The online community reviews everything these days.  Be it via stars, thumbs, or free-form comments, the denizens of the Internet are keen to offer their assessments of books, movies, restaurants, and all else out for public consumption and aggregation.  Most subjects seem to accept it as a part of offering goods or services to the public.

Not the doctors, though.

On Friday, the Court of Appeals of Maryland quashed a subpoena seeking the identity of five anonymous commenters and provided guidance to lower courts regarding what showing an aggrieved plaintiff must make before a court will order a website operator to reveal the identity of an anonymous commenter.  In Independent Newspapers, Inc. v. Brodie, the Maryland high court concluded that

The fights over whether blogging ought to be allowed during trials -- and whether it's good journalism -- aren't even over, and a new front has opened in the war over technology and its proper role in coverage of the justice system.

The purpose of copyright is to "promote progress."  We achieve this promotion by giving authors a limited monopoly over their works so that they may profit from them. This is what is known as "the incentive theory."  If we give authors the incentive to create works, they will create more of them, thus adding ideas and expression to the marketplace.  On the other hand, we don't give copyright protection to mere facts.

After several false starts, it looks like Congress is finally going to address the issue of "libel tourism," an unfortunate practice where foreign plaintiffs pick the jurisdiction with the most draconian libel laws in which to sue. 

My colleague Ethan Zuckerman just put up a disturbing post about Kubatana, a prominent Zimbabwean NGO, which saw its site taken down because its hosting provider, Bluehost, got cold feet after it discovered the site contained content from (gasp!) Zimbabwe.

Kubatana, among other things, hosts websites for prominent activist organizations like Women of Zimbabwe Arise.  For the past two years, Kubatana has hosted a joint blog for a wide range of Zimbabwean citizens that has, according to Ethan, "been one of the key sources of information and perspective for people around the world who follow Zimbabwe, and a critical outlet for Zimbabweans who have few other ways to communicate."

Ethan reports:

In celebration of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth (you knew he was born on the same day in 1809 as Abraham Lincoln, right?), I bring you news of our first legal threat directed at an online publisher asserting that a website violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.