Righthaven fails, online community rejoices

The Electronic Frontier Foundation passes on news from Nevada that will ripple throughout the land:

(T)he federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits.

The judgment – part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven – found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper’s website.

Judge Roger Hunt’s judgment confirms that an online forum is not liable for its users’ posts, even if it was not protected by the safe harbors of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice and takedown provisions. The decision also clarifies that a common practice on the Internet – excerpting a few sentences and linking to interesting articles elsewhere – is a fair use, not an infringement of copyright.

The EFF piece gets a bit windy and partisan, but it is worth a read for legal eagles.

LoMonte on the Ward ruling

Student Press Law Center’s Frank LoMonte has a must read on the most recent free speech court ruling. The three-member judiciary, LoMonte says, “swerved unnecessarily, and sideswiped much of the First Amendment protection that college students thought they enjoyed.”

Ward repudiates any notion college attorneys may have had that, once speech is classified as Hazelwood speech, that means the college automatically wins and the student automatically loses. We now know better, conclusively so.

Ward stands for the proposition that, if the student can prove an impermissible motive, then the student will prevail even under the censorship-friendly Hazelwood standard. And once a student has raised the inference of an improper motive, it is for a jury to sort out. (In Ward‘s case, it was decisive that the college imposed punishment under what appeared to be made-up-on-the-spot standards.)

If the takeaway from Ward is that colleges cannot expect to summarily dispose of their students’ constitutional claims where the motivation for discipline is in doubt, and where the documentation of a legitimate motive is thin, that is not so bad of a lesson.

The First Amendment and lies

Eugene Volokh walks you through the latest on the First Amendment and Supreme Court challenges. This one has to do with the Stolen Valor Act, which is now coming before the Justices.

(T)he Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Stolen Valor Act case (United States v. Alvarez), and in the process decide the scope of First Amendment protection for knowingly false statements of fact … Among other things, the decision could affect whether state laws banning knowing lies in election campaigns are unconstitutional, a matter on which lower courts are split …

When are knowingly false statements of fact constitutionally unprotected? That’s the issue raised by the Stolen Valor Act ligitation, in which the question is whether Congress may ban people from lying about their having gotten certain military declarations.

First Amendment, investigative reporting, easy infographic and more

I don’t try to add to what Frank LoMonte writes at SPLC, because it is great, thorough and an even handed analysis by a First Amendment expert. I do commend you his piece on the unfunny joke of the disappearing rights of student journalists. One of these cases stems from a university in Alabama:

In Case 1, graduate student Judith Heenan complained on multiple occasions about the unfairness of the grading and disciplinary systems in her nursing program. In response, she alleged, college officials retaliated by issuing her unwarranted disciplinary “strikes” and then ultimately expelling her from the school.

[...]

Judge Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama was uninterested in letting Heenan’s case go as far as a trial, and summarily dismissed all of the student’s claims. The judge simply assumed that Heenan was lying, under oath, about her disciplinary strikes being undeserved and retaliatory.

Read the whole article.

The newest brain tickler, via ONA:

”’What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page‘ is a 10-day collaborative effort not only to fill the walls with the Web sites, photos, videos, multimedia pieces, drawings and articles that our guests and visitors recommend, but also to explain why this material is important.

Ten years after the attacks of Sept. 11, we thought we would propose newer ways of knowing, relying on insider perspectives as well as the foreign eyewitnesses who make up much of the conventional press.

Follow the links. You can participate in this panel discussion, thought project from the comfort of your computer.

Tips on investigative reporting, follow the trail says Drew Sullivan:

And, finally, an easy visualization of the series of recent Texas wildfires.

Find the size, draw a radius and drop it over a Google Map. You’ll be amazed at how this changes your reader’s (and your) perspective on the story.