Reports are emerging from Pakistan that President Pervez Musharraf has shutdown independent news media within Pakistan and limited access to the Internet. Musharraf appears to be using, at least in part, Pakistan's press licensing laws to effectuate this clampdown.

There's been extensive coverage (here, here, here, and here, to start) of the arrest and subsequent dismissal of charges against Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the founders of the Phoenix New Times, a print newspaper that also publishes on its website. I'll add my voice to the chorus in order to elaborate on some of the legal issues at stake.

The facts are as follows: Starting in July 2004, the Phoenix New Times published a number of articles critical of Maricopa County Sheriff, Joe Arpaio. In one article published on its website in 2004, the newspaper disclosed Arpaio's home address as part of a story raising questions about his real estate holdings. The address was available in public records on the County Recorder and State Corporation Commission websites.

Authorities in Maricopa County began a criminal investigation of the newspaper for violation of section 13-2401 of the Arizona Revised Statutes, which makes it a felony to

knowingly make available on the world wide web the personal information of a peace officer, justice, judge, commissioner, public defender or prosecutor if the dissemination of the personal information poses an imminent and serious threat to the peace officer's, justice's, judge's, commissioner's, public defender's or prosecutor's safety or the safety of that person's immediate family and the threat is reasonably apparent to the person making the information available on the world wide web to be serious and imminent.

Timed to coincide with the release of Justice Clarence Thomas’s autobiography, the First Amendment Center today published an online symposium concerning Justice Thomas’s First Amendment jurisprudence. Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke Law School, Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, and Supreme Court practitioner Tom Goldstein are among the scholars and practitioners who scrutinized Justice Thomas’s thoughts on a variety of free speech issues, from commercial speech to campaign finance.

One scholar, Mary-Rose Papandrea, who teaches constitutional law at Boston College Law School and is an occasional contributor to this blog, examined Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence concerning the electronic media. Mary-Rose concludes that Thomas is rigidly committed to applying established First Amendment doctrine to electronic media regardless of the technological and economic complications. She points out that in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, 535 U.S. 564 (2002), Justice Thomas rejected arguments that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutionally overbroad because it applied community standards to determine what sexual expression was harmful to minors.

The challengers in that case had argued that applying such a standard would give the most puritanical community in the United States a heckler’s veto over sexual expression on the Internet nationally because the Internet did not permit geographic targeting. Remarkably, Justice Thomas responded that that those who were worried about this problem should simply stop using the Internet and instead use an expressive medium that permitted targeting.

This myopic view is consistent with Justice Thomas’s approach in other electronic media cases where he has insisted upon applying traditional First Amendment doctrine even when technological differences would seem to warrant otherwise. See, e.g., Denver Area Educ. Telecommunications Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U.S. 727 (1996) and United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group, Inc., 529 U.S. 803 (2000).

You can read all of the essays in the symposium on the First Amendment Center's website.

(Note: Mary-Rose Papandrea is my wife.)

In late August, Volkswagen obtained a subpoena from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (Case No.3:07-MC-80213) requiring YouTube to disclose the identity of an anonymous YouTube user who posted a Nazi-themed parody of a Volkswagen commercial. The video has apparently been removed from YouTube and is no longer available.

In June we reported that the New York Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting was considering new rules that would require any group of 2 or more people who want to use a camera on city property -- including sidewalks -- for more than a half hour to get a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance.

Not surprisingly, the new rules were roundly criticized from the start. The New York Civil Liberties Union, which said the rules encroached on First Amendment rights, threatened to file a lawsuit to invalidate them. One of the more interesting approaches was taken by Olde English, a comedy group based in New York City that created a rap video lampooning the new rules and directing viewers to contact the Office of Film to express their dissent. (Don't miss the video, it's great.)

The city has now backed down, following a strong public outcry by photographers and independent filmmakers. NY1 News reports:

According to NY1 News, the Office of Film says it will take the public's comments into account in the next draft of the rules.

BBC: Malaysia cracks down on bloggers. The Malaysian government has warned it could use tough anti-terrorism laws against bloggers who insult Islam or the country's king.

While nobody was watching, an interim report drafted by a study group under the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has set down guidelines for regulation of the Internet in Japan which, according to one blogger, would extend as far as personal blogs and homepages. In the report, this Study group on the legal system for communications and broadcasting, headed by Professor Emeritus at Hitotsubashi University Horibe Masao, discusses the possibility of applying the exising Broadcast Law [Ja] to the sphere of the Internet to regulate, under government enforcement, what gets on the web. The report also suggests that public comments be sought on the issue [Ja], in response to which the ministry has opened a space on their webpage for the public to submit comments [Ja], available in the period between June 20th and July 20th.

Despite the obvious significance of the proposed regulation, neither media nor the majority of bloggers are aware of its existence. The most detailed coverage of the issue has been provided by tokyodo-2005, a former journalist, now a lawyer and prolific blogger on media related issues, who has (at time of writing this) already posted seven entries on the topic. In these blog entries, he warns that this legislation would be applied not only to general websites but also to personal blogs and home pages. The report advises, he cites, that contents found illegal based on the significance of their activity ( would be outside the scope of protections on freedom of expression as specified in the Japanese Constitution; therefore, it is claimed, there would be no constitutional issue with regulating such content.