Idea Lab

Citizen Media Law Project Gives Free Legal Help to Online Publishers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am delighted to announce the public launch of the Berkman Center's Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation. The idea for the network...

• November 19, 2009
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Journalism Graduates: It's Time to Reinvent Journalism

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spring is upon us and with it comes commencement season at universities across the country (Harvard's 358th commencement is this Thursday, FYI). This is a tough time for graduates in almost every discipline, but especially so for journalism grads. At least that is the conventional wisdom. Which is why it is so refreshing to see a shift in perspective occurring (perhaps even, gasp, a paradigm shift?) at two of this country's preeminent journalism schools: the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In commencement speeches last month, Nicholas Lemann and Barbara Ehrenreich both exhorted...

• June 2, 2009
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New Resource Devoted to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Citizen Media Law Project, which I direct, today launched a new page that aggregates everything on our site relating to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("Section 230"), the important federal statute that protects operators of websites and other interactive computer services from liability for publishing the statements of third-parties. We've also added some detailed background on Section 230, links to our legal guide materials, and feeds showing recent legal threats from our database, blog posts, and news from other websites. The page also has a list of outside resources and will soon host a compendium of...

• April 30, 2009
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CMLP Leads Amicus Effort Promoting Rights of Anonymous Speakers in Illinois

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a case involving important First Amendment rights, the Citizen Media Law Project joined a number of media and advocacy organizations, including Gannett Co., Inc., Hearst Corporation, Illinois Press Association, Online News Association, Public Citizen, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Tribune Company, in asking an Illinois appellate court to protect the rights of anonymous speakers online by imposing procedural safeguards before requiring that their identities be disclosed. The amicus coalition, represented by Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, submitted a "friend of the court" brief yesterday in the case of Maxon v. Ottawa Publishing. The case is before the...

• March 25, 2009
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Legal Guide to Covering the 2009 Presidential Inauguration

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Heading to Washington, D.C., to attend the Presidential Inauguration? You're bringing your camera with you, right? Well it shouldn't come as any surprise that heightened security measures across the Washington area will affect where you can go, what you can bring with you, and what you can do to cover the inaugural events. In an effort to help the estimated two million people who are expected to attend some of the events, the Citizen Media Law Project just published a legal primer on attending and documenting the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. The 2009 Presidential Inauguration is actually a series of...

• January 13, 2009
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News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a year of study, countless meetings, and at least two conferences, a team of researchers at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society have released a series of papers exploring the potential and challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment (note: I played a small role in this work). If you are sitting there thinking that this is a BIG topic rife with thorny questions about the future of journalism, you're right. Which is why the papers' authors conceived of the project as a conversation, facilitated by a series of papers that look at different facets of...

• December 18, 2008
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The Role of Citizen Media in Ensuring Fair Elections

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times describing the fears some voters in Duval County, Florida have that their early votes will be lost and never counted. I found the article deeply disturbing. It wasn't because it surprised me that people fear their votes won't be counted (that fear has some precedent in Duval County, where 26,000 ballots were discarded in the 2000 election), but because it brought into focus for me the apprehensive feelings I've been having about the upcoming election. I have this nagging feeling that something . . . well, terrible . ....

• October 30, 2008
• 1 comment

New Liability Insurance Program for Bloggers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is a simple, but often ignored, truth: if you publish online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video, or even a user comment, you open yourself up to potential legal liability. It doesn't matter whether you are a professional journalist, hockey-mom, or an obscure blogger, if you post it, you'll need to be prepared for the legal consequences. So how big are the legal risks? It depends on what you publish and how you go about doing so. If you publish a blog about cute cats, for example, your risks are going to be lower than...

• September 23, 2008
• 1 comment

CMLP Completes Launch of Online Guide to Media Law

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, we are launching the final sections of the Citizen Media Law Project's online guide to media law covering the risks associated with publishing online, including defamation and privacy law.  (You can read the press release here.)  The free online guide, which is intended for use by bloggers, website operators, and other citizen media creators, focuses on the legal issues that non-traditional and traditional journalists are likely to encounter as they gather information and publish their work online. The legal guide, which runs more than 575 pages, is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It...

• July 29, 2008
• 1 comment

Revisiting Foreign Libel Law's Pernicious Impact on First Amendment Speech

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in April, I blogged over at the Citizen Media Law Project about New York's Libel Terrorism Protection Act, which bars the enforcement of foreign defamation judgments unless a New York court has found that the foreign court proceeding provided at least as much protection for freedom of speech and press in that case as would be provided by both the United States and New York Constitutions. "Libel terrorism" (a term I am not a big fan of) describes the practice of libel plaintiffs who pursue claims against American publishers in foreign courts that offer few, if any, of...

• July 15, 2008
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AP Takes on Drudge Retort Over Copyright Use

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, the Associated Press ("AP") sent a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Rogers Cadenhead, the founder of Drudge Retort, a liberal alternative to (and parody of) the well-known Drudge Report, demanding that he remove six user-submitted blog entries and one user comment on the site that contained quotations from AP articles. Today, the New York Times reported that AP was reconsidering its request while it creates a set of guidelines for bloggers and websites that excerpt AP material. The Drudge Retort is a community site similar to Digg and Reddit, allowing its users to...

• June 16, 2008
• 10 comments

Copyright and the Demise of Newspapers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create. He suggests that imposing a statutory license or levy on commercial Internet service providers and news aggregators might be a workable solution for ensuring that newspapers receive compensation for their investment in quality reporting. While I think he gives too little credit to citizen...

• May 8, 2008
• 3 comments

Judge Quashes Subpoena to Blogger Kathleen Seidel

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A federal magistrate judge in New Hampshire has quashed the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v. Bayer, in which the plaintiffs Lisa and Seth Sykes seek to link exposure to mercury to their son's autism. (For more on her statements about the lawsuit, see my previous post: Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation.) On March 24, 2008, Clifford Shoemaker, an attorney for the Sykes, served Seidel with a subpoena in connection...

• April 23, 2008
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Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've been following the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel in the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Threats Database, but thought it was time to throw our support behind Seidel and post about this egregious attempt to chill online speech. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v. Bayer, in which the plaintiffs, Lisa and Seth Sykes, seek to link exposure to mercury to their son's autism. Seidel's post mainly focused on developments in the lawsuit, but some of her language was critical...

• April 11, 2008
• 7 comments

CMLP Legal Guide: Accessing Government Info

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in January, the Citizen Media Law Project began rolling out its Citizen Media Legal Guide. So far, we've published major sections of the guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online, Dealing with Online Legal Risks, and Newsgathering and Privacy. This week we began rolling out the section on Access to Government Information, which highlights the extensive amount of information available through government sources and explains how both traditional and non-traditional journalists can use various public access laws to gather and make effective use of this information. To whet your appetite, I've pasted the first part of the...

• April 2, 2008
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Court Dismisses Libel Lawsuit Against iBrattleboro

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a case we've been following closely at the Citizen Media Law Project, a Vermont judge has dismissed the libel lawsuit filed against Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, a widely acclaimed community journalism site based in Brattleboro, Vermont, ruling that Grotke and LePage are immune from liability under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("CDA 230"). The lawsuit, which was filed by Effie Mayhew on November 16, 2007, alleges that David Dunn, the former executive director of Rescue Inc., an emergency medical services organization where Mayhew works as a volunteer, libeled her in a...

• March 20, 2008
• 1 comment

It's Sunshine Week!

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(Written by Tuna Chatterjee, CMLP Staff Attorney.) It's March and it's Sunshine Week. This year, from March 16 - 22, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is holding its annual initiative to raise public consciousness on the need for open government. The name "Sunshine Week" is derived from the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's admonition that "[s]unlight is the best disinfectant," describing his belief that an open government is more accountable to its people and thus less easily corrupted. As I write this post, various participants in the media community are similarly calling attention to the public's right to...

• March 20, 2008
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CMLP Legal Guide: Newsgathering and Privacy

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the fourth in a series of posts I've written that call attention to some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Legal Guide the Citizen Media Law Project began publishing in January. This past month we rolled out the sections on Newsgathering and Privacy, which address the legal and practical issues both professional and non-professional journalists may encounter as they gather documents, take photographs or video, and collect other information. In this post, I highlight the Gathering Private Information section of the legal guide, which outlines various privacy laws that set limits on the use of...

• March 10, 2008
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Citizen Media Law Project Publishes Newsgathering Legal Guide

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in January, I announced the launch of the first two major sections of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online and Dealing with Online Legal Risks. This past month we began rolling out the section on Newsgathering and Privacy, which addresses the legal and practical issues you may encounter as you gather documents, take photographs or video, and collect other information. Here is a quick rundown of the sections we've just published: Entering the Property of Others discusses your rights to access public and private property and provides some guidance on...

• March 3, 2008
• 6 comments

Media Organizations Back Wikileaks in Court

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday, a coalition of organizations dedicated to preserving free speech rights on the Internet, including the Citizen Media Law Project, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Los Angeles Times, Hearst Corp., Gannett Co., Associated Press, and Society of Professional Journalists, filed a "friend of the court" brief in the Wikileaks case. If you haven't been following the case, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a stunningly broad injunction on February 15 that brought down Wikileaks.org, a site that is developing what it describes as an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis." True to its...

• February 27, 2008
• 3 comments

CMLP Legal Guide: Deciding Whether and How to be Anonymous

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In light of Dan Schultz's excellent post entitled Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case Study of Digital Media, I've decided to focus my post this week on the legal and practical issues you should consider if you wish to engage in anonymous speech online. This is the third in a series of posts I've put up highlighting some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Law Project's recently launched Citizen Media Legal Guide. In the first two posts I discussed choosing a business form for your online activities and the legal issues associated with selecting a platform for online speech....

• February 17, 2008
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CMLP Legal Guide: Getting Your Content Out to the World

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the second in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the recently launched Citizen Media Law Project Legal Guide. The first topic I took up was choosing a business form. In this post I discuss the various issues, both legal and practical, that arise when you select a platform for your online activities.Getting Your Words and Other Content Out to the World So you've decided that you want to publish online. There is a wide range of platforms you can use to get your words, video, and other content out to...

• February 10, 2008
• 3 comments

Highlights from the CMLP Legal Guide: Choosing a Business Form

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the first in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the recently launched Citizen Media Law Project Legal Guide. The first topic I'll take up is choosing a business form for your online publishing activities. There is increasing awareness that, especially if you publish content in collaboration with others, it may not be smart to simply leave the relationship "natural" or informal. But this realization raises other questions: What are your options? What are the benefits of legal formality? Will it be expensive to obtain these benefits? Will you have to...

• February 6, 2008
• 1 comment

Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Guide

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week we launched the first sections of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues, and addresses the legal issues that you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work online. You can read the press release here. The Legal Guide, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, covers the 15 most populous U.S. states and the District of Columbia and will focus on the wide...

• February 5, 2008
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Primer on Copyright Liability and Fair Use

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a lead up to next week's launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide, we are putting up longer, substantive blog posts on various subjects covered in the guide. This post, which discusses copyright and fair use in the context of citizen media, is the second in our series of legal primers. The first addressed the subject of immunity and liability for third-party content under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Because the primer is too long for me to republish here, I've included just a summary.  If you are interested in reading more, the entire...

• January 25, 2008
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Court Affirms that Single Publication Rule Applies Online

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(Cross-posted from the Citizen Media Law Project Blog) In a case of first impression in Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the "single publication rule," which states that the statute of limitations period for libel begins to run when a defamatory statement is first published, applies to publications on the Internet. Some background on the case: on July 29, 2003, the Dallas Morning News published -- in print and on its website -- an allegedly defamatory article by financial writer Scott Burns about an accelerated mortgage program offered by Nationwide Bi-Weekly Administration, a company...

• January 16, 2008
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Court Issues Search Warrant to Unmask Anonymous Poster

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the issues we've been focusing on at the Citizen Media Law Project is whether traditional legal protections for journalists and journalism organizations are eroding as news organizations move online.  A recent search warrant seeking information about the identity of a user of the Lawrence Journal-World's website, LJWorld.com, raises serious concerns about governmental overreaching and highlights the need for adequate legal protections for website user information. Last month, an investigator at Kansas University delivered a search warrant to the Lawrence Journal-World, a highly regarded newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, demanding access to their computer servers in order to get information...

• January 9, 2008
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Bush Signs FOIA Reform Bill Benefitting Bloggers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In one of his last executive actions of the year, President Bush signed into law the "OPEN Government Act of 2007" on December 31, 2007. The Senate unanimously passed the reform bill earlier in December, and it passed the House of Representatives by voice vote on December 18. The Associated Press is reporting that Bush signed the bill without comment. As I explained in a post on the Citizen Media Law Project's blog two weeks ago, the legislation substantially reforms the Freedom of Information Act and expands the definition of who is a "representative of the news media" under FOIA....

• January 1, 2008
• 2 comments

Primer on Immunity for User Content

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a lead up to the launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide in January, we are putting up longer, substantive blog posts on our project blog discussing various subjects covered in the legal guide. The first post in the series stems from a talk I gave at the Legal Risk Management in the Web 2.0 World conference in Washington, DC. As the token academic, I had the task of providing a general overview of the liability that publishers might face if they allow users to comment on or submit content to their sites. I adapted my...

• December 16, 2007
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iBrattleboro Moves to Dismiss Libel Lawsuit

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, I blogged here and on the Citizen Media Law Project Blog about a lawsuit filed by Effie Mayhew against Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, in which Mayhew claims that Grotke and LePage bear liability for a comment a user posted on the iBrattleboro site.  You can read more about the lawsuit, and follow its progress, by accessing the entry, Mayhew v. Dunn, in our legal threats database.Today, Grotke and LePage filed their anticipated motion for jugdment on the pleadings, arguing that they are immune from liability under section 230 of the Communications...

• December 3, 2007
• 1 comment

Libel Lawsuit Filed Against iBrattleboro

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I just received notice that Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, a widely acclaimed citizen journalism site based in Brattleboro, Vermont, were sued on November 16 for libel based on a comment submitted by one of the site's users. The lawsuit, brought by Effie Mayhew, alleges that David Dunn, the former executive director of Rescue Inc., an emergency medical services organization where Mayhew works as a volunteer, libeled her in a comment on the site. According to the Brattleboro Reformer, which reported on the lawsuit yesterday: The suit pertains to a Sept. 30 comment posted to...

• November 28, 2007
• 3 comments

Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Threats Database

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Citizen Media Law Project we've finally finished building the interface for our Legal Threats Database, and I am excited to announce its public launch today. (If you would like to read our news release, you can find it here.) The database, which is funded by the Knight Foundation, catalogs the growing number of lawsuits, cease-and-desist letters, and other legal challenges faced by those engaging in online speech. We have already collected legal threats from 35 states and 9 countries, and the database is growing daily. These threats range from copyright infringement lawsuits filed against bloggers to cease and...

• November 7, 2007
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Importance of Knowing Local Laws: The Phoenix New Times Arrests

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's been extensive coverage (here, here, here, and here) in the last week of the arrest and subsequent dismissal of charges against Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the founders of the Phoenix New Times, a print and online newspaper. Lacey and Larkin were arrested for violating Arizona's grand jury secrecy statute, which makes it a criminal offense for anyone to disclose a "matter attending a grand jury proceeding," after they published details from a grand jury subpoena they received.  In a post published on our site yesterday, the Citizen Media Law Project's assistant director Sam Bayard offered a careful...

• October 25, 2007
• 2 comments

U.S. House Passes Federal Shield Bill, Changes Who is Covered

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the things we are doing at the Citizen Media Law Project is keeping our eye on new legislation that might have an impact on non-traditional journalists.  Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed -- for the first time ever -- a federal shield bill by a vote of 398 to 21. This follows on the heels of the Senate Judiciary Committee's passage of a similar bill on October 4. The House version, however, makes a critical change in the language regarding who is entitled to the bill's qualified protections by excluding those who do not receive "substantial...

• October 17, 2007
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Citizen Media Law Project: Where We've Been and Where We're Going

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We formally launched the Citizen Media Law Project's website in April 2007, so it's about time that I provided an update on what we have been up to and where we are headed in the next few months.  First, however, a bit of background on my project. The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP), a joint venture between Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Citizen Media, is creating a set of online legal resources for citizen journalists. This will include state and federal legal guides; advice on business formation; and a database of lawsuits,...

• October 15, 2007
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