Posts under ‘Issues’

Lance Dutson, a Maine blogger who has gone after a state tourism agency and its advertising contractor, found himself at the wrong end of a legal gun barrel when the contractor, an ad agency, filed a libel suit that looked from here like raw intimidation. He fought back, with a lot of help, and now […]

In Editor & Publisher’s remarkable story, “Letter Reveals Reason for Firing of Vermont AP Chief,” the news cooperative’s explanation doesn’t begin to pass the smell test. The story says Christopher Graff “was terminated for distributing a column by Sen. Patrick Leahy that promoted open public records, according to his termination letter obtained by E&P today. […]

The Podcasting Legal Guide calls itself “a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting.” Great work by all.

NY Times: Publisher to Recall Harvard Student’s Novel. Just a day after saying it would not withdraw “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life” from bookstores, Little, Brown, the publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, confessed to copying passages from another writer’s books, said it would immediately recall all […]

Lance Dutson (Maine Web Report): State Contractor Files Federal Lawsuit Against Me. So here I am, one man against the state and its contractors, put in the position of shutting up or being pounded by their deep pockets and a wild misconception of what the court system is supposed to be used for. One person […]

Harvard Crimson: Sophomore Novelist Admits To Borrowing Language From Earlier Books. Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 admitted yesterday to borrowing language from two books by Megan F. McCafferty, though the student novelist said that “any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious.” “Completely unintentional and unconscious” — really? Take a look at […]

The Save the Internet coalition is trying to prevent a hijacking of our future. The robber barons of the Information Age — the phone and cable giants — are trying to wrest control of this absolutely essential infrastructure away from the edges of the networks, and put that control back in the center where they […]

Daniel Henninger (Wall Street Journal): Wonder Land. At the risk of enabling, does the Internet mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people? As populist psychiatry, maybe this is a good thing; the Web allows large numbers of people to contribute […]

Scot Hacker: Where’s Tibet? When we think about Google being in bed with the Chinese government and blocking access to information about Tibet, we know it’s bad, but we also assume the censorship applies only to Google users in China. Here we have an example of Google’s complicity affecting searches conducted from anywhere in the […]

NY Times: TV Networks Sue to Challenge F.C.C.’s Indecency Penalties. With no allies among either the Democrats or the Republicans on the Federal Communications Commission nor any significant ones in Congress, the four broadcast networks, joined by the Hearst-Argyle Television group of stations, embarked late last week on a low-risk strategy of turning to the […]