Posts under ‘Issues’

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 […]

NY Times: On Web, Voters Question Clinton Directly. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton sat in a fake living-room set on Monday night and fielded questions on a live video Webcast. Was this a joke? Clinton’s alleged conversations with America have been so entirely scripted as to be laughable. If this is her idea of changing politics […]

A new site, Defend the Press, is taking up the case of Sarah Olson: a journalist who published an exclusive interview with Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, the highest-ranking member of the military to refuse to deploy to Iraq. Now, the Army wants Olson to be their witness in the lieutenant’s upcoming court martial. The […]

Sanjana Hattotuwa: The promise of citizen journalism. Often, this new age of citizen journalism lacks the grammar of age-old diplomacy and socio-political norms – the conversation is raw, visceral, impatient, irreverent, pithy, provocative. In Sri Lanka, it is a conversation that’s largely still in English, and also limited to urban centres. The potential of citizen […]

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 […]

(I originally wrote this for PR Week magazine.) An honorable tradition among lawyers is representing defendants whom they strongly suspect to be guilty, especially people with little or no ability to pay for their defense. When the overwhelming power of the state is brought to bear against an individual whose freedom or even life may […]

Tim Berners-Lee (who basically invented the Web): Neutrality of the Net. To actually design legislation which allows creative interconnections between different service providers, but ensures neutrality of the Net as a whole may be a difficult task. It is a very important one. The US should do it now, and, if it turns out to […]

Rebecca MacKinnon: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Vodaphone display some cojones. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and others have been getting a lot of heat over the past year for colluding with human rights violations and state censorship in countries like China. Fortunately, three of those four companies have found the wherewithal to do more than just […]

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 […]