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Legal Drama
Was Twitter Document Theft, and Publication by TechCrunch, Legal?
In June of this year, the personal email account of a Twitter employee was accessed, apparently as a result of an insecure password. By Twitter's own account, the unauthorized access to that account was the first in a series of actions that ultimately gained the hacker (who calls himself "Hacker Croll") access to Twitter corporate documents that were maintained...
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'Fox & Friends' Hosts Not Liable for Repeating Associated Content Parody
As newspapers are closing or abandoning their print editions, online news sources are growing in importance -- as are sites that rely on user-submitted news stories. But with so much unfiltered news content available online, how do you separate the accurate from the inaccurate and truth from parody? You might think that traditional news sources would be better able...
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U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Kills Online Age Verification Law
In 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a law intended to control child access to sexually explicit material on the Internet. The law was immediately challenged on free speech and other grounds and its enforcement was delayed. After ten years of litigation, on January 22 the U.S. Supreme Court dealt the final blow to...
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Can U.S. Laws Protect Online Speech from Foreign Libel Suits?
"...in cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance." That's a remark famously made in 1997 by John Perry Barlow, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow's complete statement is well worth re-reading but one implication of this particular remark is that the reach of American constitutional values may be limited by our country's physical borders. When...
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Judges Rule Anonymous Commenters Protected by State Shield Laws
Political campaigns often produce a blizzard of ancillary election-related litigation -- for an example, just look to the 2000 presidential campaign. When the press reports anonymous accusations during an election campaign, sometimes that litigation involves lawsuits by candidates or public officials seeking to learn the identity of those anonymous sources. In many states, newspapers and other media can protect such...
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