Posts under ‘Legal’

Mac News Network: Apple pays $700,000 for bloggers’ legal fees. In total, Apple was ordered to pay nearly $700,000 — a small amount for a company that reported nearly $1 billion in profit in the December quarter, but a large moral victory for bloggers, journalists and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which helped defend against […]

AP: Watada Agreement Means Journos Won’t Have to Testify in ‘Antiwar’ Case. Watada’s attorney Eric Seitz agreed that two subpoenaed reporters will not have to testify. They are Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s Gregg Kakesako and freelance reporter Sarah Olson. “We will stipulate and agree to the testimony that the reporters would have otherwise provided and the accuracy […]

OUT-LAW.com: Texas court bans deep linking. A court in Dallas, Texas has found a website operator liable for copyright infringement because his site linked to an ‘audio webcast’ without permission. Observers have criticised the judge for failing to understand the internet. The defendant represented himself, and as often happens in such cases he lost. But […]

SF Chronicle: Owner of conservative radio station KSFO demands liberal critic quit using audio clips. Now, bloggers and media freedom advocates are concerned about the legal reaction from Disney/ABC-owned KSFO. Shortly before Christmas, an ABC lawyer demanded that Spocko remove audio clips from his blog on the grounds that Spocko’s posting of KSFO content was […]

Editor & Publisher reports that Wendy McCaw, the eccentric owner of the Santa Barbara (California) News-Press, isn’t just presiding over the meltdown of a newspaper. She’s suing a freelance journalist who wrote about her activities, claiming an American Journalism Review article was defamatory. Needless to say, people familiar with journalism and the First Amendment are […]

UPDATED SF Chronicle: ISP not responsible for online libel, state’s top court rules. People who claim they were libeled on line can’t sue the Internet service providers that carried the messages, the California Supreme Court ruled today. The unanimous ruling reversed an October 2003 decision by a state appellate court in San Francisco that would […]

Lawyers for YouTube apparently sent lawyers after Techcrunch for an copyright offense that doesn’t sound offensive. Bozo behavior ascendant.

Peter Scheer, executive of the California First Amendment Coalition, asks, “What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?” He writes: Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period — say, […]

UPDATED Names@Work: Senator Would Outlaw Anonymous Blogs. New proposed legislation (in Brazil) would make it a crime, punishable by four years in jail, to anonymously send email, join a chat forum, download content, or write a blog. This is going to be a constant battle around the world in coming years. Governments loathe anonymity. But […]

(This guest posting comes via Lauren Gelman, deputy director of the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School.) UPDATED When we asked for your questions, we never expected that 80% would be about taking photographs or videos at the polls. Research by student fellows at the Stanford University Law School’s Center for Internet […]