The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reports that Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski recently signed two bills that increase public access to government records.

The first of the two bills now requires that "the public body receiving the request shall respond as soon as practicable and without unreasonable delay." While this is an improvement over the prior law, which merely required that the requester be given a "reasonable opportunity to inspect or copy the public record," see ORS 192.440, Oregon still provides no set time period by which a governmental body must respond to a request for public records.

Creative Commons of Canada recently announced that it has published a Canadian version of the well written and highly recommended Podcasting Legal Guide. As Colette Vogele, who helped author the original Podcasting Legal Guide, notes:

[T]he authors did nearly a complete re-write of the guide because copyright, trademark and publicity rights receive different treatment in Canada. One example, is that Canada has many collecting societies that need to be understood if licensing music from Canadian artists (see page 15). This adapted guide for Canada also includes a "copyright matrix" (page 16) and a "rights clearance flow chart" (page 19), both of which will help explain the various rights and who get's paid for what in the world of music licensing.

The Canadian version, with the intriguing subtitle "Northern Rules For The Revolution," is available in both html format and pdf format.

CNN is reporting (via the Associated Press) that Internet gossip columnist Perez Hilton's site was shut down for several hours after his hosting company received complaints that the site contained copyrighted photos of celebrities. According to CNN:

Not citizen media law related per se, but with Google's reach, it's recently opened Public Policy Blog, which offers "Google's views on government, policy and politics," is going to be must reading.   As Cory Doctorow reports:

Yesterday our very own Mary-Rose Papandrea, a professor at Boston College Law School, testified before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary at the Massachusetts State House regarding a proposed shield law. For most of the hearing, the questions focused on the scope of the privilege (the bill proposes an absolute privilege for the identity of sources and a qualified privilege for newsgathering materials) and not on who would be covered under the privilege.

However, near the end of the hearing, Senator Robert Creedon expressed concern about extending the privilege to bloggers, describing them as "loose cannons." Papandrea, together with Lucy Dalglish, Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, responded that the term "bloggers" is ill-defined and includes many journalists from the mainstream media. Given that it would be unwise to place internet communications outside the scope of any shield law, Papandrea and Dalglish argued that the better answer would be to define those covered under the law by their function - i.e., whether they are disseminating information to the general public. Papandrea also pointed out that the proposed shield law would not immunize bloggers - or anyone else - from libel suits, which appeared to be Senator Creedon's primary concern.

You can track the status of the Massachusetts "Free Flow of Information Act" at OpenMass.gov.

Tom Boney, publisher of the Alamance News, a weekly newspaper in Graham, N.C., was arrested and charged with trespass after refusing to leave the Burlington-Alamance Regional Airport Authority's monthly meeting.  According to the Burlington Times-News, Boney refused to leave the meeting after the airport authority voted to hold a private meeting to discuss a possible economic development project at the airport. 

Under North Carolina's Meetings of Public Bodies Act, all official meetings of public bodies are presumed to be open to the public.  The law permits closure only under nine enumerated circumstances.  It is unclear whether the airport authority met any of these conditions when it closed the meeting.  Even the sheriff who arrested Boney commented that he respects him for sticking to his convictions. "He's got a valid point about having access to public meetings," the sheriff told the Burlington Times-News.

Boney, who has long campaigned for open government meetings, is scheduled to appear in court on June 25 to address the misdemeanor trespassing charge.

Poynter Online has a useful article up on assessing the legal risks faced by sites that publish user comments.  The piece, while focused on traditional media organizations, provides some useful guidelines for anyone who runs a site that includes user submitted material.

According to attorney Robb Harvey, who is interviewed for the article,

Last week I noted that the Texas Senate had approved the "Free Flow of Information Act" and sent the bill to the Texas House of Representatives.  Well, that was short lived, as the bill has now died in the Texas House.

According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the bill

According to a recent article in Ars Technica, the Chinese government withdrew a proposal to require all bloggers in China to register their real identities.

While China has been the subject of some excellent studies concerning the government's use of technical measures to control access to information, including a recent report by the Open Net Initiative, there hasn't been a great deal of focus on the use of law to limit and censor citizen media within China and other countries that actively filter information.  If you are aware of countries that have, or are considering, registration requirements for bloggers or other citizen media, please let us know.

In addition, I've been receiving a lot of interest from people within and outside China to include Chinese law in our legal guide and other resources.  We will be adding that material to the site as soon as we can.

(Disclosure: The Open Net Initiative, like the CMLP, is a joint project of the Berkman Center.)

It must be Texas day, with two posts relating to the Lone Star State. 

The Texas Senate approved the "Free Flow of Information Act" on May 1 in a 27-4 vote and sent the bill to the Texas House of Representatives.  The bill would give "journalists" a qualified privilege to protect both their sources and their newsgathering materials.  Under the current language of the bill, a journalists is defined as follows:

"Journalist" means a person who for financial gain, for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood, or for subscription purposes gathers, compiles, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, processes, or publishes news or information that is disseminated by a news medium or communication service provider and includes: