Archive for the ‘Media Law’ Category

The Hardest Thing to Predict Is the Future

posted by Derek Bambauer

SOPA and PROTECT IP are dead… for now. (They’ll be back. COICA is like a wraith inhabiting PROTECT IP.) Until then, Michelle Schusterman has a terrific graphic about the movie industry’s predictions of doom with each new technological revolution. (Ditto the music industry: the player piano, radio, CDs, the MP3 player, etc., etc.) One reason for this is that it’s difficult to predict the effects of a new communications technology. People thought we’d use the telephone to listen to concerts from afar. But another reason is that content industries see advances not as an opportunity but as a threat – a threat that they deploy IP law to combat, or at least control. And in a policy space where lawmakers don’t demand actual data on threats before acting, trumped-up assertions of job loss and revenue loss can carry the day. This puts the lie to the theory that IP owners will move to exploit new communications media, if only they are protected against infringement. We didn’t get viable Internet-based music sales until iTunes in 2003, and Spotify is the first serious streaming app (the “celestial jukebox“). Think about prior efforts like Pressplay and MusicNow, and how terrible they were. Letting the content industry design delivery models is like letting Matt Millen draft your football team.

This is why piracy is a helpful pointer: it tells us what channels consumers want to use to access content. Sometimes this is just displacement of lawful consumption, as when college students with copious disposable income download songs via BitTorrent, but sometimes it indicates an unaddressed market niche (as with me and the baseball playoffs). To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, I think a little bit of infringement now and again is a good thing. It is only when there is a viable threat in a new medium that existing players innovate – or cut deals with those who do. In that regard, even if SOPA and PROTECT IP are effective at reducing infringement, we might not want them.

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

  January 31, 2012 at 6:58 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Culture, Cyberlaw, DRM, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   2 Comments

Censorship on the March

posted by Derek Bambauer

Today, you can’t get to The Oatmeal, or Dinosaur Comics, or XKCD, or (less importantly) Wikipedia. The sites have gone dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, America’s attempt to censor the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. This is part of a remarkable, distributed, coordinated protest effort, both online and in realspace (I saw my colleague and friend Jonathan Askin headed to protest outside the offices of Senators Charles Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand). Many of the protesters argue that America is headed in the direction of authoritarian states such as China, Iran, and Bahrain in censoring the Net. The problem, though, is that America is not alone: most Western democracies are censoring the Internet. Britain does it for child pornography. France: hate speech. The EU is debating a proposal to allow “flagging” of objectionable content for ISPs to ban. Australia’s ISPs are engaging in pre-emptive censorship to prevent even worse legislation from passing. India wants Facebook, Google, and other online platforms to remove any content the government finds problematic.

Censorship is on the march, in democracies as well as dictatorships. With this movement we see, finally, the death of the American myth of free speech exceptionalism. We have viewed ourselves as qualitatively different – as defenders of unfettered expression. We are not. Even without SOPA and PROTECT IP, we are seizing domain names, filtering municipal wi-fi, and using funding to leverage colleges and universities to filter P2P. The reasons for American Internet censorship differ from those of France, South Korea, or China. The mechanism of restriction does not. It is time for us to be honest: America, too, censors. I think we can, and should, defend the legitimacy of our restrictions – the fight on-line and in Congress and in the media shows how we differ from China – but we need to stop pretending there is an easy line to be drawn between blocking human rights sites and blocking Rojadirecta or Dajaz1.

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

  January 18, 2012 at 5:31 pm   Posted in: Advertising, Architecture, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0, Wiki   Print This Post   No Comments

Supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act Protest Day

posted by Danielle Citron

As my co-blogger Gerard notes, today is SOPA protest day.  Sites like Google or WordPress have censored their logo or offered up a away to contact your congressperson, though remain live.  Other sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Craigslist have shutdown, and more are set to shut down at some point today.  There’s lots of terrific commentary on SOPA, which is designed to tackle the problem of foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music, and other products–but with a heavy hand that threatens free expression and due process. The Wall Street Journal’s Amy Schatz has this story and Politico has another helpful piece; The Hill’s Brendan Sasso’s Twitter feed has lots of terrific updates.  Mark Lemley, David Levine, and David Post carefully explain why we ought to reject SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act in “Don’t Break the Internet” published by Stanford Law Review Online.  In the face of the protest, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) vowed to bring SOPA to a vote in his committee next month. “I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property,” he said.  So, too, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) pushed back against websites planning to shut down today in protest of his bill.  “Much of what has been claimed about the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act is flatly wrong and seems intended more to stoke fear and concern than to shed light or foster workable solutions. The PROTECT IP Act will not affect Wikipedia, will not affect reddit, and will not affect any website that has any legitimate use,” Chairman Leahy said. Everyone’s abuzz on the issue, and rightly so.  I spoke at a panel on intermediary liability at the Congressional Internet Caucus’ State of the Net conference and everyone wanted to talk about SOPA.  I’m hoping that the black out and other shows of disapproval will convince our representatives in the House and Senate to back off the most troubling parts of the bill.  As fabulous guest blogger Derek Bambauer argues, we need to bring greater care and thought to the issue of Internet censorship.  Cybersecurity is at issue too, and we need to pay attention.  Derek may be right that both bills may go nowhere, especially given Silicon Valley’s concerted lobbying efforts against the bills.  But we will have to watch to see if Representative Smith lives up to his promise to bring SOPA back to committee and if Senator Leahy remains as committed to PROTECT IP Act in a few weeks as he is today.

  January 18, 2012 at 10:11 am   Posted in: Architecture, Civil Rights, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Law Talk, Media Law, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   2 Comments

The Fight For Internet Censorship

posted by Derek Bambauer

Thanks to Danielle and the CoOp crew for having me! I’m excited.

Speaking of exciting developments, it appears that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is dead, at least for now. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said that the bill will not move forward until there is a consensus position on it, which is to say, never. Media sources credit the Obama administration’s opposition to some of the more noxious parts of SOPA, such as its DNSSEC-killing filtering provisions, and also the tech community’s efforts to raise awareness. (Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has been working overtime in reporting on SOPA; Wikipedia and Reddit are adopting a blackout to draw attention; even the New York City techies are holding a demonstration in front of the offices of Senators Kirstin Gillibrand and Charles Schumer. Schumer has been bailing water on the SOPA front after one of his staffers told a local entrepreneur that the senator supports Internet censorship. Props for candor.) I think the Obama administration’s lack of enthusiasm for the bill is important, but I suspect that a crowded legislative calendar is also playing a significant role.

Of course, the PROTECT IP Act is still floating around the Senate. It’s less worse than SOPA, in the same way that Transformers 2 is less worse than Transformers 3. (You still might want to see what else Netflix has available.) And sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy has suggested that the DNS filtering provisions of the bill be studied – after the legislation is passed. It’s much more efficient, legislatively, to regulate first and then see if it will be effective. A more cynical view is that Senator Leahy’s move is a public relations tactic designed to undercut the opposition, but no one wants to say so to his face.

I am not opposed to Internet censorship in all situations, which means I am often lonely at tech-related events. But these bills have significant flaws. They threaten to badly weaken cybersecurity, an area that is purportedly a national priority (and has been for 15 years). They claim to address a major threat to IP rightsholders despite the complete lack of data that the threat is anything other than chimerical. They provide scant procedural protections for accused infringers, and confer extraordinary power on private rightsholders – power that will, inevitably, be abused. And they reflect a significant public choice imbalance in how IP and Internet policy is made in the United States.

Surprisingly, the Obama administration has it about right: we shouldn’t reject Internet censorship as a regulatory mechanism out of hand, but we should be wary of it. This isn’t the last stage of this debate – like Wesley in The Princess Bride, SOPA-like legislation is only mostly dead. (And, if you don’t like the Obama administration’s position today, just wait a day or two.)

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

  January 16, 2012 at 7:28 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   One Comment

The New Spectrum Scarcity

posted by Olivier Sylvain

At first glance, President Obama’s proposed American Jobs Act was an unlikely place to find significant reforms to the laws governing the allocation of prized electromagnetic spectrum licenses. Since the 1990s, however, FCC-administered auctions have been a major source of revenue for the U.S. Treasury, generating billions of dollars for the exclusive license to commercialize coveted bands of the spectrum. Just a couple years ago, for example, the 700 MHz band once occupied by the major broadcasters generated a total of almost $20 billion in successful bids from the likes of AT&T and Verizon.

So, as the mood for fiscal austerity haunts the halls of Congress these days, it makes sense to expect spectrum auction policy to make an appearance in the Jobs Act.  As presented to Congress, Obama’s jobs law would commit a meaningful portion of an expected $28 billion or so of revenue from spectrum auctions to help pay down the U.S. deficit. The so-called “incentive auctions” would be for a band in the spectrum jealously controlled by major broadcasters today. The broadcasters would get a piece of the expected $28 billion for the trouble of participating. Another portion would be devoted to the development and operation of a national wireless public safety network. The remainder would go to reducing the debt or closing budget deficits. A relatively small contribution to the cause, but a contribution nevertheless.

The auctioning of rights to the spectrum, however, is not just meant to plug holes in the federal budget. The incentive auctions in the jobs bill are meant to partially redress one of the more pressing problems in telecommunications law and policy today: spectrum scarcity in the face of booming demand for high-bandwidth wireless services, smartphones, and tablets. For someone who spent years pondering the problem of scarcity in the first law to regulate the commercial use of the spectrum, these developments beg the question: How did scarcity resurface so seamlessly after about two decades of being poopoo’ed as the chief reason for spectrum regulation?

Read the rest of this post »

  September 16, 2011 at 2:08 pm   Posted in: Current Events, Media Law, Technology   Print This Post   2 Comments

Hot Summer Flashes, Black Urban Mobs

posted by Olivier Sylvain

  September 5, 2011 at 11:52 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, First Amendment, Media Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Race, Social Network Websites, Sociology of Law, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   8 Comments

Behind the Filter Bubble: Hidden Maps of the Internet

posted by Frank Pasquale

A small corner of the world of search took another step toward personalization today, as Bing moved to give users the option to personalize their results by drawing on data from their Facebook friends:

Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This “Friend Effect” is apparent in most of our decisions and often outweighs other facts because people feel more confident, smarter and safer with the wisdom of their trusted circle.

Today, Bing is bringing the collective IQ of the Web together with the opinions of the people you trust most, to bring the “Friend Effect” to search. Starting today, you can receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook. New features make it easier to see what your Facebook friends “like” across the Web, incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches.

The announcement almost perfectly coincides with the release of Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble, which argues that “as web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview.” I have earlier worried about both excessive personalization and integration of layers of the web (such as social and search, or carrier and device). I think Microsoft may be reaching for one of very few strategies available to challenge Google’s dominance in search. But I also fear that this is one more example of the “filter bubble” Pariser worries about.
Read the rest of this post »

  May 16, 2011 at 7:03 pm   Posted in: Anonymity, Google & Search Engines, Media Law, Privacy, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

UCLA Law Review Vol. 58, Issue 4 (April 2011)

posted by UCLA Law Review

Volume 58, Issue 4 (April 2011)

Articles

Digital Exhaustion	Aaron Perzanowski & Jason Schultz	889
Fixing Inconsistent Paternalism Under Federal Employment Discrimination Law	Craig Robert Senn	947
Awakening the Press Clause	Sonja R. West	1025

Comments

Still Fair After All These Years? How Claim Preclusion and Issue Preclusion Should Be Modified in Cases of Copyright’s Fair Use Doctrine	Karen L. Jones	1071
Patenting Everything Under the Sun: Invoking the First Amendment to Limit the Use of Gene Patents	Krysta Kauble	1123

  April 27, 2011 at 12:00 pm   Posted in: Amazon, Employment Law, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Law Rev (UCLA), Media Law   Print This Post   No Comments

A Few Preliminary Thoughts on Snyder v. Phelps

posted by Neil Richards

This morning the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Snyder v. Phelps, No. 09-751, holding that a military funeral protest by the Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church was protected by the First Amendment, and did not give rise to civil liability under the state law torts of intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED), invasion of privacy, or civil conspiracy.  The case has generated a lot of media attention, in part because it offered a chance to see whether the Roberts Court would continue its trend of retaining or expanding strong First Amendment protections.  (In United States v. Stevens 130 S.Ct. 1577 (2010), which I blogged about here last year, the Court claimed fidelity to the existing structures of First Amendment law, even though it seems to have expanded corporate speech protections in Citizens United 130 S.Ct. 876 (2010), and cut back on incitement doctrine in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 130 S.Ct. 2705 (2010)).  Snyder v. Phelps is also notable because the defendant, Fred Phelps, is possibly the most unappealing First Amendment claimant that has made it to the Supreme Court.  In an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court upheld the funeral protest, essentially holding that speech on matters of public concern made peaceably in a public space receives protection even if it causes significant psychological and emotional harm.  As the Chief Justice concluded:

Speech is powerful.  It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain.  On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.   As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to  ensure that we do not stifle public debate.  That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

There is a lot to say about this important decision, but a few preliminary observations struck me as especially interesting.  First, the holding in the case seems to be correct, at least as a matter of fidelity to existing First Amendment precedent.  In Falwell v. Flynt, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), the Court held that IIED suits by public figures had to satisfy the protective actual malice standard of New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), continuing the trend of First Amendment cases protecting speech on matters of public concern even if they caused emotional injury.  Some observers thought that Snyder was a chance for the Court to halt the trend, since Snyder, the plaintiff in this case, was merely the father of an ordinary soldier killed while serving in Iraq and not a public figure.  What’s interesting about today’s opinion is that the Court sidestepped this question entirely, holding that the nature of the speech was a matter of public concern and thus protected.  The Court held that the Church’s rather distasteful message – that God hates America and is punishing it for its tolerance of homosexuality, particularly in the armed forces – was principally a commentary on public affairs rather than a private act of harassment against the Snyder family.  Again, this is consistent with the broad theme of modern First Amendment law that speech on matters of public concern (especially politics) is entitled to very strong protection, and cannot be regulated or made the subject of civil liability even when (like this speech) it is both offensive to many and causes significant harm.

The second aspect of this case that’s notable is what it says about tort liability and free speech.  Dan Solove and I have argued (here) that torts are most threatening to the First Amendment when they allow the state to control the content of public debate.  Snyder is certainly consistent with that theory, and it seems to all but rule out liability for IIED when the speech at issue is about a matter of public concern.  The Court also ruled that the invasion of privacy (intrusion upon seclusion) claim for funeral disruption violated the First Amendment because the speech was protected, and the captive audience doctrine did not save Snyder’s claim.  The invasion of privacy claim is odd, because it seems that the district court in this case mis-applied Maryland law.  Although the intrusion upon seclusion tort would be violated (and probably could to impose liability constitutionally) if a protestor disrupted a funeral by entering a church or menacing a gravesite, those facts weren’t present here.  (In fact, the concurrence by Judge Shedd at the Fourth Circuit level made exactly this point, but the point wasn’t preserved on appeal).  So in reality, the invasion of privacy claim boils down to something like “you hurt my feelings when you picketed the funeral from a public place”; in other words, a classic IIED claim.

There are thus lots of questions about the relationship between tort liability and free speech that the Court refused to decide and remain open.  For instance, the Court tells us that speech on “matters of public concern” is protected, which it defines as “a subject of general interest and of value and concern to the public.”  But it doesn’t define private speech, so we don’t really know how broad the “public speech” category is.  Presumably, because the Court uses a kind of “enquiring minds want to know” standard, it’s a rather broad category, but it’s hard to be sure from this opinion.  The Court does hint in a couple of places that personally directed harassment, speech to a small number of people, and the publication of someone else’s sex tape would be “private speech” and more readily amenable to regulation based on their content.  In addition, the Court refused to rule on a second IIED claim, one arising from a post on the Church’s website that described the funeral protest in detail.  The court noted only that “an Internet posting may raise distinct issues in this context,” and declined to rule on the question.  This allows the possibility that the Court could create a separate category of cyber-harassment, though given the overall tenor of the opinion, I think this possibility is unlikely to occur in practice.  It is interesting to see the Court treading warily in the Internet speech context, however.

The third notable aspect of this case is Justice Alito’s dissent.  Last year in Stevens, he dissented from the Court’s protection of animal cruelty videos, apparently on the ground that certain images are so horrible that society can regulate them.  Today, he also seemed outraged by the emotionally harmful nature of the Church’s protest, and would have allowed the state to regulate the protest by holding that the tort actions weren’t protected by the First Amendment.  Alito seems willing to approve a per se rule that funerals call for special sensitivity and special protection against “emotional assaults.”  But reading this opinion together with his Stevens dissent, it appears that Justice Alito is the most willing member of the current Court to allow regulation of speech based upon its morally objectionable nature or its emotionally harmful content.  It will be interesting to see how he rules the next time the Court hears a hate speech case, if only to test his fidelity to this principle.  If his vote in that future case is consistent with his vote today, Justice Alito may be the best friend of anyone who seeks a broader protection against hate speech and other words that wound.

Finally, although the case is something of a victory for orthodox free speech theory, there is one note of concern for free speech advocates, which is the opinion’s toleration of “free speech zone” theory.  The opinion notes with approval that the funeral protest took place from a free speech zone from behind a protective fence, and notes at the end that even though Phelps’ speech was protected, it would certainly be amenable to possibly aggressive time, place, and manner restriction.  If, as Tim Zick suggests in his excellent recent book Speech Out of Doors, spatial tactics have become the new frontier of free speech protection, Snyder v. Phelps possibly moves us even further in that direction, for all of its protection of the funeral protest at issue.  So the real message to states from Snyder v. Phelps might be not that lots of speech is protected, but as a blueprint for ways to regulate lots of speech in the future.

  March 2, 2011 at 6:06 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Courts, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, First Amendment, Media Law, Privacy, Supreme Court   Print This Post   6 Comments

The Intellectual Property Implications of Marketing a Fictional Product

posted by Danielle Citron

Every year, law students face exams with characters and products ripped from popular television, movies, and YouTube videos (a wiser course than building a torts or crime problem around your colleagues, see Orin Kerr’s post here).  What is true for the goose is no doubt true for the gander: many may want to buy fictional products from popular culture.  For instance, Omni Consumer Products Corporation, a “defictionalizing” company, licenses real-world versions of popular fictional products like “Sex Panther,” the fictional cologne from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

An interesting question raised by law student Ben Arrow’s Note Real-Life Protection for Fictional Trademarks (which has garnered lots of attention, see here, here, and here) is whether a use in fiction constitutes a “use in commerce” sufficient to reserve priority rights in a trademark.  Two cases have addressed real-life protection for fictional trademarks: Daily Planet from S.D.N.Y. and Duff Beer from Australia.  Arrow explains that the courts, finding real-life trademark infringements, hand-waived on the priority analysis.  For instance, in Duff Beer, the court assumed that Duff Beer had used the mark (presumably because it is famous and thought the breweries were free riding on, well, something).  But Duff Brewery never sold anything in commerce, because it isn’t real (that is at least true if you buy the fact that Homer Simpson isn’t really drinking anything).  So maybe Duff Beer is not a trademark for anything.  A real-world Duff Beer might not be an infringement after all; you can’t infringe a non-trademark.

  February 25, 2011 at 8:29 am   Posted in: Intellectual Property, Media Law   Print This Post   6 Comments

Ammori on Assange, Free Speech, and Wikileaks

posted by Danielle Citron

At Balkanization, Professor Marvin Ammori has a thoughtful post on the Wikileaks story.  Professor Ammori, who will be guest blogging with us soon, gave me the thumbs up on reproducing his post.  Hopefully, it will spark some interesting discussion on CoOp.  Here is Ammori’s post:

Many of our nation’s landmark free speech decisions are not about heroes–several are about flag-burners, racists, Klansmen, and those with political views outside the mainstream. And yet we measure our commitment to freedom of speech, in part, by our willingness to protect even their rights despite disagreement with what they say, and why they say it.

The story of Wikileaks publishing U.S. diplomatic cables has become the story of Julian Assange: is he a hero or villain, a high-tech terrorist or enemy combatant? Should the U.S., which may have already empanelled a grand jury in Virginia, prosecute him as a criminal under the Espionage Act of 1917 or under the computer fraud and abuse act?

Though I have spent years advocating for Internet freedom, I don’t think Assange is a hero for leaking these diplomatic cables.  According to plausible reports, the leaks have harmed U.S. interests, made the work of U.S. diplomats more difficult, likely endangered lives of allies, and may have set back democracy in Zimbabwe and perhaps elsewhere.  Even some of Assange’s friends at Wikileaks are doubting Assange’s heroism: a few left him to launch a rival site and to write a tell-all book.  Whatever the harms of secrecy and over-classification, Assange’s actions have caused tremendous damage.  No wonder polls show nearly 60% of Americans believe the U.S. should arrest Assange and charge him with a crime.

My initial reaction was similar.  I thought that if a case could be made against Assange, one should be made.

But, as time passed, the political and legal downsides of prosecution came into clearer focus, and I am rethinking that initial reaction.  Despite still believing Assange’s actions have been harmful, I have now come to the opposite conclusion—not for the benefit of Assange, but for the benefit of Americans and of the United States.

Prosecuting Assange could do more harm than good for our freedom of the press and would inflict further harm on diplomatic effectiveness.  Despite the appeal of prosecuting Assange, it is not worth the cost.  We will not get the cables back.  We will not deter aspiring Wikileakers, as both our allies and our enemies know.  We will, as Dean Geoffrey Stone has best articulated, likely sacrifice established principles of freedom of the press in doing so.

Here are some thoughts on why we should think twice about prosecuting Assange, categorized by harms to the U.S.’s freedom of the press and then harms to America’s diplomatic effectiveness. And, in advance, I thank the many scholars, policy experts, and friends who took the time to give me thoughts on earlier drafts of this post. Read the rest of this post »

  January 4, 2011 at 1:59 pm   Posted in: Anonymity, Current Events, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Media Law, Technology, Web 2.0, Wiki   Print This Post   One Comment

The Master Switch

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I am reading Tim Wu’s terrific new book on how information industries oscillate between decentralized and consolidated business models and the role that regulatory policy plays in that cycle.  I highly recommend that you pick this up, and hope to organize an online symposium about this important book here on CoOp sometime soon.

There is something that bothers me about Tim’s analysis (or, at least, raises a question). There is no doubt that he is a fan of as much openness as possible, as demonstrated by his support for net neutrality.  More or less, the bad guys in his story are monopolists (AT&T, RCA, Paramount) and the heroes are the rebels who fought them.  In general, I agree with this narrative.  As someone old enough to remember the Bell system, you weren’t missing anything.  But I’m hesitant to embrace this openness norm completely.

The toughest case is the studio system for movies.  The flaws of that vertically integrated oligopoly are not hard to describe.   Actors were bound by long-term contracts that denied them the fruits of their labor (much like baseball players before free agency).  Censorship was pervasive, as Tim correctly points out.  And yet . . .

People still refer to this time as Hollywood’s Golden Age.  Now I concede that movie tastes are not uniformly shared, but if you ask most people when better movies were made, would they say 2010 or 1939?  (OK, that’s not an entirely fair comparison.  1939 was the best year of the studio system, and movies did not have the kind of competition then that they get now.) The point is that the studio system produced outstanding art.  As a result, the issue of how regulatory policy should work (or stay its hand) for information industries is not so simple.

  November 8, 2010 at 6:29 pm   Posted in: Media Law   Print This Post   3 Comments

Chatroulette, Julia Child, and the Virtues of Virtual Friendship

posted by Glenn Cohen

A Hispanic teenager listening to music through headphones, a masturbating man, 3 young caucasian women (probably American), two young middle eastern men dressed in army fatigues and a child with a kafiah covering his face shouting something in Arabic and smiling, another masturbating man, 3 japanese young women.

This was what I saw in ten minutes of Chatroulette, an intriguing web site that anyone with a webcam can try. I wanted to try it and blog about it after reading an interesting article in the New Yorker on its teenage Russian founder. You turn on your webcam and are randomly paired with someone else on the site with their webcam on, to whom you can chat vocally or by typing. Either party can push a button that spins the wheel again at any time to be connected with a new partner, and there is no penalty for doing so.

Perhaps 31-year-old law professors are not the favored species in this realm, but I was “nexted” almost immediately in each of the cases except the middle eastern men at whom I started laughing and they laughed back as well. At some point, though, I felt uncomfortable enough myself that I ended the interaction.

Chatroulette is only the newest and strangest instantiation of a phenomenon I’ve been thinking about – virtual friendship. Can one be friends with someone that one has never met, and what kinds of benefits do this form of friendship offer over or to compliment non-virtual friendship? In recently watching Julie and Julia, I was struck by a scene where Julia meets up with the woman, Avis, she has been writing throughout the film.  We discover that the two women have never actually met in person despite being extremely close; they have just been pen pals for years.

The disadvantages of virtual friendship are pretty straightforward, but what might the advantages be? Total honesty if it retains an air of anonymity or removal from one’s social circle? The ability to compose oneself (like a piece of music), that is present a very specific slice of oneself? Many people I’ve talked to of a certain age (usually under 35, those who have had socializing technologies for some period of their youth) have had a virtual friend or two at some point.  These relationships, however, do not seem very long-lived, certainly not like the decade long correspondence of Avid and Julia. Is that just because our social circles are thicker or there is more competing stimuli than in earlier periods?

To add a legal angle on chatroulette, after seeing Robin Wilson present her paper on Sex Play In Virtual Worlds at a conference this summer, I wondered whether the masturbating men on the site might be subject to criminal liability in some jurisdictions if some of their viewers turned out to be children.  Robin (she’ll correct me if I have this wrong) was of the view that on Second Life or other virtual environments that don’t even involve actual images of actual people, under existing doctrine in some states adults can be criminally liable for sexually suggestive remarks and virtual activities.  Under existing doctrine this is true even if those minors represent themselves as adults, the perpetrator has a good faith belief they are adults, and even if the service has an 18+ policy (even if enforced by something like requiring a credit card).  If that’s right, the comparably less virtual and less regulated domain of chatroulette would seem to be full of potential criminal liability.  I am neither a criminal law nor a cyberlaw scholar so I will be curious what those with more expertise think….

  September 3, 2010 at 9:06 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Criminal Law, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Law and Humanities, Media Law, Technology, Web 2.0, Weird   Print This Post   4 Comments

Introducing Symposium on Deborah Hellman’s “Money Talks, But It Isn’t Speech”

posted by Frank Pasquale

It’s an honor to introduce Deborah Hellman and the participants in this cyber-symposium. In the wake of the sweeping Citizens United decision, Hellman has returned to first principles in her article “Money Talks, But It Isn’t Speech.” Justice Kennedy based the majority opinion in Citizens United on the assumption that spending and speech are interchangeable. But what if this equivalence does not hold? Might a future Court declare Citizens United “not well reasoned” because it “puts us on a course that is sure error” (to borrow Kennedy’s characterizations of the precedents that Citizens United overruled)?

A vibrant conservative legal movement has seized the mantle of “popular constitutionalism” to demand that courts reinterpret key constitutional provisions in order to reflect popular opposition to some provisions in the recently passed health reform legislation. But Citizens’ United has proven far less popular than health reform; “the court’s ruling is opposed, respectively, by 76, 81 and 85 percent of Republicans, independents and Democrats,” and by 80% of the nation as a whole. Though I was ready to give up on campaign finance regulation three years ago, numbers like these convince me that the Court needs to listen to scholarship like Hellman’s now more than ever.

At least some justices have shown remorse for deregulatory dogmatism. Might the Court back down from its current war on campaign regulation? If it is so inclined, will arguments like Hellman’s help it “see the light” and reclaim the egalitarian roots of democratic governance? To consider these and other issues raised by Hellman’s rigorous and illuminating paper, we’ve invited an all-star cast of legal thinkers:

Erwin Chemerinsky
Louis Michael Seidman
Lawrence Solum
Zephyr Teachout

Some of our regular crew of perma-bloggers & guests will likely have some contributions, as well. Whatever you think of campaign finance reform, I’m confident you’ll find both Hellman’s article and our guests’ commentaries to be bold and invigorating contributions to legal theory.

Photo Credit: Rob Lee/Flickr, Money Shirt.

  May 2, 2010 at 11:41 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Current Events, First Amendment, Jurisprudence, Law and Inequality, Legal Theory, Media Law, Politics, Symposium (Money Talks), Uncategorized   Print This Post   5 Comments

Snyder v. Phelps: Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress and the First Amendment

posted by Daniel Solove

In a previous post, I analyzed the intrusion upon seclusion claim in Snyder v. Phelps, 580 F.3d 206 (4th Cir. 2009), a case where the Supreme Court recently granted certiorari.

Snyder involves tort claims against Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, and others arising out of the practice of Church members to picket the funerals of U.S. soldiers.  Church members held a protest near the funeral of Albert Snyder’s son, who was killed in Iraq.  The Church preached anti-gay messages, protesting funerals of dead soldiers as a way to illustrate God’s hatred of America for tolerating homosexuality.  Some signs said: “God Hates the USA,” “Fag troops,” and “Thank God for dead soldiers.”  A jury found for Snyder, awarding him millions of dollars in damages.  The Fourth Circuit reversed on First Amendment grounds.  Snyder v. Phelps, 580 F.3d 206 (4th Cir. 2009).

In this post, I’ll analyze the intentional infliction of emotional distress issues.  The tort provides:

One who by extreme and outrageous conduct intentionally or recklessly causes severe emotional distress to another is subject to liability for such emotional distress, and if bodily harm to the other results from it, for such bodily harm.

Restatement (2nd) of Torts, Sec. 46.

Here are the questions being considered by the Supreme Court:

1. Does Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell apply to a private person versus another private person concerning a private matter?

2. Does the First Amendment’s freedom of speech tenet trump the First Amendment’s freedom of religion and peaceful assembly?

3. Does an individual attending a family member’s funeral constitute a captive audience who is entitled to state protection from unwanted communication?

I’ll address each in turn.

1. Does Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell apply to a private person versus another private person concerning a private matter?

Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 86 (1988) involved a parody ad consisting of a fake interview between the Reverend Jerry Falwell and his mother, suggesting he had sex with his mother.  He won a jury verdict for intentional infliction of emotional distress.  The Supreme Court held that the First Amendment barred liability unless Falwell (a public figure) proved actual malice:

We conclude that public figures and public officials may not recover for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress by reason of publications such as the one here at issue without showing in addition that the publication contains a false statement of fact which was made with “actual malice,” i. e., with knowledge that the statement was false or with reckless disregard as to whether or not it was true.

In Snyder v. Phelps, the district court had applied the standard in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974), which provides an exception to the actual malice standard for “private figures.”  But the Fourth Circuit reasoned that Phelps’s speech involved a matter of public concern and wasn’t directed specifically at Snyder.  Whether Snyder was a public or private figure was irrelevant.

Read the rest of this post »

  March 16, 2010 at 3:04 pm   Posted in: First Amendment, Media Law, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming)   Print This Post   9 Comments

Snyder v. Phelps: Funeral Picketing, the First Amendment, and the Intrusion Upon Seclusion Tort

posted by Daniel Solove

The Supreme Court had granted certiorari on Snyder v. Phelps, 580 F.3d 206 (4th Cir. 2009), a First Amendment case involving some privacy law issues.   The Supreme Court seems quite interested in privacy law of late, having recently granted cert. in NASA v. Nelson, a case involving the constitutional right to information privacy.

Snyder involves tort claims against Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, and others arising out of the practice of Church members to picket the funerals of U.S. soldiers.  Church members held a protest near the funeral of Albert Snyder’s son, who was killed in Iraq.  A jury found the defendants liable and awarded $2.9 million in damages as well as $8 million in punitive damages.  The total damages were reduced by the court to $5 million.

The Church preached anti-gay messages, protesting funerals of dead soldiers as a way to illustrate God’s hatred of America for tolerating homosexuality.  Some signs said: “God Hates the USA,” “Fag troops,” and “Thank God for dead soldiers.”

Snyder prevailed on at least two tort claims of relevance to privacy law: (1) intentional infliction of emotional distress; and (2) intrusion upon seclusion.

The Fourth Circuit reversed on First Amendment grounds.  Snyder v. Phelps, 580 F.3d 206 (4th Cir. 2009).

In this post, I’ll focus on the intrusion upon seclusion tort.  I’m not clear on the basis for the intrusion upon seclusion claim. The tort provides:

One who intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns, is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy, if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.

Restatement (Second) of Torts 652B.

Generally, intrusion doesn’t involve speech.  It involves invasive actions — snooping, surveillance, trespassing.

Where was the intrusion in this case?

The protest occurred more than 1000 feet away from the funeral and wasn’t seen by the funeral attendees.  It is not clear that there was any disruption of the funeral.

Had the protesters invaded the funeral or disrupted it with noise, then this might constitute an intrusion upon seclusion.  But speaking about an event, even nearby, isn’t an intrusion unless it somehow invades or disrupts privacy.  The facts supplied in Snyder’s cert. petition point out police resources being used to promote safety at the protest and how a nearby school was affected.  But what is notably missing are facts alleging how the protest invaded the funeral itself.

I would like to know precisely what facts establish the intrusion upon seclusion claim.  Without facts to establish an intrusion upon seclusion, this claim should have been dismissed because the elements of the tort weren’t met.  This isn’t a First Amendment issue — it involves whether the requirements of the tort are met.  Based on the facts I’m aware of, I don’t see a cognizable legal claim for intrusion upon seclusion.

Click here for my analysis of the intentional infliction of emotional distress claim.

  March 16, 2010 at 10:58 am   Posted in: First Amendment, Media Law, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Tort Law   Print This Post   10 Comments

William Prosser and the Privacy Torts

posted by Daniel Solove

I recently posted on SSRN a draft of my forthcoming article (with Professor Neil M. Richards of Washington University School of Law).  The piece is called Prosser’s Privacy Law: A Mixed Legacy, 98 California Law Review __ (forthcoming 2010).  It was written as part of a symposium “Prosser’s Privacy at 50.”

By way of background for those readers not familiar with William Prosser, he was the leading torts scholar of his generation — the undisputed king of the subject throughout the middle of the twentieth century.  And he played a profound role in shaping the privacy torts — four causes of action recognized by most states today.  His article, Privacy, 48 Cal. L. Rev. 383 (1960), still stands as one of the most influential articles in privacy law.

For this symposium, Neil and I examined Prosser’s influence and concluded that his legacy was mixed.  Here’s the abstract of our paper:

This article examines the complex ways in which William Prosser shaped the development of the American law of tort privacy. Although Prosser certainly gave tort privacy an order and legitimacy that it had previously lacked, he also stunted its development in ways that limited its ability to adapt to the problems of the Information Age. His skepticism about privacy, as well as his view that tort privacy lacked conceptual coherence, led him to categorize the law into a set of four narrow categories and strip it of any guiding concept to shape its future development. Prosser’s legacy for tort privacy law is thus a mixed one: He greatly increased the law’s stature at the cost of making it less able to adapt to new circumstances in the future. If tort privacy is to remain vital in the future, it must move beyond Prosser’s conception.

Comments are welcome.

  March 15, 2010 at 5:35 am   Posted in: Articles and Books, First Amendment, History of Law, Jurisprudence, Media Law, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Tort Law   Print This Post   No Comments

A “Content Loss Ratio” for Cable Companies?

posted by Frank Pasquale

I’ve been following the debate over ala carte cable TV pricing, and the recent Fox/Time Warner showdown has put it back in the news. Brian Stelter’s NYT article on the topic reveals some interesting revenue figures in the cable industry:
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  January 4, 2010 at 7:23 pm   Posted in: Consumer Protection Law, Culture, Cyberlaw, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Media Law, Technology   Print This Post   One Comment

The Tort of Privacy’s Racist Past

posted by Danielle Citron

As New York Times v. Sullivan made clear, defamation has a bigoted past.  There, Montgomery, Alabama’s police commissioner brought a defamation suit against The New York Times after it published an advertisement, “Heed Their Rising Voices,” which suggested law enforcement’s interference with civil rights protests.  Sullivan based his defamation suit on this premise: accusations of racism hurt my reputation in Montgomery, Alabama.  At the time, it was a truly laughable proposition given the racial hatred so prevalent in the white community there.  No matter, Sullivan and others after him tried to use the law of defamation to silence mostly Northern papers writing about Southern bigotry and officially sanctioned violence against civil rights leaders and others.

In writing a piece entitled Mainstreaming the Tort of Privacy (forthcoming Cal. L. Rev.), I stumbled across  Afro-American Publishing v. Jaffe, 366 F.2d 649 (D.C. Cir. 1966), a case that told a Sullivan-esque story but with a privacy twist.  A white drug store owner sued the Washington Afro-American (the “Afro”), a D.C.-based, bi-weekly paper, for invasion of privacy and libel.  The plaintiff sold the Afro in his drugstore, and canceled it because the paper “spread racial hatred and distrust.”  In the October 14, 1961 edition of the Afro, the paper covered plaintiff’s cancellation of the Afro, noting that plaintiff had told Afro’s editor that his black customers had a “low level of intelligence” and were ignorant.  Plaintiff prevailed at trial on the privacy and libel claims.

The D.C. Circuit, writing en banc, recognized the common law right to privacy in the District of Columbia based on the Warren and Brandeis formulation of a person’s “right of private personality,” the “right to be let alone.”  The court noted that much like in 1890 when Warren and Brandeis wrote The Right to Privacy, the “communications explosion” and “mechanical and electronic devices for snooping” of the 1960s imperiled privacy.  Although the D.C. Circuit noted that the right of privacy stands on “high ground, cognate to the values and concerns protected by constitutional guarantees,” it is not absolute and must permit the press to publish discussions vital to democracy.  As the court held, “[w]hen a proprietor of a news vending outlet in a predominantly Negro neighborhood discontinues the handling of a newspaper oriented to Negro readers, the matter is appropriate for newspaper discussion . . . without fear of an overhanging action for invasion of privacy.”

This case reminds us that just as batterers invoked the mantle of privacy to hide domestic violence, some used the tort of privacy to silence media attention to bigotry.  (There are no doubt better cases for the point, but I use this one just because I found it seredipitiously).  This case brings to mind Lior Strahelivitz’s important work in Reputation Nation: Law in an Era of Ubiquitous Personal Information, 102 Northwestern L. Rev. 1667 (2008), where he explores how information privacy protections can undermine antidiscrimination law and how government can in certain circumstances reduce the prevalence of unlawful discrimination by publicizing previously private information about individuals.  A fascinating read on the promise of sunlight.

  December 21, 2009 at 4:51 pm   Posted in: Civil Rights, Employment Law, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Media Law, Privacy   Print This Post   One Comment

Scientology and the Media

posted by Danielle Citron

Much like everything else in our debt-ridden economy, the media has hit hard times.  Papers have folded, fired staff, or been sold.  This leaves news markets with fewer papers and less investigative reporting.  Amidst this glum report comes another trend worth discussing.  As the mainstream media centralizes its overall presence in a few organizations, some papers left standing have been acquired by organizations with strong religious affiliations.

Consider the Times Publishing Company’s sale of Governing magazine, which reports on state and local governments, to e.Republic, whose founder and top executives are Scientologists.  e.Republic’s founder Dennis McKenna has practiced Scientology for over 30 years and was identified as a church spokesman in 1979.  The Times Publishing Company still owns The St. Petersburg Times, which has long investigated and criticized the Church of Scientology.  In the last several months, The St. Petersburg Times has run a series of scathing articles on the Church of Scientology under the title “The Truth Rundown.”  (In 1980, that newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation of the church’s inner workings).

Governing staffers worry that their new management’s religious practices may affect their jobs.  According to The New York Times, their anxiety stems from  2001 article in the Sacramento News and Review reporting that e.Republic’s staff members were required to read a book on management called “Speaking from Experience,” written by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.  e.Republic’s Chief Operating Officer has said, however, that in his 13 years at the company, he had never read Mr. Hubbard’s book.  Some of the staffers’ concerns might be alleviated by the fact that e.Republic has long published Government Technology (GT) magazine, one of my favorite sources for my work on government’s use of information technologies, with no sign that the owner’s religion has had an impact on the stories that GT publishes.  But no matter, this trend is worth watching as newspapers continue their downward spiral.

Wikimedia Commons Image

  November 24, 2009 at 10:01 am   Posted in: Culture, First Amendment, Media Law, Uncategorized   Print This Post   2 Comments

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