so many false alarms, the threat of losing net neutrality has become something of a digital boogey man...

ADA Online: Is a Website a "Place of Public Accommodation"?

Posted on December 04, 2009
A lawsuit filed in October claims that Sony's online games?ranging from Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies to Wheel of Fortune?do not provide tools to allow visually impaired users to successfully play the games, and thus violate both the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and California's civil rights law...

SLAPP Me Baby, One More Time

Posted on December 03, 2009
California SLAPP jurisprudence is the gift that keeps on giving, especially for weary bloggers looking for something to write about. (SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. You can read all about them in our Legal Guide.) Our friend Adrianos Facchetti over at the California Defamation Law Blog has been blogging and tweeting up a storm this week about anti-SLAPP cases...

Arkansas Judge Tosses Defamation Lawsuit Against Dixie Chicks Over "West Memphis Three" Letter

Posted on December 02, 2009
Yesterday, a federal district court in Arkansas dismissed Terry Hobbs' defamation lawsuit against Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines and her band mates over a letter published on the band's website and MySpace blog. Here's a copy of the opinion. The case is especially interesting because Maines' letter was a plea for support of the "West Memphis Three"?Damien Echols, Jesse Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin?three teenagers who were convicted of murdering three eight-year-old boys in the Robin Hood Hills area of Arkansas in 1993...

CMLP's Blog Named Top 100 Blawg by ABA Journal

Posted on December 01, 2009
wOOt! Yesterday, we received notification that the editors of the ABA Journal, the American Bar Association's eponymous publication and website, had named the Citizen Media Law Project Blog as one of the "100 best Web sites by lawyers, for lawyers...

One of the Classic Blunders: Microsoft?s De-Listing Campaign Makes No Sense

Posted on November 30, 2009
Before the Thanksgiving holiday, Microsoft held talks with News Corp. in an attempt to convince the titan of information to de-list its content from Google. The idea being, if users can only find news on Microsoft?s Bing, then that search engine will beef up its anemic market share (around 10% of search traffic)...

Holiday Week Hiatus

Posted on November 24, 2009
Due to the Thanksgiving holiday (and some much needed down time after the big OMLN launch), it is likely that we won't be putting up any blog posts this week. We also will not be sending out our weekly newsletter, the Citizen Media Law Brief. Things should be back to normal next week...

Is Britain Putting an End to Libel Tourism?

Posted on November 20, 2009
Could Britain finally be moving to shed its unflattering title of "libel capital of the world"? We can only hope, of course, but it does appear to be edging that way, thanks to a recent High Court decision to toss a textbook "libel tourism" case...

Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists

Posted on November 19, 2009
We are delighted to announce the public launch of the Berkman Center's Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono (i.e., free!) initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help...

CMLP Gets Lectured

Posted on November 18, 2009
Last week, the Practicing Law Institute hosted its annual program on Communications Law in the Digital Age. Up for discussion were a lot of topics near and dear to CMLP's heart: trends in First Amendment jurisprudence (including prognostications in US v...

The MPAA Lottery: Town of Coshocton Draws the Black Spot

Posted on November 16, 2009
??It isn?t fair, it isn?t right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.? - The Lottery, Shirley Jackson In The Lottery, Shirley Jackson explored the interplay of the banal and the barbaric. She described a town?s old-fashioned agrarian ritual: an individual who has drawn a slip marked with a black spot is stoned to death in order to ensure a good harvest...

Fox News DMCA-Bombs News1News on YouTube

Posted on November 13, 2009
Like many former newspaper employees, I hate the 24-hour "news" networks. Be it Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN, I think they're just across-the-board awful. The only time I'll pay any attention to them is in the midst of some event that demands real-time attention, say a presidential election or a terrorist attack (and even then, I may just switch to BBC coverage instead)...

Hipcheck16 Is No Turk 182 - But Anonymous Political Speech Is Sacred

Posted on November 11, 2009
This one is a little disturbing. Political Race Gets Nasty During an election in Buffalo Grove, Ill., an online debate started about a candidate for Village Trustee, Lisa Stone. During that debate, this public official's 15 year old son, Jed, got a little upset about some harsh statements lobbed at his mother, so he joined the debate -- in particular, getting into a flame war with "Hipcheck16"...

The Cartman Technique: How a Fraud Exception will Mine the ISP Safe Harbor

Posted on November 10, 2009
[A]ll it takes to kill a show forever, is to get one episode pulled. If we convince the network to pull this episode for the sake of Muslims, then the Catholics can demand a show they don't like get pulled . . . and so on and so on, until Family Guy is no more - it's exactly what happened to Laverne & Shirley...

"I Know It When I See It." The View from Where?

Posted on November 09, 2009
Jeffrey A. Kilbride and James Robert Schaffer are spammers. They sent millions of unsolicited e-mails advertising pornographic web sites, and were paid a fee whenever a recipient of their e-mails purchased a subscription to one of the sites, earning a total of $1...

Glenn Beck's UDRP Complaint Gets The Smack Down

Posted on November 06, 2009
First Amendment juggernaut Marc Randazza is having a very good week. On Wednesday, Professor Donald Marvin Jones a/k/a the "Nutty Professor" voluntarily dismissed his invasion of privacy lawsuit against Randazza's client Above the Law. Today, word comes that WIPO Arbitration Panelist Frederick M...

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Hears Oral Argument in Anti-SLAPP Case

Posted on November 04, 2009
On Monday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) heard oral argument in Fustolo v.Hollander, No. SJC-10485. As you may recall, last month the Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) joined the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLUM) and the Lawyers? Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association in submitting an amicus curiae brief urging the SJC to reverse a lower court's decision interpreting the state?s anti-SLAPP legislation...

Chamber of Commerce to the Yes Men: We Are Not Amused

Posted on November 03, 2009
What do Tommy Hilfiger, MasterCard, the World Wrestling Federation, and Tom "Scopes monkey trial" Donohue, the President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have in common? Apparently, none of them has a sense of humor when it comes to their respective brands...

Senate Puts Bloggers Back in the Federal Shield Bill

Posted on November 02, 2009
On Friday, Senators Arlen Specter (D-PA) and Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) released a revised version of the proposed federal shield bill (S. 448), which expands the bill's coverage to bloggers and other amateur journalists publishing on the Internet. This version departs from a previous one, announced in September, which limited protection to "salaried employee[s]" and independent contractors for established news media organizations...

A New Leistungsschutzrecht? Say It's Nicht So!

Posted on October 30, 2009
It's tough being a publisher these days. Of course, no one is having much fun in the current economic downturn, but publishers were up against it even before the slowdown. Circulations have been down across the board for years now, which in turn has slashed the advertising revenues that print publications have always relied upon to survive...

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