Internet free speech laws, Chapter Whatever
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Maybe you were out of town last week, or maybe you just weren't paying attention. That's OK. Here's a quick rundown of what you missed, culled from reports by our staff and wire services.
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A lawyer specializing in freedom of speech and the Internet said Wednesday he will defend free of charge a 19-year-old publisher of a Web site facing a lawsuit over an article that revealed trade secrets about an Apple computer.
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
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How much should people be able to quote from, remix, and reuse copyrighted material?
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Keep our web sites free! Silicon Justice Is this the dawning of the age of the defamation take-down notice?â¦
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Well, Murphy&#8217;s Law kicked in this afternoon, and after attempting to disable comments on the original 2006 SEJ Search Blogs Awards post, the entire thing disappeared. Thin air. Poof. Houdini action. We&#8217;re all hoping that Matt Cutts can grab us a cached version of the original page that is newer than this one, but in the event [...]
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Just been doing some heavy translation from German to English. Which lead to writing a simple command line tool for translating via Google - waste time to save time in other words. Getting a prototype up from scratch took about 15 minutes (which sheds a light on blog spam I guess). Have cleaned it up a bit and dropping it here in case anyone can use it.
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The Asbo is a control order usually banning offenders from frequenting certain places or carrying out particular activities. But now one has been issued to curb Internet activity
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To: TECHNOLOGY EDITORS  Contact: Karen Norphon, +1-703-683-5004 x121, for Hands Off the Internet   WASHINGTON, June 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Gov.
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A federal judge threw out on Friday a Pennsylvania law requiring Internet service providers to block Web sites containing child pornography, saying the tools to do so also cause "massive suppression" of constitutionally protected speech.    Enacted in 2002, the law gave Pennsylvania's attorney general the power to require that companies like America Online Inc...
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A California judge says Diebold Election Systems broke the law when it threatened students for posting internal company memos on the web. Advocates say this is a precedent-setting victory for free speech on the web, and a warning to litigious companies. By Kim Zetter.
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"Net neutrality" is a technical concept that has protected online freedom. It's essentially the First Amendment for the Internet - allowing Web users to go where they want and do what they please online.
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A PENNSYLVANIA law which was designed to prevent Internet users from child pornography has been chucked out because it blocks free speech.
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WASHINGTON - A Pennsylvania law requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to block Web sites the state's prosecuting attorneys deem to be child pornography has been reversed by a U.S. federal court, with the judge ruling the law violated free speech rights.
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A Pennsylvania law requiring Internet service providers to block Web sites deemed by the state's prosecuting attorneys to be child pornography has been reversed by a U.S. federal court on free-speech grounds.
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One of the best things I like about the Internet is the boundary-less nature of this amazing network. I can check out user views of people (from here in India) around the world on the India issues.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??