Consumerist: Lawsuits: Law Firm ‘Jones Day’ Usurps Monster Cable For Stupidest Trademark Lawsuit Ever. Jones Day is a law firm that doesn’t want anyone else to use standard, everyday formatting for links in news stories about its staff, and it succeeded in forcing a small start-up to cave in to its demands.

This is so absurd (and wrong) that you have to wonder how the judge in the case could be so utterly misinformed, not just misguided.

And Jones Day (no links from here, ever) should be ashamed of itself. Stunning arrogance and power-grabbing from people who should (and probably do) know better but probably don’t care.

Washington Post: New Obama Orders on Transparency, FOIA Requests. In a move that pleased good government groups and some journalists, President Obama issued new orders today designed to improve the federal government’s openness and transparency. The first memo instructs all agencies and departments to “adopt a presumption in favor” of Freedom of Information Act requests, while the second memo orders the director of the Office of Management and Budget to issue recommendations on making the federal government more transparent.

This is indeed good news. The Bush administration’s fanatical devotion to secrecy was at least as much about keeping the public from finding out scandalous behavior as protecting information that, if disclosed, might endanger national security.

We all need to hold Obama’s feet to the fire on this. His administration will inevitably fall, at least on occasion, into what afflicts all governments: a wish to keep embarrassing (or worse) information from the public.

As I noted in an item that was part of a series for the Knight Citizen News Network a while back, “A key point about the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and various state “open records” laws: They are not designed solely for journalists, although that is the popular mythology, sometimes encouraged by professional journalists. They are for everyone, not any special profession or group of people.”

Now we’ll have a better chance to use them well.

StinkyJournalism.org: The Unspoken Peril for “Citizen Journalists” Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax! Is the “donation” of a citizen’s content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the IRS guidelines, the answer is “yes.”

This is a surprise, and an unwelcome one.

Before people panic, however, we should keep in mind that — given the typical freelance rates paid by media outlets these days — you’d have to spent a lot of time sending stories to large media organizations before you’d be even potentially liable for gift taxes.

The good news is that it won’t affect in any way the occasional contributor, or even a frequent contributor to nonprofit or low-traffic sites, and it has no bearing whatever on your own work on your own blog, period.

More important, it’ll help get people thinking harder about financial implications in general. The business model that says “You do all the work and we’ll collect all the money” has always been a lousy one, not to mention unfair. Now, if that turns into “You do all the work, we’ll take all the money and you’ll pay taxes on what we don’t pay you,” the citizen journalists will look even harder at this unbalanced state of affairs.

During the Inauguration, heightened security measures will be in place across Washington, D.C., particularly in the areas where official events are taking place. These security measures, as well as tickets, permits, and credentialing requirements, will affect where you can go, what you can bring with you, and what you can do to document the Inauguration. Your location and what events are taking place there will influence what legal and other limitations you are subject to. The following information will help you understand and comply with security measures and other requirements while documenting the Inauguration.

If you’re going to be there with your camera, etc., this is invaluable information.

One of the most intriguing current media legal cases pits GateHouse Media, which owns a pile of newspapers in New England (and elsewhere) against the New York Times Co., owner of the Boston Globe and Boston.com. (UPDATE: A Judge has denied, for now, an injunction.) I’ve been looking at this from both sides’ perspectives, and this is not as simple as it looks on first glance.

A disclosure: I’m a New York Times shareholder. But if the facts are true as alleged in GateHouse’s complaint, I’m leaning toward taking GateHouse’s side on this — even though I think GateHouse is making a strategic mistake in the first place — for reasons I’ll explain below.

This is a copyright fight at heart, about Boston.com’s Your Town sites, local aggregations of information and news for surrounding communities. The Your Town project, which I believe is a good idea, has three towns up now and the Globe has plans for dozens more.

GateHouse, meanwhile, has been operating sites — before Your Town got started — called Wicked Local. Both of these sites aggregate from various sources, sending traffic to the sites they point to, which is part of why many of us consider aggregation generally positive for everyone involved. So far so good.

GateHouse doesn’t buy that when it comes to what Your Town is doing: copying some headlines and story ledes from Wicked Local and GateHouse news sites (a “lede” is the start of a story) onto the Your Town pages.

Now, this is exactly what Google does on Google News, at least in some respects, when it scrapes headlines and ledes from news sources around the world and presents them in aggregated context. Google doesn’t (yet) try to monetize these pages with advertising, and what it’s doing looks to most people like fair use (though a closer call than some; see below). Your Town and Wicked Local are very much in the business of monetizing their sites.

As Dan Kennedy notes in his extensive coverage of this case:

Yes, Boston.com gives credit to the GateHouse papers, and yes, you have to click through to read the stories. But in many cases you don’t have to read the stories to get the gist of it. This is not a novel proposition — earlier this year, the Associated Press went after bloggers for reproducing its headlines and ledes, arguing that represented most of the value of its news stories.

By offering what copyright lawyers refer to as the “substantiality” — that is, the best and most marketable part — of GateHouse’s stories, Boston.com, GateHouse charges, is not complying with the notion of “fair use,” which defines the circumstances under which a copyright-holder’s work can be re-used without permission.

I consider the AP’s actions the case above to be misguided, if understandable from a panicky traditional media operation. The news agency backed off, thankfully, under the ridicule it had earned.

And if the issue in the GateHouse-NYT case were solely about substantiality, I’d make a similar argument, although what Boston.com’s Your Town operation does seem closer to the edge of fair use than what Google and other aggregators do at this stage.

But the actual complaint (PDF) alleges something that, if true, makes me much more sympathetic to GateHouse. Specifically:

Lacking any cooperation from defendant, GateHouse implemented certain electronic security measures on Wicked Local, to prevent users with a certain Boston.com Internet Protocol (“IP”) address from scraping content from GateHouse’s website. Plaintiff’s security measures did not deter defendant in the least — defendant posted original content to the Infringing Website the very next day after they were installed.

In other cases of this sort, those of us who have argued that aggregation-via-scraping is fine have also tended to say that sites that don’t want to be crawled have a way of fixing the problem: blocking access to the software robots doing the crawling. What happens when your barrier is evaded?

Google and other search engines look for files in the HTML code that make clear whether or not the site wants to be indexed. If the “robots.txt” file say, effectively, “Leave me alone,” the robot obeys. It’s not the law, but it’s the custom — and it’s the right custom.

If Boston.com’s Your Town crawlers/scrapers are going around the technological blockades, that strikes me as — at the very least — poor behavior. I don’t know whether it’s legal, but it’s not honorable. Boston.com should take the hint and stop pointing to GateHouse.

Make no mistake: I believe that turning away page views that come from other sites is, in the end, a mistake. Even so, GateHouse should have the right to make that mistake.

UPDATE: Please read the comments, which are rich with ideas and observations.

Also, the Citizen Media Law Project (I’m a co-founder) has posted a detailed initial legal take on this case.

• celebrates the incoming administration’s decision to put a Creative Commons license on its Change.Gov transition website, thereby allowing anyone to share, remix and otherwise reuse and copy the material there;
• and asks that this philosophy be extended widely in the new administration, and around the government in general.

Politico has a short story on this here.

CNET: Blogger jailing backfires on Malaysian government | Politics and Law. If the Malaysian government had hoped that the recent detention of controversial blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin would quell the country’s vociferous blogger community, it may need to look elsewhere.

Citizen Media Law Project: New Insurance Program for Bloggers Offered by the Media Bloggers Association. The new insurance, which is currently available only to members of the Media Bloggers Association (MBA), provides coverage for defamation, invasion of privacy, and copyright infringement claims. Premiums start at $450 per year for $100,000/$300,000 in coverage ($100,000 per claim and $300,000 aggregate per year) and go up from there depending on how much revenue your blog or site generates and the type of content.

This is a big deal, and kudos to MBA’s Robert Cox for his work in getting this going.

Bloggers are not immune from the law, and they need to understand this clearly. Insurance is a pain, but it’s not a frivolous expense.

The Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat reports the story.

Citizen Media Law Project: Judge in Wikileaks Case Reverses Course, Wikileaks.org is Back Online.