Coach v. Coaches insults lead to lawsuit

Posted on January 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

An assistant coach’s online insults aimed at fellow coaches have lead to a $200,000 libel lawsuit.

The showdown is at Sacred Heart-Griffin High School in Illinois, where a football coach and his assistant claim the former defensive coordinator has libeled them with labels like “pedophile” and “thief” on Facebook, according to the State-Journal Register.

The coaches say they have been dealing with three years of online insults.

Long live online media, because the newspaper has attached a downloadable PDF of the court document for your perusal should you choose.

Let’s just hope that the only lesson students learn from this case is a positive one.

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Photo on escort site leads to lawsuit

Posted on January 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

I love it when truth is stranger than fiction.

This little gem of a case comes out of the Sunshine State.

Self-proclaimed porn star Justin Krueger’s photos have shown up on a male escort site called men4rentnow.com, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

But the angry party in the lawsuit is not Krueger. It’s Liberty Media, which says it owns the copyright to the photos and the trademark to a name in the photos. Liberty filed suit in federal court in Orlando.

For more on the case, see the story.

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Prosecution of the Innocence Project

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 2 comments

If you are reading this blog, chances are you have heard of the Innocence Project, in which a group of Medill Journalism students at Northwestern University have freed 11 wrongly convicted men and women.

Today a Chicago-area prosecutor is trying to get access to students grades and class notes. Why, you might ask? You really need to listen to this NPR story.

In short, the prosecutor is arguing that these students may be being pressured by their professor to prove innocence, even if that means bribing sources to tell the “right” stories. Ridiculous.

Are we expected to believe this prosecution has nothing to do with the embarrassment these cases might cause to the legal system? Or that the prosecutor is not trying to intimidate these students — and future students — into silence?

The professor in question, journalist David Protess, says he won’t give up the records. Good for him.

Keep fighting the good fight, Professor. With people like you, the true spirit of journalism will survive.

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Nudity, copyright and accusations, oh my!

Posted on December 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

It’s hard to resist choosing Tiger Woods’s British court injunction to stop publication of nude photos of him as the Media Law Case of the Week, but because of the proliferation of Tiger coverage, I will abstain.

I’m also tempted to focus on the interesting debate in the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee about who is — and is not — a journalist.You can watch it for yourself here. (Start at 135 minutes in to get to this particular focus.)

But instead a copyright infringement case that comes on the heels of strangulation accusations is the Media Law Case of the Week.

Shawne Merriman, who plays for the San Diego Chargers, has accused MTV reality show star Tila Tequila of copyright and trademark infringement. The lawsuit claims that Tequila is using his image and the trademark of his company on her web site without his permission.

Last month, Tequila filed a lawsuit against Merriman, whom she claims imprisoned and tried to strangle her. (Merriman was never charged, reportedly due to lack of evidence.)

Tequila hosted a show called “A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila” in which MTV says “16 luscious lesbians and 16 sexy straight guys” compete to be with Tila, a bisexual. Yes, it’s as horrible as it sounds.

And, yes, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

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Libeled on Wikipedia?

Posted on December 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

Actor Ron Livingston, whom some may know from the movie Office Space or the TV series Sex and the City, is suing an anonymous Wikipedia and Facebook writer for libel.

Livingston contends that someone has been repeatedly rewriting Wikipedia posts to say he is gay and involved with a man named Lee Dennison, according to an article in the Toronto Star. This person is also believe to have created fake Facebook accounts for Livingston and Dennison listing them as a couple, the report states.

The recently married Livingston is asking a judge to force Wikipedia and Facebook to reveal the identity of the anonymous poster.

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Annarbor.com brings FOIA to readers

Posted on December 1, 2009 | 1 comment

I stumbled upon a great feature in Annarbor.com called FOIA Friday. Each week, Annarbor.com uses information gathered through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to “shed light on the activities of government.”

FOIA Friday is written like a column, with a conversational tone and lots of information.

For a good example of what FOIA Friday does, see this entry. Not only does it inform readers about the National Security Archive, but it also lists the upcoming local information that might come from pending FOIA requests.

My hat’s off to you, Advance Publications, for FOIA Friday.

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Author ordered to pay for libeling friend

Posted on November 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

With friends like these …

The author of the New York Times best-selling book “The Red Hat Club” is out $100,000 after a jury decided that she libeled her former friend in the book.

Her friend said one of the characters resembled her in many ways — except that she was not the “sexually promiscuous alcoholic” that the character in the book is.

The jury agreed that Haywood Smith libeled her former friend.

For more details on the case, go here.

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The FCC is on MySpace–with censorship?

Posted on November 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

FCC MySpace Page
I stumbled across an article in The Hill about the Federal Communications Commission launching a MySpace page last week.

Not only is the MySpace page of interest, but so is a question raised by a blogger Adam Thierer at The Technology Liberation Front. Will the FCC censor the comments on its MySpace page?

The Hill writer Kim Hart found out that yes, an FCC spokesperson says it has a policy to remove comments deemed obscene or inappropriate.

If you want a look at some of the comments that were cut, check out Thierer’s blog.

My favorite comment so far, out of the 11 still remaining on the FCC’s MySpace page, is the following by someone identified as “The Ambience Project”: “Thanks for all the years of suppressing creativity and wasting our money in the process. America is a ****** ***** for it.”

So far, the friends of the FCC on the MySpace page far out number the negative comments. As of 4:20 today, the FCC had 73 friends on My Space and 11 comments (not all negative).

It just makes you wonder how many comments might be there without the policy.

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Butler drops lawsuit against student blogger

Posted on November 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

Watch out, student bloggers.

You may think you can freely spout whatever you choose in your blog, but that’s not the case. In fact, even words that you might see as standing up for your dear mom might land you in court.

A Butler University student has learned that the hard way.
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Butler University has dropped its libel suit against a student blogger after learning his name. But that’s not the end of the story. The university is going to use “internal disciplinary proceedings” instead to punish the student instead.

And what, oh what, did this student say in his blog to cause all this ruckus?

The comments that the university considered defamatory were about administrators who removed the blogger’s stepmother from her job as chair of the music school, according to the IndyStar.

The comments included calling an administrator “power hungry” and saying that administrator “hurts the ability of the school to recruit talented students and faculty members,” according to the Indiana Daily Student.

See The Indiana Daily Student‘s fabulous editorial on the case here.

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So when is a Subway a Subway (TM)?

Posted on October 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

One of the latest lawsuits out of Vegas has nothing to do with gambling, skin shows or even entertainment.

It has to do with subs. The kind you eat.
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According to the Las Vegas Sun, Gevork Boyadzhyan opened up a sandwich shop in Las Vegas and called it Subway Avenue.

As you might imagine, the owners of the Subway chain of sandwich shops, Doctor’s Associates Inc., were none too amused. They filed suit in U.S. District Court for trademark infringement and cybersquatting (because of the potential confusion about the name).

So now Subway Avenue has reportedly become Sub Avenue.

It’s Vegas, Baby.

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