HIPAA and transparency

For all you legal eagles, When agencies hide public records behind HIPAA, the diagnosis is “brain death” (or “Chronic Liar’s Disease”):

Many news stories require reporting on the injuries and ailments of public figures, and the public has a clear interest in — and entitlement to — information about stories that implicate the health of campus newsmakers.

And yet, whether through ignorance or deliberate obstructionism, government agencies continue to cite HIPAA, the federal health privacy law, to withhold or heavily edit public records in situations where HIPAA plainly does not apply.

[...]

When a request for public records is met by a claim of HIPAA confidentiality, a journalist’s first assumption should be that the explanation is bogus. “Show me where in the law it says that,” is an excellent response to this and to many other half-baked rationalizations for dishonoring information requests.

Do check it out.

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.

Pinterest and copyright

One of the hottest new digital startups is finding itself in a curious discussion about modern copyright issues. How does Pinterest behave with respect to copyright law? The implications impact both the company and their individual users, you. The Verge has more:

Pinterest is designed, top to bottom, to make copies of photos on the internet. That’s a crucial difference from other sites that rely on users to post content: YouTube and Tumblr and Facebook all generally operate under the assumption that the majority of posted content is the user’s own, not someone else’s. Compare that to Pinterest, which presents as its primary interface a toolbar bookmarklet that rips all the images from any web page you’re on.

The comments to that piece may be of interest to those curious about media law.

Free FOI

David Cuillier has five ways you can brush up on FOI over at SPJ, some of which you can enjoy from the comfort of your computer screen.

What is a journalist?

Alicia Colon takes a look at some of the nuance stemming from the Crystal Cox trial:

In the past, many famous and well-respected journalists had no formal training but honed their craft on the job, in many cases beginning their careers as copy boys/copy girls. Walter Cronkite, once cited as the most trusted man in America, was a college dropout who had a series of newspaper jobs reporting news and sports. Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley started their careers as broadcast journalists but never had journalism degrees. Dan Rather did receive a degree in journalism, and we can see how well that turned out once he decided to switch to advocacy journalism instead of the traditional who, what, when, where and how protocol of traditional journalism.

Advocacy journalism intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint for either a political or social agenda and has morphed today into nothing less than media bias and propaganda. Today the mainstream media is predominantly composed of liberal democrats, and this bias has been quite evident since the 2008 presidential race. There is also a marked difference between opinion and reportage journalism.

I have a hard time claiming to be a member of the fourth estate, although I have been writing for newspapers since 1998 as an op-ed columnist. During that time, however, I have covered news events and press conferences and submitted non-opinion articles. I never attended Journalism College, nor have I even taken one writing course. I had to drop out of college to support my mother who had had a stroke. Mark Steyn, who is a brilliant writer, never attended college at all but can write reams around many inhabiting the elitist realm of the New York Times.

Read the whole thing for an interesting point of view.