That’s what this proposed South Carolina bill (S.B. 878) (sponsored by Sen. Sheheen — who is running for governor — and now before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary) would provide: (A) It is [a felony punishable by up to five years in prison] for a person to produce or create, or conspire to produce […]
Archive | Freedom to Gather Information
The Aurora Mass Shooting, Choice of Law, and Newsgatherer Shield Statutes
Reporter, who is based in New York, gathers information in Colorado, related to a Colorado crime. She returns to New York, but is subpoenaed to appear in Colorado court proceedings, to testify about her confidential sources. Should New York newsgatherer shield law or Colorado newsgatherer shield law apply? An interesting and unusual choice of law […]
Google Books’ Scanning and Snippet Display of Books Is Fair Use, and Thus Not Copyright Infringement
By Eugene Volokh on November 14, 2013 1:54 pm in Copyright, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Gather Information
So holds Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc. (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 14, 2013). I’m still on the road, and thus can’t blog about the opinion in detail, but I’ve read it and I think its fair use finding is quite right. Thanks to How Appealing for the pointer. UPDATE: Matthew Sag has a summary of the […]
Campus Videorecording and Bans on “Harassment” and “Intimidation”
By Eugene Volokh on November 12, 2013 12:23 am in Freedom of Speech at Colleges and Universities, Freedom to Gather Information
As the previous post noted, I’m passing along another brief that the UCLA First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic has filed in the last few weeks. This one is on behalf of the Student Press Law Center and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, in O’Brien v. Welty (9th Cir.) (the link is to the […]
Court Upholds Ban on Photographing Border Checkpoint
Lower courts have recently been holding that the First Amendment protects people’s right to audiorecord and videorecord in many public places, especially when they are recording the conduct of government officials. (See, e.g., ACLU v. Alvarez (7th Cir. 2012) and Glik v. Cunniffe (1st Cir. 2011).) This makes a good deal of sense; just as […]
Texas Ban on Photographing People Without Their Consent “With Intent to Arouse or Gratify the Sexual Desire of Any Person”
As I mentioned last year, a Texas appellate court upheld this statute against a First Amendment challenge. This past Friday, though, a different Texas appellate court struck the statute down (Ex parte Thompson (Tex. Ct. App. Aug. 30, 2013)). The court reasoned: 1. Photographing (at least in public places) is presumptively First-Amendment-protected activity. This includes […]
Will NYT’s James Risen go to Jail?
Last Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the fourth Circuit rejected New York Times reporter James Risen’s claim of reporter’s privilege in United States v. Sterling. The underlying case is a federal prosecution of a former CIA official for allegedly disclosing classified information in violation of the Espionage Act. The federal government believes Sterling […]
Whistle-Blower, Criminal, or Both?
By Jonathan H. Adler on June 11, 2013 9:59 pm in Freedom to Gather Information, Government Transparency, War on Terror
The NYT has posted a “Room for Debate” feature on whether Edward Snowden should be seen as a whistle-blower or a criminal (if not both). My contribution begins: Investigating and prosecuting Edward Snowden is a priority, but it should not distract from the far more important issues raised in the past week. Although some Americans […]
Did Eric Holder Lie to Congress?
The Hill reports that the House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether Attorney General Eric holder lied to Congress when testifying about the Justice Department’s surveillance of reporters and media organizations. The panel is looking at a statement Holder made during a back-and-forth with Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) about whether the DOJ could prosecute reporters under […]
Jonathan Adler on Leak Investigations
Apropos the recent posts on the Administration’s leak investigations and the press, I thought I’d note three items by our own Jonathan Adler from when a similar issue arose during the Bush Administration: Reporting Is Not a Crime: Conservatives Should Think Twice About Criminalizing Journalism (National Review Online), A Troubling Prosecution: United States v. Rosen […]
Leakers, Recipients, and Conspirators
Leaks to reporters — and investigations of the leaks that included subpoenas of reporters’ e-mail logs and searches of reporters’ e-mail — have been in the news; see this post by Orin about the AP story and this post by Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic) about the Fox News story. I thought I’d say a few […]
Is the Seizure of the AP’s Phone Records a “Non-Story”?
In a thoughtful post below, Orin suggests that we don’t know enough about the federal government’s seizure of the AP’s records. As Orin notes, the Justice Department has special rules for this sort of thing. Yet there are reasons to doubt whether the government followed these rules. Among other things, the government is required to […]
Justice Department Seized AP Phone Records
By Jonathan H. Adler on May 13, 2013 8:04 pm in Executive Branch, Freedom to Gather Information, Press, War on Terror
The AP reports: The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news. The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and […]
Photographer Peter Parker Couldn’t Be Reached for Comment
YNN Rochester reports: Amid the filming process for “The Amazing Spiderman 2” in Rochester, film crews and police, have been walking a fine line with media and civilians over public photography rights. The question is: if police and production crews tell you not to photograph or videotape their public work, are they violating your civil […]
Arrest for “HIPAA Violation” Based on Citizen’s Recording of Encounter Between Police and Another Citizen
By Eugene Volokh on January 9, 2013 11:04 pm in Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Gather Information, Privacy
That’s what the St. Paul Pioneer Press reports: Andrew Henderson watched as Ramsey County sheriff’s deputies frisked a bloody-faced man outside his Little Canada apartment building. Paramedics then loaded the man, a stranger to Henderson, into an ambulance. Henderson, 28, took out his small handheld video camera and began recording…. [A] deputy, Jacqueline Muellner, approached […]