Times media law article enlightens

Posted on February 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Here’s the good news: Some news organizations are not letting up on legal cases to get records and information.

Here’s the bad news: Some are.

Tim Arango of the New York Times wrote an excellent piece about how Hearst and the Associated Press are continuing to fight for legal records, even if it costs them.

Unfortunately, he also writes that smaller news organizations — regional and local — have had to cut legal costs along with other costs. And the head of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told him that she’s hearing about hard times for media lawyers.

I hope the Times continues to follow up on this issue. At a time when cost-cutting is the norm in the news industry, we must monitor how this cost-cutting is impacting journalism’s watchdog role.

Kudos to the Times for doing just that.

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Posted in Media Law Case of the Week, newspapers

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Playing the J-School Name Game

Posted on February 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

This story is probably familiar to many of you.

I have a wonderful journalism student. She’s done everything she’s supposed to do.

  • Internships? Check. She’s had great internships at local newspapers and a regional magazine.
  • School work? Check. She goes above and beyond.
  • Hard worker? Absolutely. She’s a go-getter, no doubt about it.

The only thing she has not done is go to a journalism school with a top-tier national reputation.

The school where I teach is not Columbia or Missouri or Syracuse. It’s a good, small, public college in Upstate New York. And now that this stellar student is looking for jobs — or even internships — at larger publications, she’s finding it difficult to compete against the students with the J-School Name.

Last night this student came to me to ask what she can do. I told her to keep trying, that sometimes it’s about perseverance, luck and timing. I also told her that ultimately, she might want to consider graduate school at a top journalism school. I have no doubt she’d get in and thrive.

Dear Reader, what should I tell this student? Do you have any advice?

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Term papers have copyrights, too

Posted on February 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

If you are buying a term paper off the Internet, you are probably not that concerned about whether someone’s copyright has been infringed upon.

But some of the people who wrote those papers are concerned about their copyrights, and their lawsuit has led an Illinois judge to order to one of these term paper companies to prove it has permission for the papers it sells.

According to USA Today, this might “be the first time a court has penalized a seller based on how it acquires papers.”

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Posted in front page

Coach v. Coaches insults lead to lawsuit

Posted on January 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

An assistant coach’s online insults aimed at fellow coaches have lead to a $200,000 libel lawsuit.

The showdown is at Sacred Heart-Griffin High School in Illinois, where a football coach and his assistant claim the former defensive coordinator has libeled them with labels like “pedophile” and “thief” on Facebook, according to the State-Journal Register.

The coaches say they have been dealing with three years of online insults.

Long live online media, because the newspaper has attached a downloadable PDF of the court document for your perusal should you choose.

Let’s just hope that the only lesson students learn from this case is a positive one.

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Photo on escort site leads to lawsuit

Posted on January 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

I love it when truth is stranger than fiction.

This little gem of a case comes out of the Sunshine State.

Self-proclaimed porn star Justin Krueger’s photos have shown up on a male escort site called men4rentnow.com, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

But the angry party in the lawsuit is not Krueger. It’s Liberty Media, which says it owns the copyright to the photos and the trademark to a name in the photos. Liberty filed suit in federal court in Orlando.

For more on the case, see the story.

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Posted in Media Law Case of the Week

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Prosecution of the Innocence Project

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 2 Comments

If you are reading this blog, chances are you have heard of the Innocence Project, in which a group of Medill Journalism students at Northwestern University have freed 11 wrongly convicted men and women.

Today a Chicago-area prosecutor is trying to get access to students grades and class notes. Why, you might ask? You really need to listen to this NPR story.

In short, the prosecutor is arguing that these students may be being pressured by their professor to prove innocence, even if that means bribing sources to tell the “right” stories. Ridiculous.

Are we expected to believe this prosecution has nothing to do with the embarrassment these cases might cause to the legal system? Or that the prosecutor is not trying to intimidate these students — and future students — into silence?

The professor in question, journalist David Protess, says he won’t give up the records. Good for him.

Keep fighting the good fight, Professor. With people like you, the true spirit of journalism will survive.

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Posted in front page

Nudity, copyright and accusations, oh my!

Posted on December 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

It’s hard to resist choosing Tiger Woods’s British court injunction to stop publication of nude photos of him as the Media Law Case of the Week, but because of the proliferation of Tiger coverage, I will abstain.

I’m also tempted to focus on the interesting debate in the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee about who is — and is not — a journalist.You can watch it for yourself here. (Start at 135 minutes in to get to this particular focus.)

But instead a copyright infringement case that comes on the heels of strangulation accusations is the Media Law Case of the Week.

Shawne Merriman, who plays for the San Diego Chargers, has accused MTV reality show star Tila Tequila of copyright and trademark infringement. The lawsuit claims that Tequila is using his image and the trademark of his company on her web site without his permission.

Last month, Tequila filed a lawsuit against Merriman, whom she claims imprisoned and tried to strangle her. (Merriman was never charged, reportedly due to lack of evidence.)

Tequila hosted a show called “A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila” in which MTV says “16 luscious lesbians and 16 sexy straight guys” compete to be with Tila, a bisexual. Yes, it’s as horrible as it sounds.

And, yes, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

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Posted in Media Law Case of the Week

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Libeled on Wikipedia?

Posted on December 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

Actor Ron Livingston, whom some may know from the movie Office Space or the TV series Sex and the City, is suing an anonymous Wikipedia and Facebook writer for libel.

Livingston contends that someone has been repeatedly rewriting Wikipedia posts to say he is gay and involved with a man named Lee Dennison, according to an article in the Toronto Star. This person is also believe to have created fake Facebook accounts for Livingston and Dennison listing them as a couple, the report states.

The recently married Livingston is asking a judge to force Wikipedia and Facebook to reveal the identity of the anonymous poster.

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Annarbor.com brings FOIA to readers

Posted on December 1, 2009 | 1 Comment

I stumbled upon a great feature in Annarbor.com called FOIA Friday. Each week, Annarbor.com uses information gathered through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to “shed light on the activities of government.”

FOIA Friday is written like a column, with a conversational tone and lots of information.

For a good example of what FOIA Friday does, see this entry. Not only does it inform readers about the National Security Archive, but it also lists the upcoming local information that might come from pending FOIA requests.

My hat’s off to you, Advance Publications, for FOIA Friday.

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Posted in Media Law Case of the Week

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Author ordered to pay for libeling friend

Posted on November 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

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.

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