First Amendment News

Italian prosecutors are charging Google with privacy violations over a posting on Google’s Italian-language website of Italian youths teasing a student with learning disabilities. Google is arguing it is a search engine, not a newspaper and can’t possibly monitor everything on its site. -DB International Herald Tribune February 3, 2009 By Elisabetta Povoledo MILAN – Four executives of Google went on trial Tuesday, accused of crimes stemming from the posting of a video on its

A federal appeals court denied a consumer group’s request for records of Medicare claims filed by doctors. The group wanted to use the records to evaluate doctors, but the court ruled that the Freedom of Information Act was intended for government not private business. -DB Centre Daily Times Feb. 3, 2009 By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar WASHINGTON, D.C. — A consumer group seeking Medicare billing records to peek over the shoulders of doctors and grade them on

Kentucky’s effort to seize domain names to shut down online gambling sites could pose a threat to First Amendment freedoms by setting a precedent for denying access to particular Internet sites based on moral grounds determined by the government. -DB The National Law Journal Feb. 2, 2009 By Marcia Coyle WASHINGTON, D.C. — What if China seized the domain names of U.S. Web sites promoting religions that China bans? Or what if (horrors of horrors!)

A blogger posting an article about a defamation lawsuit against a Charlottesville newspaper never dreamed he would be the target of a subpoena for the names of those posting comments on the article and the IP addresses associated with each viewer. -DB Citizen Media Law Center Jan. 30, 2009 By Sam Bayard In perhaps the most blatant misuse of the subpoena power we’ve seen since the subpoena served on Kathleen Seidel of Neurodiversity last March,

After mistakenly voting for a change in the city’s general plan in January without public notice, the Lakeport City Council revoked the vote, reasserted their commitment to open government and scheduled a public workshop to inform the community about the Brown Act. -DB Clear Lake County Record-Bee Jan. 2, 2009 By Tiffany Revelle LAKEPORT – The Lakeport City Council held a workshop Jan. 2 to inform the public and the council about Brown Act and