Today the Court granted my Motion for Summary Judgment in the Comins v. VanVoorhis case, on the grounds that Chris Comins failed to obey the basic legal requirements that must be met before suing a media defendant for libel in the state of Florida.
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In recognition of World Press Freedom Day, which occurs every May 3rd, I am reposting my Blawg Review from last year:
The Carnival of Law Bloggers has invited me to host Blawg Review #262 for World Press Freedom Day. For those not already familiar with it, Blawg Review is a weekly review of legal blogging, hosted by a different “blawg” each week.
In looking over past reviews, I gather it’s rare for non-lawyers to have this honor. The two exceptions I found were from a law student (see BR#57) and a regular commenter on legal matters (BR#238). Both seemed to be considered “blawgers” by the legal-blogging community. Webopedia defines a “blawg” as:
A slang term used to describe an online blog that is written by lawyers, or one that is focused on providing legal-oriented content.
Even by that flexible definition–no one would classify Public Intellectual as a “blawg.” This blog’s original intent was to translate the concepts I was learning in graduate school into language that could reach a wider audience. Social science offered insights on matters of public concern, but it bothered me that we were trained to keep it all to ourselves, writing only in obscure academic journals and using encrypted terms. I appreciate when specialists (in any field) keep the lines of communication open, by limiting the jargon when they write about their area of expertise. So I created this blog to do just that with sociology.
In that same spirit, I’ve chosen links for this review that were accessible to me as someone outside-the-loop. My involvement with law is limited to my experiences as a defamation defendant (see Comins v. VanVoorhis). Thus, I can’t really judge the “quality” of blawgs from a legal standpoint. But as an educated citizen, I’d like to be informed about legal issues, and to pass along whatever I learn to other non-experts. Law bloggers help make that possible when they break down the legalese into layman’s terms. In the spirit of freeing up knowledge and to commemorate World Press Freedom Day, this blawg review will celebrate those kinds of posts. Since some of the topics pertain to technology and various forms of online communication, I’ve also included posts by industry insiders, so that we might contrast legal blogs with technology and software blogs.
Today is World Press Freedom Day, celebrated every year on May 3rd worldwide.
World Press Freedom Day is an opportunity to:
The UN’s General Assembly proclaimed World Press Freedom Day in 1993, following a recommendation adopted two years earlier at the UNESCO’s General Conference. (Learn more about the WPFD 2010 conference hosted earlier today at Australia’s University of Queensland; also, WPFD 2010 on Twitter).
Press freedom has great significance to me not only personally (as the victim of a SLAPP lawsuit, aimed not at collecting damages but at intimidating me into silence) but also professionally. As a PhD candidate at the University of Florida, my dissertation research focuses on civic literacy: the (a) willingness and (b) ability of citizens to participate in matters of public concern. Not surprisingly, preliminary findings support past research suggesting a strong correlation between civic literacy and press freedom. In order to be “willing” and “able” citizens must first be informed. It’s hard to imagine an uninformed population doing much of anything.
Of course, not everyone likes this idea of citizens participating. A population that’s engaged and informed means greater accountability for political leaders and other powerful individuals. So if you happen to be involved in some activity for which you’d rather not be held accountable, I guess you’re not celebrating World Press Freedom Day today.
Freedom starts with democratizing knowledge. It’s hard to imagine a democracy without a free press and freedom of speech. Anyone can claim to be a proponent of free speech. But most people are flip-floppers on free speech. The First Amendment is a light switch that they turn on and off as it suits their agenda.
Have you ever met a person who openly admitted to being against “free speech”? That seems to be an undesirable position, even among those who are in fact the First Amendment’s enemies. I find that such people don’t classify whatever they’re opposing as “free speech.” Instead, they redefine it as something that sounds unpleasant, such as “hate speech”; that way it’s easier to get people on board with denouncing it.
Sometimes both sides in an argument see their own position as “free speech” and the other’s as “hate speech.” That’s exactly what happened here at the University of Florida in 2007 when the Vice President of Student Affairs sent a mass email condemning a public screening of the movie Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West and demanding an apology from those responsible.
Another anti-free speech buzzword is “defamation.”
Just before I started blogging in late 2006, I read up on online defamation and liability laws at Electronic Frontier Foundation. That was when I first learned about my favorite non-defamation example, Vogel v. Felice.
A statement that the plaintiff is a “Dumb Ass,” even first among “Dumb Asses,” communicates no factual proposition susceptible of proof or refutation. It is true that “dumb” by itself can convey the relatively concrete meaning “lacking in intelligence.” Even so, depending on context, it may convey a lack less of objectively assayable mental function than of such imponderable and debatable virtues as judgment or wisdom. Here defendant did not use “dumb” in isolation, but as part of the idiomatic phrase, “dumb ass.” When applied to a whole human being, the term “ass” is a general expression of contempt essentially devoid of factual content. Adding the word “dumb” merely converts “contemptible person” to “contemptible fool.” Plaintiffs were justifiably insulted by this epithet, but they failed entirely to show how it could be found to convey a provable factual proposition. … If the meaning conveyed cannot by its nature be proved false, it cannot support a libel claim.
Copyright infringements sometimes conflict with freedom of expression. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) criminalizes production and dissemination of copyrighted digital material. Often, website owners cooperate with DCMA takedown notices when it’s not certain that any copyright infringement has occurred, because the website will not be held liable as long as the potentially infringing content is taken down.
Two DCMA takedowns made headlines this week. The first involved sweeping YouTube removals of Hitler parodies from the movie Downfall (see commentary from Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb; also Corynne McSherry at EFF and Samuel Axon at mashable).
The other involved the removal of a Twitter update by a music writer (see DMCA abuse extends to Twitter posts by Jacqui Cheng at arstechnica).
Consider the Gizmodo/stolen iPhone affair. From Kim Zetter at Wired:
Police raided the house of an editor for Gizmodo on Friday and seized four computers as part of an investigation into the leak of a prototype iPhone that the site obtained for a blockbuster story last week.
At first glance it didn’t seem like this case had anything to do with freedom of the press. But in a phone interview with Laptop magazine, EFF’s Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick said the Privacy Protection Act protects reporters and journalists from search and seizure for their news gathering activities. (see also Citizen Media Law Project).
Here is a quasi-insider perspective by Gizmodo intern Sergio Hernandez. And another, “The Official Verdict in the Stolen iPhone case” from mega-blogger Jason Calacanis (co-founder of Web Blogs Inc.) who trashes his former competitor Nick Denton, who runs the show at Gizmodo. Calcanis also offers a metaphor, comparing the stolen iPhone saga to finding a future Mercedes:
You see a silver Mercedes parked in front of your house… and see that it has a bunch of new features that the standard Mercedes you drive lacks. You take the car and drive it home, then call automotive magazines and offer to sell this prototype you found, and know the owner of, for 10x the street value of the car (say, $1M). What are you now? Yes, a criminal!
This analogy is simplistic because it overlooks the nuances between “information” and objects. A car cannot be stored on a hard drive. However, the analogy reminded me of a still-ongoing debate between Orin Kerr at Rick Horowitz at Probable Cause and Orin Kerr of The Volokh Conspiracy regarding how to apply. In Kerr’s recent article, he describes the basic goal of technology neutrality, which he paraphrases in a blawg entry as:
(T)o develop Fourth Amendment principles that roughly replicate the function of the Fourth Amendment offline in the online environment. Put simply, the Fourth Amendment should do for cyberspace what it does for realspace.
Horowitz wrote two posts in response to Kerr’s theories and has promised a third. The first two:
The last few years have seen significant changes in the law regarding First Amendment protections for anonymous and pseudonymous speech on the Internet. Accordingly, Citizen Media Law Project’s Sam Bayard announced updates at CLMP to reflect all these changes.
Many Internet users assume they have limitless anonymity online, and get themselves in trouble as a result. Douglas Keene of The Jury Room gives an informative rundown of recent examples.
Walter Olson at Overlawyered dug up another example from Kalamazoo Michigan, where T & J Towing is suing a college student for $750,000 for starting the Facebook page “Kalamazoo Residents Against T&J Towing.” I visited the Facebook page, which has close to 11,000 visitors. This could be an example of the Streisand effect–unless that many people hated the company before they filed they sued the student.
Also on the Facebook front, KashmirHill weighs in on Facebook’s tracking of our digital footprints in “Control Matters More than Privacy.”
Lyle Denniston at SCOTUS discusses the Supreme Court Justices and where they fall in the anonymity debate, in
“Without Scalia, whither anonymity?Supreme Court Justices” and
Peter Richman, guest contributor at ninefiveyears writes about the bold new plan by the Associated Press to control the distribution of its news by implementing hidden licenses and tracking devices. Richman suggests the new technology could ultimately enable to AP to stipulate that readers forfeit their fair use rights simply by reading an article.
The hNews microformat is metadata embedded in a news article with two noteworthy features – 1) a licensing framework, and 2) a tracking beacon. The framework sets the legal terms and conditions for using the article… (W)hat is legally significant here is not so much the specific terms of the framework as the very fact that the AP is trying to control its content by binding its readers to a contract.
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Phillip R. Greaves
Phillip R. Greaves, author of a self-published book on pedophilia, was released yesterday after spending more than three months in jail.
From BBC News:
Phillip Greaves pleaded no contest on Wednesday in Florida to a charge of distributing obscene material depicting minors engaged in harmful conduct… He was arrested in December after he sold a copy of the self-published book to an undercover detective in Florida. He was arrested in Colorado on behalf of prosecutors in Polk County, Florida, and was extradited to the southern US state. (Read the full article).
It all started last fall when Anderson Cooper spearheaded CNN’s crusade against Greaves. The goal, at first, was just to compel Amazon.com to stop selling Greaves’s book. Amazon initially responded by saying that it supported the author’s rights to free speech:
Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable.
Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.
Viewers of AC360 were then encouraged to boycott Amazon.com until the website pulled the book. Predictably, Amazon eventually reneged on its commitment to the First Amendment, removing the book from its website within a day.
But here’s what CNN and Cooper failed to mention. Nobody besides the author had ever read, purchased, or even heard of this book until CNN started giving it free publicity. To hear the CNN pundit tell it, it was as if the book were a national bestseller. But in reality, Greaves’s typo-filled book hadn’t even been published by an actual publisher. It was only available in Kindle form. Absolutely anybody is eligible to sell their crap on Amazon in Kindle form. But neither Amazon nor Greaves were getting on account of this book. In fact, guess how many copies had sold before CNN went berserk? Just one. So even though CNN ultimately succeeded in preventing Amazon from “selling” the book, the cable news network likely caused more readers (including real-life pedophiles) to buy the book than Greaves ever could have sold himself in the absence of a national freak out. (Let this be a First Amendment lesson for all major media organizations: if your goal is to censor distasteful material, don’t provide it with free advertising).
But whatever good fortune the boost in Kindle sales brought to Greaves was no doubt offset by what came next. During the global outcry surrounding Greaves, a self-righteous Florida sheriff saw an opportunity to get famous.
From Bay News 9:
Sheriff Grady Judd saw all the national attention about the book and wanted to do something about it. He had his detectives order the book.
When it got to Polk County, Judd had a judge sign an arrest warrant. Two deputies then flew to Colorado to arrest Greaves.
Greaves has no other connection to Florida.
Judd was criticized for spending money on the case. Today, Judd defended his decision to send his detectives to Colorado.
“What’s that worth to the parents across the United States? I would say an investigation like that is priceless and it cost us very little,” Judd said. “And if at the end of the day it only saved a child in Colorado from being a victim, who would argue with that? I am proud of that expenditure.”
(See news video about arrest).
It was an outcome even CNN never intended (but nonetheless celebrated).
Though ordered to serve two years probation, Greaves does not have to register as a sex offender because he was never accused of actually molesting a child, only thinking about it and fantasizing about it in writing. He told Bay News 10 that he intended to celebrate his release with a pizza and a Dr. Pepper in a local motel last night. Today, he will attempt to purchase a bus ticket back to Colorado using social security checks that accumulated during the
As Greaves was released yesterday, he told told reporters:
I don’t really think that I did anything that was so terribly wrong. I was trying to be objective, I was trying to reach out and help people that everybody hates and it backfired on me.
Posted in Amazon, Anderson Cooper, BBC, CNN, Colorado, Florida, Phillip R. Greaves | Tagged Amazon, Anderson Cooper, CNN, Phillip Greaves | 1 Comment »
Conventional wisdom teaches us that voting is supposed to be what makes democracy tick. Textbooks would have us believe our greatest act of public participation comes from the single ballot we cast that contributes to the election of our political leaders. But really, stop and ponder this: how many times has a single vote made the difference in an election? If you happen to live in a dinky hamlet in some abandoned corner of nowhere, then maybe your vote will someday “matter”—if only in deciding an election that doesn’t.
As for the rest of us, we’re deluding ourselves if we believe voting is the best or only way to make our voices heard in our democracy. Voting is a passive activity that enables citizens to tell themselves they’ve participated.
I’m not saying “don’t vote”—rather, “don’t only vote.” Do more. Take part actively in the public dialogue. Supplement your electoral enthusiasm with more productive forms of civic engagement.
If suffrage is the symbolic heartbeat of freedom, its legwork and brainpower both come from civic participation. All citizens have a right to be informed, and to be engaged in public affairs. Such civic involvement requires that you proactively take part.
Use your voice; it’s the most powerful instrument you have as an ordinary citizen. Use it in every way you know how.
You can exact far more change with your voice than you can with how you vote. That’s why no one has ever been sued for how they vote.
Posted in citizens, citizenship, democracy, free speech, freedom of speech | Tagged civic engagement, free speech, voting | 1 Comment »
Governor Rick Scott recently announced his new budget for the state of Florida. Don’t worry, socialism-haters, it does not “take from the rich and give to the poor.”
Instead, it takes from the kids and gives to the rich!
No, seriously. The new budgets cuts over $1.7 Billion in education, and gives $1.6 billion of that to the rich in the form of tax breaks.
Thus, Rachel Maddow defines “The Rick Scott Test”:
A simple test for determining whether your quality of life and your share of the American Dream is going to shrivel significantly this year for a real economic reason or just because you have a bad governor.
We call this the Rick Scott Test because newly-elected Florida Governor Rick Scott didn’t just use a state budget deficit to justify cutting public education down to the bone… No, Rick Scott gets the bad governor test named after him because Rick Scott found a way to make huge devastating cuts to education in a way that does not help the state’s budget deficit at all.
Specifically, Governor Scott’s new Florida budget
takes more than $1.7 billion out of public schools. And instead of putting that money back into the budget, the budget gives it away in corporate and property tax breaks. So, K through 12 education gets absolutely eviscerated in the state of Florida and the money that is saved by the state no longer spending the money on the schools doesn’t close the state budget gap at all. It leaves it roughly exactly as is and instead gives the saved money away in the form of tax cuts. So, you get all of the pain and none of the gain.
Is your state about to become a much worse place to live because of an actual economic shortfall in your state? Or is your state about to become a much worse place to live because it`s just what your governor wants? It is the Rick Scott test. It`s empirical. Tax cut for dummies.
Posted in Florida, Rachel Maddow, Rachel Maddow Show, Rick Scott | Tagged education, Florida, Politics, public schools, Rick Scott, taxes | Leave a Comment »
Wisconsin Republican Dale Schultz
Any politician who votes against the party line deserves credit. Even if we don’t agree with their actual vote, we should least appreciate that by defying their own party they’ve taken a political risk, usually because their principles manage to survive their selfish interests.
Former Rhode Island Republican US Senator Lincoln Chafee’s opposition to the Iraq War comes to mind as one of the best examples of this in recent years.
Now, so too does Wisconsin State Sen. Dale Schultz’s lone dissenting vote the other night when his fellow-Republican colleagues successfully carried out a sneak attack on the middle class.
“Ultimately, I voted my conscience which I feel reflects the core beliefs of the majority of voters who sent me here to represent them,” Schultz said.
Protesters gathered in the state capitol in Madison chanting “Shame, shame, shame” after Republicans in the Wisconsin state Senate used a procedural loophole–and, some argue, broke the open meetings law–to pass a standalone bill restricting collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions.
The fourteen Democrats in the state’s Senate were absent, having fled Wisconsin three weeks ago to prevent a vote on legislation proposed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker. On its surface, Walker claimed the legislation was aimed at addressing the state’s $137 million budget deficit. Even though it also contained provisions restricting collective bargaining, which many of the Governor’s critics saw as a direct attack on labor, Walker swore publicly that the impetus behind the legislation was budgetary. As a budgetary matter, it required a quorum which Democrats blocked by leaving the state.
But, all the budgetary justifications turned out to be just a front after all. The new version of the bill that the Republicans passed on Wednesday night separated the union provisions from any measures that spend money, thus eliminating the need for a quorum while achieving the legislation’s true intent—to punish Democrat-backing unions.
The legislation quickly moved out of committee and onto the floor of the Senate, where Republicans voted 18-1 to approve it, with only Schultz daring to push back against it on behalf of the working people of Wisconsin.
Mark Miller, the Democrats’ leader, said:
“In 30 minutes, 18 state Senators undid 50 years of civil rights in Wisconsin. Their disrespect for the people of Wisconsin and their rights is an outrage that will never be forgotten.. Tonight, 18 Senate Republicans conspired to take government away from the people.”
Another Democrat, State Sen. Chris Larson, added:
“This is on the Republicans’ heads right now. If they decide to kill the middle class, it’s on them… This is a travesty is what it is…. I can’t sit by and let them kill the middle class.”
Posted in Chris Larson, Dale Schultz, Iraq War, Lincoln Chafee, Madison, Mark Miller, politicians, Politics, Scott Walker, Wisconsin | Tagged education, labor unions, Politics, teachers, Wisconsin, Wisconsin 14, Wisconsin Fourteen | 3 Comments »
I’ve never before posted a product review on my blog. But this one is so crappy that I’ve no choice but to make an exception. People need to be warned about what not to waste their hard-earned money on.
PRODUCT: Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 v3
I ordered this product on Amazon less than a year ago and am already replacing it. Not sure how much ergonomic research actually went into the designing of this product. It’s more likely that they just came up with a design that looked cool rather than one that actually fit well with the human hand.
"Ergonomics" apparently means no two buttons can be the same size.
KEYBOARD PROS:
KEYBOARD CONS:
Good luck finding the "Escape" button without taking your eyes off the monitor screen.
Microsoft should put on a clinic: how to maximize thumb discomfort!
MOUSE PROS:
MOUSE CONS:
Basically, I can think of no reason to recommend this product. I take that back–I would recommend it to a rival or competitor of mine in a shady attempt to make him become less productive!
Posted in Microsoft | Tagged consumers, hardware, keyboard, Microsoft, Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop, Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 6000, Microsoft Wireless Laser Keyboard 6000, Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000, mouse | 2 Comments »
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