Digital Media and Data Privacy Law Blog

A California court recently ruled that a lawsuit in which a group representing deaf citizens contended that CNN must provide captioning for videos uploaded to its website may proceed.  The group, The Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness, brought suit under the California's Unruh Civil Rights Act and the California Disabled Person's Act.  The court's decision is available here.

CNN responded to the suit by moving to dismiss under California's Anti-SLAPP statute, Section 425.16 of the California Code of Civil Procedure, contending that the claims arise from its ... Read More 

We previously wrote here and here about cases involving wiretapping prosecutions as a result of recording police activities.  In addition to running afoul of wiretapping statutes, citizens or journalists who videotape or record the police have also been arrested for violating state obstruction statutes, in certain circumstances. Two such cases are discussed below.

For example, in Berglund v. City of Maplewood, two journalists who hosted a public access cable program were arrested for videotaping their own arrest. The journalists refused to pay a $15 fee to attend a public ... Read More 

I’m going to devote a few posts over the next several weeks to some intriguing cases from 2010 that you might have missed.

One such case is a fascinating decision from the Fourth Circuit, Ostergren v. Cuccinelli, 615 F.3d 263 (2010), in which the Court found a Virginia statute making it unlawful to intentionally publish a person’s social security number over the Internet violated the First Amendment. Judge Duncan’s thoughtful and thorough analysis offers insight into how the Supreme Court’s holdings in Cox Broadcasting v. Cohn, Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing, and The Florida ... Read More 

Sorry, this blog post is not about the Duke-UNC rivalry.  Instead, it is about a First Amendment decision handed down by a trial judge last month that qualifies as being on the lighter, if not cleaner, side.  The case involved North Carolina's antiquated -- and quirky -- anti-profanity statute.  The 98-year old statute made it a crime to utter profanity on a public highway, but with two of North Carolina's 100 counties exempted -- Pitt County in the east and Swain County in the west.

Judge Allen Baddour ruled in January that Samantha Elabanjo could not be prosecuted for a misdemeanor ... Read More 

The U.S. District Court for District of Hawaii issued an order on May 7, 2010, denying a federal candidate’s request to be included in a televised debate among the candidates for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The order is available here.

Fourteen candidates are in the race to fill a vacant seat in the House. Television station KITV, Honolulu, Hawaii, in partnership with the League of Women Voters, chose three candidates to participate in the televised debate on May 7. One of the candidates who was not selected to participate filed a lawsuit against the station and ... Read More 

The United States Supreme Court's recent decision  in U.S. v. Stevens, which invalidated on First Amendment grounds a federal statute criminalizing the commercial creation, sale, or possession of a "depiction of animal cruelty," has been widely discussed in the media and blogosphere.  In Stevens, the Court held 8-1 that the so-called "dog-fighting" statute was, on its face, unconstitutionally overbroad.  In so holding, the Court declined the government's invitation to create a new category of speech that did not enjoy First Amendment protection.

Our purpose here ... Read More 

Pursuant to the terms of a recent settlement between the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina Legal Foundation (ACLU-NCLF) and the N.C. Department of Correction (DOC), prison inmates in North Carolina may now write novels and other manuscripts and send them to publishers, even if those written materials portray criminal activity.  The ACLU-NCLF reported the settlement in a press release.

The ACLU-NCLF had filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Victor L. Martin, a habitual felon with several theft-related convictions and whose “urban fiction” authored ... Read More