Posts under ‘Legal’

Jonathan Weber at New West Network asks, “Michael Moore, Why Are You Stealing Our Content?” Pretty shabby…

NY Times: Survey Finds Action on Information Requests Can Take Years. The Freedom of Information Act requires a federal agency to provide an initial response to a request within 20 days and to provide the documents in a timely manner. But the oldest pending request uncovered in a new survey of 87 agencies and departments […]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Avvo’s attorney rating system draws fire. Setting up an online rating system that attempts to rank the best and worst attorneys, is kind of like dipping your toes in shark-infested waters. Sooner or later, you are bound to get bitten. That’s the situation facing Avvo, the heavily funded Seattle startup that just four […]

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’ […]

The Citizen Media Law Project, jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and this Center, is launching this week, with the help of a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. Our central aim is to provide practical knowledge and tools for citizen journalists. In the coming months we will be […]

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 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 […]

Over at Just Another Pretty Farce, Nashville blogger Katherine Coble reports settlement of what was shaping up to be a nasty legal disupte. You can find more about the situation in earlier postings on her blog, but the main point is that the threatening party agreed — after the intervention of a lawyer for the […]

Last week, March 11-17, was known in journalistic and (some) governmental circles as “Sunshine Week” — a tribute to notions of open government, and a call to action to make it more so. Freedom of information was on tap in all kinds of ways. But now that the official celebration is over, I want to […]

Valleywag points to the incredibly hypocrisy of Viacom, which has sued Google for big bucks over YouTube but encourages its own video “pirates” on a Viacom-owned site. No surprise here, whatever.