David Lat runs a legal tabloid blog called Above the Law, which provides "news and gossip about the profession's most colorful personalities and powerful institutions, as well as original commentary on breaking legal developments." No stranger to notoriety in the past, he's recently become the center of attention in a humorous episode involving a leaked "celebratory anthem" created by the law firm, Nixon Peabody, when the firm made Fortune magazine's 2007 list of the best companies to work for. The song is embarrassingly bad -- As Frank Pasquale of Concurring Opinions puts it, "think 'Up With People' meets Sheena Easton meets B of A's version of U2's One." Lat himself writes:

On the musical merits, the song itself is just as horrific as the idea of a law firm theme song. Yes, we miss the eighties, but not this much. The lyrics include such gems as "Everyone's a winner at Nixon Peabody" (the chorus) and "It's all about the team, it's all about respect, it all revolves around integri-tee yeah." . . . Check it out for yourself below. But we're warning you: even though the Nixon Peabody anthem is dreadful, it's as catchy as HPV. If that "everyone's a winner" chorus gets stuck in your head for the rest of today, don't blame us.

Following up on our posting yesterday about WordPress in Turkey, the MidEast Youth project has launched a petition calling on the Turkish government to invalidate the judicial decision to block the entire WordPress blog-hosting service in that country. The petition states:

The New York Times reports that Carl Malamud and his non-profit organization, Public.Resource.Org, have begun an ambitious campaign to make US court decisions available to the public for free online. According to its website, Public.Resource.Org seeks to create an "unencumbered public repository of federal and state case law and codes." To do this, Malamud will be scanning West Publishing's federal and state case reporters,"extracting the public domain content and republishing it on the Internet for use by anyone." Malamud has already started with West's Federal Supplement, Federal Reporter, and Federal Appendix. So far, only cases from the 1880s are up on the website.

Interestingly, Malamud has a successful history of challenging publishers and getting government information released to the public. In the 1990s, he spearheaded a campaign that led to the US government making records from the Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR) and the Patent and Trademark Office available to the public for free.

Lawyers have long anticipated a move of this kind because court decisions and statutes are not copyrightable. West Publishing and its primary competitor, LexisNexis, do not own the copyrights to the decisions that they publish in print or post to their subscription-based online services. Rather, the publishers own the copyrights only to the content that they add to the published opinions, such as syllabi (which summarize the general holding of each opinion), head notes (which summarize specific points of law discussed in each opinion), and "key numbers" (which categorize points of law into different legal topics and subtopics for research purposes). They also own the copyrights to the particular selection and arrangement of the opinions in their case reporter volumes. This is a relatively thin layer of copyrightable material -- it is fairly clear that a competitor or interested citizen could copy and distribute cases found in West's reporters, so long as the syllabi, head notes, and "key numbers" were redacted, and so long as the reproductions did not duplicate the West reporters' original selection and arrangement of cases. See, e.g., Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing, 158 F.3d 674 (2d Cir. 1998), cert. denied, 526 U.S. 1154 (1999).

I'll be traveling for the next ten days.  Postings will be light as a result.

Allison Hayward, an assistant professor of law at George Mason University, has a new article coming out entitled Regulation of Blog Campaign Advocacy on the Internet: Comparing U.S., German, and EU Approaches. (Credit to Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy for the tip.) Hayward writes in her abstract:

This is a subject we are working on for the CMLP Legal Guide, so I eagerly printed her excellent article (yes, I prefer to read things in hard copy). I'll touch on a few of the more important issues in this post.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is seeking a Media Fellow to undertake a project to comprehensively study the new/citizen/social media landscape. The fellow will perform a critical analysis of where citizen media has fallen short, where it has delivered, and how we as a community can help it to do better. Details:

Kuensel Online, the electronic version of Bhutan's English-language national newspaper, reported last week that a man who posted comments on its discussion forums was convicted of criminal libel:

According to Kuensel Online, the defendant "pleaded guilty" in his opening statement and admitted that he acted with malice and had no proof to substantiate his allegations of bribery, corruption, and misuse of power.

Although it doesn't appear that Kuensel Online or the defendant's ISP were implicated in the case, the article quotes the court as stating that regulatory authorities and Internet Service Providers share equal responsibility to regulate Internet related crime:

"The websites that solicits online discussion forums must also be equally responsible to protect from the vices of any internet related crimes and the principle of vicarious liability impugn that it is just not good enough to say that the webmaster or editors are not responsible of the content with a disclaimer clause," said the Paro drangpon.

The U.S. House of Representatives has taken an important step forward on the federal shield bill (H.R.2102), which we've discussed in greater detail before. The proposed legislation would protect those "engaging in journalism" from having to testify about or produce documents relating to their work, and from revealing their anonymous sources, except under specified circumstances. Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee approved an amended version of the bill after two hours of debate, sending it to the House floor for consideration.

The amended bill is not currently available online, but reports (here, here and here) indicate that the new version extends protection to bloggers as long as they derive "financial gain or livelihood" from their journalistic activity. Some in Washington are unhappy because this definition of journalistic activity is too broad, complaining that the "financial gain or livelihood" standard opens the door to anyone whose blog or websites raises even a small amount of revenue through ads. Conversely, some online sources are trumpeting the amended version as a victory for bloggers, with headlines like "House panel approves legal shield for bloggers" and "US law to protect bloggers."

Both sides miss the (fairly) obvious point that the the recent revision narrowed the scope of journalistic activity protected by the law. Don't get me wrong. The revised legislation seems like a good start, and the "financial gain or livelihood" standard may well be broad enough to drive a truck through, providing plenty of room for enterprising bloggers. But the revised bill does potentially (and arbitrarily) exclude those citizen journalists who choose not to have ads or other marketing tools on their sites. We'll reserve judgment for now, monitor the bill closely, and follow up when a copy of the revised bill is available.

An Illinois juvenile court judge refused to allow blogger Elaine Hopkins from Peoriastory.com to observe and cover a July 25 juvenile court hearing in Peoria, IL. In excluding Hopkins from the courtroom, Judge Albert Purham, Jr. ruled that bloggers are not journalists under Illinois law. Hopkins, who covered her ouster on her website, reported:

Operating a "so-called blog" doesn't make the person a journalist, Purham said. Before the ruling he consulted the lawyers in the courtroom. A lawyer for the parent in this child welfare case had no objection, and her client, Lorraine Singleton who lost her children in 2003 and is trying to get them back, also had no objection. But assistant state's attorney Susan Lucas objected, as did an unidentified female lawyer apparently representing the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. An explanation that Peoriastory.com has operated since February 2007, has business cards, and is run by Hopkins, a former newspaper reporter known to court personnel, did not sway the judge.

Unlike adult criminal proceedings, which are presumed to be open to the public, juvenile proceedings have traditionally been closed. See In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 25 (1967). Under Illinois' Juvenile Court Act, the general public, except for the "news media," are excluded from juvenile proceedings. The provision addressing access, 705 ILCS 405/1-5, states:

Press Gazette (UK): MPs outlaw satire in New Zealand. New Zealand's Parliament has voted itself far-reaching powers to control satire and ridicule of MPs in Parliament, attracting a storm of media and academic criticism.