Tag: FIRSTAMENDMENT

Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could determine whether or not Congress can remove works from the public domain and place them under copyright. At issue is a ruling from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in July against a group of orchestra conductors, educators, publishers, and film archivists, whose professional lives rely on public domain works. The ...

A 13-year old Georgia girl is facing expulsion and relocation to an "alternative school" after she called one of her teachers a pedophile on Facebook. The girl, Alejandra Sosa, and two of her classmates who commented on the post must now go before a disciplinary tribunal for what Chapel Hill Middle School calls a "level one" offense: the worst category of transgression in the student handbook. ...

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently spoke at the University of Denver, and suggested that Wikileaks' publication of the so-called Afghan War Diaries could result in a court case over free speech, reports the Guardian. Sotomayor said that the relationship between unfettered speech and national security has been "a constant struggle in this society, between our security needs and our ...

In April, we told you about the unfortunate plight of Justin Kurtz, a 21-year-old college student who found himself battling defamation charges after creating a group on Facebook to publicize his dissatisfaction with a local towing company. Not long after its birth, the group began growing, with many Kalamazoo, Michigan locals flocking to the forum in order to air their own grievances with the ...

Good politicians respond to criticism by engaging in a healthy dialogue with their disgruntled constituency. Pennsylvania Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett, on the other hand, responds by slapping a muzzle on Twitter accounts. According to Techdirt, Corbett has gone so far as to subpoena Twitter in response to two anonymous users who used the microblogging ...

Public libraries, in theory, are supposed to be bastions of information. But with the rise of the Internet, many libraries have begun putting up online filters, to make sure users are using public broadband connections to search for actual information and not, well, porn. To many, it's a practical measure. But is it constitutional? According to the Washington state Supreme Court, it is. As the ...

Back in 2007, a South Florida teen found herself in hot water after using Facebook to vent her frustration with an English teacher. Katherine Evans, who was at the time a Senior honors student at Pembroke Pines Charter High School, was suspended for "cyber-bullying" her teacher. Evans had created a group on Facebook called "Ms. Sarah Phelps [her teacher] is the worst teacher I've ever met!" After ...

Back in July, a grad student from Providence named Joel Tenenbaum was ordered by a federal jury to pay four record companies $675,000 worth of damages for illegally downloading and sharing music, and to destroy all of his illegally obtained songs. In a memorandum (PDF) released on Monday, though, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner explained her reasoning for not ordering Tenenbaum to refrain from ...

No stranger to lawsuits, Google has faced any number of accusations, from misappropriating trade secrets to invading people's privacy with its Street View application. Well, according to MediaPost.com, the litigious mother of an Olympic athlete decided to file suit against Google last week because of allegedly defamatory comments posted through Google's Blogger service. The comments, ...