With friends like these …
The author of the New York Times best-selling book “The Red Hat Club” is out $100,000 after a jury decided that she libeled her former friend in the book.
Her friend said one of the characters resembled her in many ways — except that she was not the “sexually promiscuous alcoholic” that the character in the book is.
The jury agreed that Haywood Smith libeled her former friend.
For more details on the case, go here.
Categories: Media Law Case of the Week
Tagged: libel
I stumbled across an article in The Hill about the Federal Communications Commission launching a MySpace page last week.
Not only is the MySpace page of interest, but so is a question raised by a blogger Adam Thierer at The Technology Liberation Front. Will the FCC censor the comments on its MySpace page?
The Hill writer Kim Hart found out that yes, an FCC spokesperson says it has a policy to remove comments deemed obscene or inappropriate.
If you want a look at some of the comments that were cut, check out Thierer’s blog.
My favorite comment so far, out of the 11 still remaining on the FCC’s MySpace page, is the following by someone identified as “The Ambience Project”: “Thanks for all the years of suppressing creativity and wasting our money in the process. America is a ****** ***** for it.”
So far, the friends of the FCC on the MySpace page far out number the negative comments. As of 4:20 today, the FCC had 73 friends on My Space and 11 comments (not all negative).
It just makes you wonder how many comments might be there without the policy.
Categories: Indecency · Media Law Case of the Week
Tagged: fcc, freedom of information
Watch out, student bloggers.
You may think you can freely spout whatever you choose in your blog, but that’s not the case. In fact, even words that you might see as standing up for your dear mom might land you in court.
A Butler University student has learned that the hard way.
Butler University has dropped its libel suit against a student blogger after learning his name. But that’s not the end of the story. The university is going to use “internal disciplinary proceedings” instead to punish the student instead.
And what, oh what, did this student say in his blog to cause all this ruckus?
The comments that the university considered defamatory were about administrators who removed the blogger’s stepmother from her job as chair of the music school, according to the IndyStar.
The comments included calling an administrator “power hungry” and saying that administrator “hurts the ability of the school to recruit talented students and faculty members,” according to the Indiana Daily Student.
See The Indiana Daily Student‘s fabulous editorial on the case here.
Categories: Media Law Case of the Week
Tagged: bloggers, libel, student press
