Category: Mass Communication Law

The cost of Three Strikes

Big news… the RIAA announced that they will no longer persue lawsuits against individual music filesharers. Instead, filesharers will receive a notification from the Internet Service Provider (ISP), and may loose net access after 3 “strikes.”  ISPs should be cautious, for this could set a bad precedent.

The safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was granted to ISPs because it allowed them to effectively turn a blind eye to the vast amount of content flowing over their network. If a copyright holder sends them a notice of something infringing, they take the offending content down. The theory is that ISPs shouldn’t be put in a position of policing content because it would be a huge burden. I would argue that this will require a great investment of man/lawyer hours (though a PK blogger argues that this would take care of ISP’s “bandwidth hog” problem and others may argue that people are a more sustainable investment than hardware). Further, if ISPs are seen as colluding with the recording industry, it might tarnish their image.

A better answer would be a unified “ISP ethic,” perhaps like librarians, to gain public trust. The 3 strike rule might make them into an RIAA-style bad guy, and the costs of such a plan may mean they won’t be able to cut prices or increase service.

South Korea cracks down on “malicious” Internet use

Here’s an interesting story about a darker side online culture from South Korea:

South Korean police have rounded up more than 2,000 people for spreading malicious rumours on the Internet during a month-long crackdown sparked by an actress’s suicide, officials said Monday.

The National Police Agency said 11 people have been formally arrested and detained for serious legal breaches and that prosecutors would be asked to charge another 2,019 with various offences.

Online norms in South Korea have been an issue in the past.  It will be interesting to see if legal enforcement will have the desired effect of supressing rumors.

PBS and Google encouraging voting video

YouTube, PBS urge people to record voting (Silicon Valley)

In what must be an effort to combat voter intimidation, PBS and Google are encouraging voters to discretely record their experiences and upload them to a YouTube channel. PBS will air the best ones, I assume, after the election.

The YT channel page also links to the Citzen Media Law Project (a cool Drupal site, I might add). The law of recording around a poling place could be dicy, although the idea of a voter recording their own experience has never really been addressed.

This could be one to watch.

First Amendment Gotcha

A state appellate court overturned an order against a SoCal newspaper, stating that the paper can publish stories about a case in which it is a defendant. This is one of those strange cases where a paper can use it’s strong voice in the community (from which jurors will be selected) to argue on its own behalf. The government (here, the court) is rightly restricted from restraining the voice of the paper–even though it means those on the other side of the case might have a more difficult time arguing in the court of public opinion. The strength of one’s right to speak often results in the restriction of another’s.

Also worth a look is the Supreme Court’s Tuesday hearing on the constitutionality of searches resulting from erroneous database information.