Legal Pad

Facebook's Former Privacy Chief Gets Behind Trafficking Measure

[Cheryl Miller]

Chris Kelly may be back on the ballot next year, but it won’t be as a candidate.

The former Facebook privacy officer and 2010 attorney general aspirant is co-proponent of a proposed initiative that would crack down on human traffickers, particularly offenders that troll the Internet for victims.

The so-called Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act would beef up sentences for convicted traffickers while forcing sex offenders to register their email addresses and Internet user names with authorities.

The initiative would be a marriage of two ideas that, so far, have failed to gain political traction in California. The group California Against Slavery tried to qualify an anti-trafficking measure for the ballot in 2010 but failed to gather enough signatures. Kelly has lobbied unsuccessfully for state legislation that would force registered sex offenders to identify their online personas.

“Our Legislature unfortunately invented the idea that it will cost money,” Kelly said.

Kelly, who finished third in the 2010 Democratic AG primary, said the campaign will use paid and volunteer signature-collectors to ensure it can gather the more than 500,000 qualifying names needed in 150 days. It’s a pricey task but a potentially priceless one if it ties Kelly, a possible future candidate, to a popular and winning measure.

Kelly, the father of two young children, said he’s simply trying to “step up” for an issue he believes in.

“It’s important to be publicly engaged,” he said. “And it’s important for people in the tech industry to be politically engaged.”

The attorney general’s office still must prepare a title and summary for the would-be initiative before Kelly and others can begin collecting signatures.

 

Chicago Firm Spins Broad Porn Piracy Web

[Petra Pasternak]

A Chicago law firm is going after grandma and her alleged online porn habit.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Steele Hansmeier has filed a lawsuit against “Does 1-46” -– including one the Chronicle describes as a Bay Area widow in her 70s -- in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Hard Drive Productions.

Steele Hansmeier accuses the Bay Area woman and scores of other “digital pirates” across the country of downloading porn illegally over BitTorrent. They’re being urged by Steele Hansmeier attorneys to settle with the originators of the content by ponying up several thousand dollars by credit card.

The Bay Area Jane Doe tells the Chronicle she has never downloaded porn and doesn’t even know what a BitTorrent is. She can’t afford an attorney to make her case, but she won’t settle either, she told the Chronicle. The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes such lawsuits as "copyright trolling," and EFF attorney Matthew Zimmerman said the porn allegations add a further "coercive element," the Chronicle reported.

Steele Hansmeier, which describes itself as a law firm dedicated to eradicating digital piracy, says on its website (wefightpiracy.com) that it focuses on representing content producers and creative professionals. It’s unclear how many lawyers it employs.

 

Web Has Made First Amendment an Anachronism, Kozinski Says

[Scott Graham]

Alex Kozinski came to Golden Gate University School of Law on Monday to praise the First Amendment — and to bury it.

Appearing as part of the school's Distinguished IP Speaker series, the Ninth Circuit's chief judge argued that technology has rendered the First Amendment obsolete. As incidents ranging from Wikileaks disclosures to Barbra Streisand's house have demonstrated, it's no longer possible for the government or individuals to suppress speech in an age of distributed self-publishing via blogs and social networks.

"How do you sue a blogger who may be anonymous, or may be posting from Uzbekistan?" Kozinski asked. "And assuming you somehow get service of process and prove that he acted with malice, so what? How do you collect a judgment against a guy whose principal assets are an iMac and a genuine autographed poster of ZZ Top?" (See a video clip of Kozinski making his point here and Monica Bay's report on the lecture here.)

Justices Give Spammers More Leeway

[Mike McKee]

No one likes e-mail spam. But the California Supreme Court on Thursday seemed resigned to the inevitability of it in a case testing the state’s anti-spam law.

The justices seemed to give little credence to Los Angeles lawyer Elaine Byszewski’s argument that nonsensical domain names in e-mail headers from multiple sources violate the law by bypassing spam filters and misleading recipients into thinking they’re from different sites when they’re actually from one advertiser.

Video-Sharing Site Finds New Legs for Appeal

[Zusha Elinson]

An important Internet law case was about to be as abandoned (free reg. req.) as a baby left on a foreclosed home’s doorstep – but no longer!

Joe Mullin reports today that Winston & Strawn’s Michael Elkin will in fact be handling the appeal for Veoh against Universal Music Group in a seminal online copyright case. The video-sharing site was teetering on bankruptcy and then sold its assets – and there was a real concern that the remaining corporate shell of Veoh didn’t care to defend itself or didn’t have the money.

City Employee Turned Hacker's Fate in Jury's Hands

[Kate Moser]

After enduring nearly four months of excruciatingly boring testimony (as reported by tech blogs, which have followed the trial pretty closely), a San Francisco jury now has the case of Terry Childs (free reg. req.), the architect of the city’s computer network who walked off the job in 2008 and refused to hand over network passwords to his superiors. He ultimately gave the information to Mayor Gavin Newsom, who testified at trial.

In closing arguments today, Assistant District Attorney Conrad del Rosario portrayed Childs as a manipulative, brilliant egomaniac who prioritized protecting his job over protecting the city’s network. “This was nothing more than his attempt to become an indispensable employee,” he told jurors in the courtroom of Judge Teri Jackson.

Yahoo Says Government Can't Read Over Your Shoulder

[Zusha Elinson]

So it looks like the government won’t just go looking through your Yahoo email when it feels like it.

Yahoo, with a little help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, raised a big enough stink that the government today dropped an effort to do some warrantless snooping in a Yahoo email account. Who knows, it could’ve been your email account … probably not, though, since no one uses Yahoo anymore.

Big Brother had asked a federal court in Denver to compel Yahoo to turn over the account without a search warrant. Yahoo said no (unlike when the Chinese government asked to see some email accounts) and EFF filed an amicus curiae brief earlier this week. Today, the government filed a brief saying it didn’t really need to look in that Yahoo account anyhow.

Copyright Infringement and BitTorrent Search Engines

[Cynthia Foster]

The process of downloading movies and music on the Internet (gratis) just got a little more complicated. Isohunt, one of the world's most comprehensive torrent search engines, was just ordered to remove links to all copyrighted material by a judge in Los Angeles, according to Wired.

The issue of search engines returning results that are copyright infringements is a hot button one. Just a few weeks ago, Google triumphed in a copyright dispute with luxury handbag-maker Louis Vuitton. Isohunt, also a search engine, wasn't so lucky.

U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson reasoned that the availability of free copyrighted material (like the movies and music you can find through Isohunt) "irreparably undermines" the market for legally purchasing the same media. Wilson is demanding that Isohunt remove access to files that use or are based on "infringement-related terms." Isohunt argues that this "amounts to nothing less than taking down [its] search engine," according to founder Gary Fung.

Facebook "Privacy Foundation" a Go, Despite Misgivings

[Zusha Elinson]

As the kids say it was an “Epic Fail.”

Privacy advocates at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) were trying to stop a settlement (free reg. req.) in a Facebook privacy case. No dice. Judge Richard Seeborg approved the controversial deal today (.pdf).

Forwarding Trash Talk A-Ok

[Mike McKee]

A word of warning: If you receive an e-mail message that’s bad-mouthing someone, be careful what you add if you decide to pass it on.

A Santa Ana appeal court on Thursday ruled that individuals can’t be sued for forwarding a defamatory message unless they “materially contribute” to the item.

In Phan v. Pham, Lang Van Pham, a veteran of the Merchant Marine in Vietnam, forwarded a message from the group’s president that accused another man, Hung Tan Phan, of having been disciplined by the Navy for abusive behavior in the last days of the Vietnam War. Phan sued Pham.

Pham got off because the appeal court found he hadn’t added much to the forwarded message.

“His original language,” the court held, “said, in essence: Look at this and ‘Everything will come out in the daylight.’ All he said was: The truth will come out in the end. What will be will be. Whatever.”

“Nothing ‘created’ by defendant Pham was itself defamatory.”

So, be short and sweet. Not long and mean.