Federal appeals court slams 'secret opinions'

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stern warning last week against federal judges issuing secret opinions. I wrote about it on my LawSites blog.

AP wins release of Guantanamo names

A federal judge yesterday ordered the Pentagon to release the identities of hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay to The Associated Press, a move which would force the government to break its secrecy and reveal the most comprehensive list yet of those who have been imprisoned there, AP reports.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff in New York ordered the Defense Department by March 3 to release uncensored transcripts of detainee hearings, which contain the names of detainees in custody and those who have been held and later released. Previously released documents have had identities and other details blacked out.

1st Circuit reinstates libel suit over photo

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday reinstated a New Hampshire woman's lawsuit alleging that Boston magazine libeled her by running a photo of her and others with an article headlined, "The Mating Habits of the Suburban High School Teenager," AP reports. The 1st Circuit reversed U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor's March 2005 dismissal of Stacey Stanton's lawsuit against Metro Corp., the magazine's publisher.

AP reports:

"Saylor had found that Stanton failed to demonstrate that the photo's publication in the May 2003 issue of the magazine could be considered defamatory under Massachusetts law.

"But the three-judge panel ordered the lower court to reconsider the Manchester woman's complaint.

"The appeals court ruled that Stanton's allegations 'sufficiently state a defamation claim based on the theory that Metro negligently used Stanton's photograph to illustrate a story describing teenagers as sexually promiscuous without realizing that the publication might therefore be reasonably understood to mean that she was sexually promiscuous."

The full text of the opinion is available here.

Podcast: The trial of Saddam Hussein

On Coast to Coast this week we discuss The Trial of Saddam Hussein. We are honored to have as our guest Simone Monasebian, chief of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime. She formerly served as principal defender of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and as a trial attorney with the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Office of the Prosecutor.

Coast to Coast is the weekly legal news podcast cohosted by J. Craig Williams and me and produced by the Legal Talk Network. An archive of all past shows is available here. All shows are available to listen to in Windows Media format or to download in MP3 format. The show's RSS feed is available here.

Fair use under fire

Worth reading is Fair Use Under Fire, an Online Journalism Review interview with Marjorie Heins, founder and coordinator of the Free Expression Policy Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU's School of Law. Heins is co-author with Tricia Beckles of a new report, Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control. In the interview, Heins discusses the uncertain state of fair use. She concludes:

"To the extent that fair use is not used, it will shrink, and to the extent that it is used and asserted, it will remain healthy and even grow. And in the area of journalism, it's especially important that that happen."

Shield laws advance in two states

Bills to enact journalist shield laws are moving forward in two states.

• In Washington, the House of Representatives Feb. 13 voted 87-11 in favor of a bill (HB 2452)that would grant reporters an absolute privilege on protecting confidential sources, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. The bill, which now goes to the Senate, would provide a more limited privilege on unpublished notes and tapes.
  

• In Missouri, the Senate Judiciary and Civil and Criminal Jurisprudence Committee held a hearing Monday on a bipartisan measure that would create a qualified privilege for journalists, the Springfield News-Leader reports. "The bill would require anyone seeking confidential information from a reporter to detail for a circuit court judge the information sought, its relevancy to a case or investigation and the necessity of the information's release," the report says. It appears from the state legislature's calendar that it heard two versions of shield bills: SB 786 and SB 1013.

Supreme Court denies cert. in student paper case

The Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear the appeal of former college journalists at Governors State University in Illinois, AP reports. The students sued after a dean blocked the paper's printing in 2000 until she could review its stories. The students earlier lost in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Read more:

• Chronicle of Higher Education.
• Student Press Law Center.

Link to Perfect 10 ruling

Here is the full text of the 47-page opinion: Perfect 10 v. Google Inc..

And here is another good article on the case from The Recorder in San Francisco: Perfect 10 Racks Up Preliminary Injunction Against Google.

Google likely infringed magazine's copyright

A federal judge in Los Angeles said yesterday that Google's image search likely infringed the copyright of adult magazine Perfect 10 by displaying thumbnails of images for which the magazine charges, the Los Angeles Times reports.

In ruling on Perfect 10's request for a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz said that Google would likely lose at least part of the copyright infringement case when it is heard on its merits. The judge told the parties that he plans to grant Perfect 10 a preliminary injunction and asked the two companies to negotiate an agreement by March 8.

The Los Angeles Times story goes on:

"If upheld, the judge's preliminary ruling could throw a kink into the way Mountain View, Calif.-based Google collects and displays photographs in the image portion of its search engine. Lawyers not involved with the case said it would have little effect on Google's overall business, which generated $6.1 billion in revenue last year."

Blog defamation lawsuit lacks jurisdiction

Eric Goldman reports at Technology & Marketing Law Blog on a important federal court ruling involving jurisdiction over an out-of-state blogger. In TrafficPower.com v. Seobook.com, the U.S. District Court in Nevada dismissed a defamation lawsuit against a Pennsylvania blogger for lack of personal jurisdiction.

In Internet cases, courts often look to a Web site's degree of interactivity to determine personal jurisdiction. Applying this precedent, the Nevada court concluded that the defendant's blog, "while interactive in the sense that it allows individuals to read an dpost comments on a forum, does not rise to the level of interactivity to tip the 'sliding scale' in favor of personal jurisdiction."

Can you copyright a headline?

Not a chance, says The Patry Copyright Blog. At issue is a case pending in federal court in Chicago, Agence France Presse v. Google Inc., in which AFP says use of its headlines by Google News infringes its copyright. Baloney, says Patry, a copyright lawyer with Thelen Reid & Priest in New York. Copyright regulations expressly exclude short phrases and titles and "hundreds of opinions" back this up, he says.

Podcast: The business of law

Coast to Coast this week looks at the business of law with special guest Reid Trautz, lawyer, blogger, director of the D.C. Bar Practice Management Advisory Service, and nationally recognized author and speaker on law practice management topics.

Coast to Coast is the weekly legal news podcast cohosted by J. Craig Williams and me and produced by the Legal Talk Network. An archive of all past shows is available here. All shows are available to listen to in Windows Media format or to download in MP3 format. The show's RSS feed is available here.

Podcast looks at diversity in law practice

Our legal news podcast Coast to Coast this week looks at Diversity in Law, discussing whether progress has been made since 1999, when the chief legal officers of 500 large corporations agreed to push their outside law firms to hire more minorities and women. Joining us to discuss this topic are Veta Richardson, executive director of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, and Ron S. Jordan, founding principal of Carter-White & Shaw.

Coast to Coast is the weekly legal news podcast cohosted by J. Craig Williams and me and produced by the Legal Talk Network. An archive of all past shows is available here. All shows are available to listen to in Windows Media format or to download in MP3 format. The show's RSS feed is available here.

Careless NYT links should raise libel alarms

[Update at 3 p.m. ET: The hyperlinks discussed below have been removed.]

This story on the New York Times Web site, A Detective to the Stars Is Accused of Wiretaps, includes prosecutors' allegations that a Hollywood private detective paid a Pacific Bell worker named Teresa Wright to provide telephone records and help him secretly install wiretaps and that the detective bribed a Beverly Hills police officer, Craig Stevens, 45, to check confidential law enforcement databases. Oddly, the story hyperlinks the names of Wright and Stevens to bios of different people with the same names. The Teresa Wright of the bio is an actress born in 1918 -- unlikely she is now working for Pacific Bell. The Craig Stevens of the bio also was an actor born in 1918 -- meaning he is not a 45-year-old police officer. Is this careless editing or is the NYT using an automated process to link names in stories to names in a database? In either case, careless linking of crime suspects to archived bios should set off newsroom libel alarms.

Podcast: Tort reform in 2006

Our legal news podcast Coast to Coast this week takes on the topic of tort reform in 2006. Joining us to discuss some of the critical issues in tort reform this year are Laurie Beacham, communications director for the Center for Justice and Democracy, and Tiger Joyce, president of the American Tort Reform Assocation.

Coast to Coast is the weekly legal news podcast cohosted by J. Craig Williams and me and produced by the Legal Talk Network. An archive of all past shows is available here. All shows are available to listen to in Windows Media format or to download in MP3 format. The show's RSS feed is available here.