Posts under ‘Free Speech’

UPDATED NY Times: New York City May Seek Permit and Insurance for Many Kinds of Public Photography. Some tourists, amateur photographers, even would-be filmmakers hoping to make it big on YouTube could soon be forced to obtain a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance before taking pictures or filming on city property, including […]

Lawrence Lessig: I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. “Corruption” as I’ve defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, […]

Well, Dell Computer is learning about the web. See the confession at Consumerist, in which the company admits its mistake in demanding that the site take down a posting about its kiosk sales operation. Some things do change.

Louisville Courier-Journal: Courier-Journal reporter ejected from U of L game. A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events. Gene McArtor, […]

NY Times: FCC rebuffed by court on indecency fines. The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the Federal Communications Commission and for the Bush administration. It was a major victory in a legal battle being waged by […]

Pegasus News: Anti-sunshine bill HB 2564 on Governor Perry’s desk Saturday. Under this law, local and state government agencies could track individuals who seek public records and bill them for employee time spent to dig them up. Elected officials, nonprofit corporations, FCC-licensed TV and radio stations and “Newspapers of General Circulation” would be exempt. Pegasus’ […]

UPDATED The California First Amendment Coalition has won a crucial lower-court ruling that Santa Clara County must provide — at cost — its geographic “base map” of real estate boundaries in the county. The county had been saying it would charge tens of thousands of dollars for information collected on behalf of residents, using taxpayer […]

The Open Net Intitiative global Internet filtering study was posted this morning, and it’s an incredible piece of work. From the BBC story on the launch: The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests. The study of thousands […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed Internet innovators and users of all stripes a huge victory in a case involving a company called Perfect 10 versus Google: The decision covers a wide-range of online copyright issues from in-line linking to fair use to the DMCA safe harbors and post-Grokster […]

Wall Street Journal: Why China Relaxed Blogger Crackdown. Now, the Ministry of Information Industry, the agency responsible for the policy, has abandoned plans for a law requiring all Chinese blog service providers to ask their users for verifiable personal details before they can start blogging. Instead, the government is going for the soft approach. An […]