Imagine you live in a country where criminal attacks on civilians are alarmingly familiar, and reliable reporting from the local media is regrettably unfamiliar.  You hear about an attack on your local school, so you take to the Internet to spread the word on Facebook and Twitter to warn people before it's too late.  Mercifully, the report you heard was mistaken, and everything's okay...

UPDATE: Two years after the law went into effect, California's Judicial Council recommended that the statute be repealed, saying that that the possibility of criminal sanctions actually impeded courts' inquiries into improper online activity by jurors. The criminal provisions were repealed in 2014, 2014 Cal. Laws chap. 99, although civil penalties remain.

This is the second half of an analysis of the free speech issues implicated by the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)'s shutdown of mobile phone service on Aug. 11 in order to prevent scheduled protests.  The first part of the blog is available here.

The CMLP's friends at the National Freedom of Information Coalition and the Media Law Resource Center have just released the results of a recent survey of citizen interest in government transparency and

Back in mid-June, Texas's new anti-SLAPP law finally took effect. (Since the bill passed both houses of the Texas legislature unanimously, it took effect immediately when Gov. Rick Perry signed it.) The CMLP's legal guide is updated to reflect the new statute.

From the credit-where-credit's-due department (with the requisite hat-tip to David Ardia's Twitter account):

I am thrilled to welcome Andy Sellars, our new Staff Attorney, to the Citizen Media Law Project, and to welcome him back to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society as an Employee Fellow.

On May 20, 2007, I wrote my first blog post. It also happened to be the first post on this blog. Entitled "Time to Launch," I agonized for days over what to write and struggled with the fear of putting my words out to the entire world (if you remember your first time blogging, you know exactly how I felt). Fortunately, nobody came after me with a pitchfork and I gradually learned to control that fear. I also learned that if I surrounded myself with bright and talented lawyers they would make me look good.

So, the video game case came down today, Brown v. EMA. First off, a tip of the hat to SCOTUS for A) coming out the right way and declaring California's violent video games for minors ban unconstitutional and B) reaching the actual merits, rather than settling on the fairly obvious vagueness concerns.

In a narrow, fact-bound decision, the Second Circuit today held that a group of investment firms' claims against a news-aggregation company were preempted by federal copyright law. (PDF of the opinion here.) The court stopped well short of reaching any larger 1st Amendment issues, however.