Freedom Of The Press? UK's The Guardian Barred From Reporting On Parliament

from the how-do-you-report-on-being-banned-from-reporting? dept

Over in the UK, the Guardian has apparently been barred from reporting on a certain action in Parliament (Update: read below). But how do you even report on being barred from reporting on a particular subject without reporting on it. Watch the linguistic gymnastics The Guardian goes through:

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented -- for the first time in memory -- from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Yet another case of chilling effects in the form of lawyers suing over coverage they don't like. Of course, we're not barred from reporting on anything, and checking through some Parliament webpages turns up the following list of questions, including the following:

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

This certainly implies that The Guardian has been barred due to this original story of how British oil trader Trafigura was offering to pay "historic damages" to 31,000 people injured in the dumping of toxic waste in Africa.

Of course, my guess is that Trafigura and Carter-Ruck are about to learn about The Streisand Effect, and UK politicians are about to get another lesson on why its libel laws need to be fixed. In the meantime, in the absence of all of this, how many people would have heard about this whole Trafigura affair? How many more people are about to become aware of it?

Update: After this story got spread all over the internet (especially on Twitter), it looks like Carter-Ruck backed down. Of course... the end result? Much worse than if they had never tried to gag the newspapers. A lot more people are aware of the story. Why do lawyers still think banning such things will work?

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Ralph Lauren And Its Lawyers Discover The Streisand Effect On Bogus DMCA Takedown

from the someone's-bright-idea dept

Will they never learn? Issuing bogus DMCA takedowns to get content down that you don't like, rather than which is actually infringing, is going to backfire. Badly. Last week, the website Photoshop Disasters put up a post showing a ridiculous Ralph Lauren ad with a woman who was too skinny to be alive. Boing Boing put up a post about it, along with the tag line "Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis." While some have questioned whether the ad is even real, one thing is clear: Ralph Lauren was not pleased. The company's lawyers at Greenberg Traurig sent DMCA takedown notices concerning both posts. Despite Blogger's new DMCA policy, Google still quickly took down the post at Photoshop Disasters, causing the site to ask whether or not Ralph Lauren or its lawyers have ever heard of the Streisand Effect (yay). BoingBoing's host, however, doesn't automatically take content down and passed along the info to BoingBoing, who quickly pointed out that this was clearly fair use (commentary, criticism, etc.) and the DMCA takedown wasn't being used to stop infringing content, but to stifle speech.

So, not surprisingly, BoingBoing put up a nice post explaining the whole thing, including a nice quote from lawyer Wendy Seltzer about fair use... and, of course, another version of the image, and dared Ralph Lauren to sue. Hopefully Ralph Lauren and its lawyers get the message and offer a quick apology. In the meantime, it makes you wonder what the hell anyone was thinking in sending out such a bogus DMCA. Do people really not recognize the consequences?

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UK Politician's Cross Border Attempt To Terminate Prostitute Review Site Only Bumps Up Traffic

from the nice-advertising dept

There was some news coverage last week of the UK's "equalities minister" (what the hell is that?), Harriet Harman, asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to shut down a prostitute review site called Punternet. As many legal commentators pointed out, this was ridiculous for a variety of reasons -- neither Harman nor Schwargenegger had any legal authority to shut down such a site. However, the really ridiculous thing is that all this request did was give the site a ton of attention. In a press release response, Punternet took issue with many of Harman's claims about the site, and then at the end noted how much she had helped the site's traffic:

How much extra traffic did you get on 30 September, the day the story first broke?

Just over 2.7 million hits, more than double the daily average. Here's the graph from my server statistics for September: http://www.punternet.com/daily_usage_200909.png

One must assume that wasn't Harman's intention. But, honestly, it makes you wonder what sort of politician these days doesn't realize that calling for the shutting down of a site will only boost the traffic to that site by a considerable amount.

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Bad Ideas: ACORN Sues Videotapers For Illegal Wiretapping

from the streisand-went-to-acorn? dept

Sometimes these things just make you wonder what people are thinking. If you follow political news at all, you've no doubt heard about the whole ACORN scandal, with workers at the organization being filmed having no problem offering advice to a fake "pimp and ho" on how to handle the tax implications of trafficking in underage sex workers. The whole thing has been pretty ridiculous, with pretty much everyone holding any sort of political office shoving each other aside to distance themselves (and any gov't funds) from the organization. Honestly, if you've ever watched Candid Camera (dating myself) or any of its modern equivalents, I'm not really sure that getting a few people to do stupid stuff on camera really says all that much about an organization, other than that it needs to better train people, but what really calls ACORN's judgment into question is its decision to sue the folks who made and financed the videos for an "illegal wiretap." Even if they broke wiretapping rules by recording the meeting without letting the worker know, no good can come from this lawsuit. In that link, Andrew Moshirnia from the Citizen Media Law Project goes through a variety of reasons why it makes no sense to sue, even if they have a chance of winning the lawsuit. All it does is call more attention to the whole thing at a time when the organization should be apologizing profusely and detailing what steps it's taking to make sure such things never happen again. Suing just makes the organization look like it still defends those actions. ACORN screwed up big time, and it's only adding to its troubles by trying to sue those who exposed the organization for an illegal wiretap.

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Reddit, Sears, Grills That Cook Babies... And The Streisand Effect

from the have-at-it dept

Adam sends in a link to a Reddit story where it comes out that someone (not entirely sure who) decided to push Reddit to take down an earlier story. Apparently Sears.com had some oddity in how content on its e-commerce site was displayed, and with a little URL-hacking some folks were able to create a Sears.com e-commerce page for a barbecue grill designed to cook babies:

Pretty amusing, and obviously something that Sears wasn't all that happy about. Sears's explanation for what happened doesn't quite make much sense, but what would you expect?

We discovered earlier today that someone visiting our site had defaced a limited number of product pages

It wasn't so much "defacing" from the sound of it, as it was a bug in the way the site was set up, but, what doesn't make much sense is that someone then forced Reddit to remove its original thread discussing Sears' URL hackability. It's not at all clear who specifically got Reddit to take down the thread, though an admin admits that he was told to take it down. The obvious list of culprits, of course, would be Sears and Conde Nast (owners of Reddit).

Still, it should come as no surprise that the Reddit community doesn't take kindly to the idea that someone (whoever it might be) can dictate that a Reddit thread get deleted when it's not spam. So, now they've been pumping up this particular story about Reddit pulling down the thread, giving the whole story much more attention. Wouldn't it just have been better to fix the URL-hackability and let things be?

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Cyberattack That Brought Down Twitter & Facebook Only Highlighted The Guy It Hoped To Silence

from the whoops dept

Ajit Jaokar alerts us to the fact that last week's "cyberattack" seems to have given a much greater voice to a guy the attacks were designed to silence. If you haven't been paying attention, late last week, there were huge denial of service attacks on Twitter and Facebook, which knocked out both sites for a period of time. Apparently, the attacks were an attempt to silence an economics professor in the republic of Georgia, who online has gone by the name cyxymu. Jaokar noticed that cyxymu had very few followers on his Twitter account, but since the news has come out that he was the target of the attack, thousands of new followers have started paying attention to him. So whoever ran the attacks (cyxymu blames the KGB), which sought to first discredit cyxymu and then take him offline, seems to have only done the opposite. They've suddenly given him the world's attention.

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LeBron James Discovering What Happens When You Try To Suppress Something

from the calling-attention... dept

Every time you think people understand that trying to suppress some kind of information only draws more attention to it, it happens again. The latest, as pointed out by Tim O'Reilly is that basketball star LeBron James had videos confiscated after he was dunked on by a college sophomore -- and because of that it's now being written up on various news sites and blogs. If he'd just let the video go out it may have amused a few people but no one would have thought any less of James, one of the best players ever to play the game. Instead, even more people are finding out about it and makes James look really insecure and controlling. In fact, the Rivals.com points out that because the video can't be seen, people will just assume it makes James look as bad as possible:

The Crawford dunk would have been a temporary embarrassment for LeBron. Let's say the video was put on YouTube. It blows up for a bit, dominates blogs for 36 hours, everyone has a good chuckle and then it's forgotten about.

But by censoring the tape, LeBron turns the dunk into a legend. On video, it's just a dunk. Without video, the jam can reach mythic proportions. Because nobody can see it, the story of the dunk will grow in stature with each telling. Today, it was a simple two-handed slam. In a few days, it will be a 360-degree windmill. By the time Crawford makes his Xavier debut in October, he will have jumped off LeBron's shoulders, flipped in the air, slammed the ball home with his left pinkie and then handed LeBron $3.99 for his dry cleaning.

One day, perhaps, people will learn...

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Dear People Offended By Books; Requesting Permission To Burn Them Will Drive More Attention To Them

from the that's-not-what-you-want dept

A reader named Frosty840 points out that, if you thought the idea of a good old fashioned "book burning" had gone out of style in the US, a group of offended individuals in Wisconsin are petitioning the local library for permission to burn its only copy of a book called Baby Be-Bop. A book burning? Apparently it hasn't occurred to these offended folks that (beyond the disgrace of wanting to burn books they dislike), this entire action has only served to call a lot more attention to that book. The folks asking for the right to burn the book, are also demanding $120,000 for "being exposed to the book in a library display," which seems likely to (again) only drive much more interest in the book. A book that can cause that much damage? Where can I get my copy?

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Streisand To Publish An Entire Book Detailing The Malibu Home She Once Wanted To Keep Very, Very Secret

from the the-streisand-effect-book dept

Well, this is amusing. As you may know, a few years back, I coined the phrase "The Streisand Effect" to describe the situation where someone tries to force some content to be taken down, in an attempt to suppress it -- but, in doing so, winds up driving much more attention to the content. The name came from a lawsuit filed in 2003 by Barbara Streisand against environmentalist/photographer Ken Adelman, who had been photographing the entire California coast from a helicopter in order to document coastal erosion. Of course, in trying to have her photo taken off of his site, it generated significantly more interest in that particular photograph. Streisand eventually lost the lawsuit and was even ordered to pay nearly $200,000 in legal fees.

Of course, since then, the phrase "The Streisand Effect" has become fairly popular and in common usage -- and has been featured in Forbes, Associated Press articles and on NPR's All Things Considered -- and has even been translated into other languages. All because Streisand didn't want a distant photo of her Malibu home on the internet.

Thus, it's with some level of irony that we find out (thanks Stephen!) that Streisand is now putting together a book about the architecture of that very home including numerous photos of the home and property. Perhaps Ken Adelman should sue for helping her to realize that there was "demand" for photos of her Malibu home.

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El Efecto Streisand As Guatemala Arrests Twitterer

from the it's-going-international dept

Apparently, down in Guatemala, there's an ongoing political scandal, involving murder, corruption and a big local bank. The whole thing sounds rather unpleasant. Earlier this week, a Guatemalan Twitter user, named Jean Anleu, suggested via Twitter that people should pull their money out of the bank, rather than support the corruption. This seems like a pretty standard Twitter message. Yet, in Guatemala, it resulted in the arrest of the guy for "intent to incite financial panic." Apparently, all within the same day, the guy was brought before a judge, had a trial, and was sentenced, with a large fine. Until he can pay off the fine, he's to remain in detention.

This sounds oddly familiar, of course. It was just a few months ago that South Korea arrested a blogger under similar charges, though (thankfully) that guy was acquitted. Except, in this case, it seems a bit more serious, especially when there appear to have been murders of those who were trying to fight the bank's corruption, and charges that those murders were done with government support.

But, what's interesting is that the news is spreading wide and fast that the government has arrested this Twitter user, turning international attention on the country and what it's doing with this guy. Boing Boing even points out that Central American news organizations are referring to "el efecto streisand" to describe how much attention this is generating. As the guy who coined the term "the Streisand Effect," in the first place, I have to admit some amount of pride in discovering that the term is being used in foreign headlines in other languages -- though I wish the actual details of this guy's arrest weren't so clearly an attempt to crack down on gov't criticism.

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Goldman Sachs Doesn't Pay Attention: Threatens Gripe Site

from the this-will-end-badly dept

Just as we saw some corporate lawyers (finally!) advising clients not to freak out and go legal when they saw a "gripes site" show up, it appears that Goldman Sachs has done exactly that. The company and its lawyers have apparently been threatening the site GoldmanSachs666.com. The company is pulling out the oldest trick in the book, claiming that Goldman Sachs customers are "confused" by the site:

"Your use of the mark Goldman Sachs violates several of Goldman Sachs' intellectual property rights, constitutes an act of trademark infringement, unfair competition and implies a relationship and misrepresents commercial activity and/or an affiliation between you and Goldman Sachs which does not exist and additionally creates confusion in the marketplace,"

This is a stretch. Many, many courts have found that such sites are perfectly legitimate, because no one would confuse a site complaining about a company for the company itself. It's likely that Goldman Sachs felt that sending the cease-and-desist would scare the blogger into shutting up. But... as with so many of these things, all it's actually done is draw a hell of a lot more attention to the site. You would think that the bank would have a few more important things to be focused on than some ranting blogger. Indeed, the fact that they seem to want him to shut up, gives him a lot more legitimacy than if the bank had simply ignored him. The fact that management or the lawyers (or both) think this is a big enough issue to deal with suggests that they're actually concerned about what he's saying.

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Lawyers Realizing That Suing Gripe Sites Might Not Make Much Sense

from the it-took-this-long? dept

It looks like some lawyers may be realizing that suing so-called "gripe sites" (more commonly called "sucks sites") might not make very much sense (thanks to Bill Squier for sending this in). The lawyer basically points out what plenty of folks have been saying for years: these sites are usually perfectly legal. They don't violate trademark law, and almost every time such a case goes to court the company loses -- only adding more attention and legitimacy to the gripe site. Instead, the lawyer suggests ignoring the site is often the best course of action:

The best course to deal with a gripe site often is to do nothing at all. The site itself actually might have a little impact on a company's business and the ferocity of its venom might obscure the reality that it is only one of millions of sites that has little traffic and that is visited only by the disaffected, whose business is ultimately lost anyway. Also, if the target pays no overt attention to the site, its operator may lose interest in this particular cause and direct his or her ire to more recent, emotionally appealing, or reactive targets. Non-action can be the most difficult course to take where there is a demand that something must be done.

He also notes that sending a cease-and-desist is likely to create the opposite reaction, often encouraging the site to continue (though, while he mentions that cease-and-desist letters are likely to get posted to the sites, he doesn't mention that many site owners will use that to get more attention from others using a "they're trying to shut me down" alarm). Oddly, the lawyers' "final" advice seems like the sort of thing that shouldn't be "final" or a "last resort" but should be much closer to the top of the list:

Finally, the target might seek to engage the operator of the gripe site to find out just what his/her problem is and see if it can be rectified. This would be the cleanest, easiest, and cheapest solution. It might not work, but it has little downside risk and might, if not immediately successful, attenuate the ferocity of the attacks and might in the long run hasten the end of the site, by causing its operator's interest to wane.

Wait... speak to someone like a human and see if you can fix their problem? What kind of advice is that?

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Sony Considers Lawsuit Over Its Controller Being Used In Anti-Video Game Ad

from the probably-not-the-best-idea dept

Steve points us to a story in the UK about how Sony Computer Entertainment Europe is considering taking legal action against the folks behind an anti-video game advertisement because a photo in the ad includes a boy holding what appears to be a Playstation controller. The whole thing seems pretty silly. The anti-video game ad is pretty ridiculous itself, but Sony overreacting to it seems even worse. First of all, other than hardcore gamers, who's even going to notice that it's a PlayStation controller? Instead of suing and drawing more attention, Sony might want to just focus on reasons why the ad is misleading and that video gaming doesn't lead to "cancer, diabetes, and heart disease." Suing over the use of the controller just makes it look like they have something to hide.

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Hasbro Lawyers Threatening Parody 'Get Out Of... Free' Cards, Which They Previously Allowed...

from the too-much-free-time dept

Mike C. writes "Hasbro is at it again. I've been a reader of Randy Cassignham's This is True for several years now. Among other things, he offers a "Get Out of Hell Free" card - a parody of the Monopoly Get Out of Jail Free card. Back in 2000, he received a cease & desist (postage due!) and after some discussion, altered the card to include a "not endorsed by Hasbro" line. At that time, they decided not to pursue the matter any further. Fast forward to 2009 and they "recently became aware that you are offering for sale "Last Chance - Get Out of Hell Free" cards and stickers on your website." Wait, recently?? I guess times are tough for the Hasbro lawyers and they're looking to drum up some more business. Randy has been kind enough to post the full story to his website starting with the original action in 2000 and ending with the 2009 cease and desist."

It seems pretty clear that Hasbro's lawyers have a bit too much free time on their hands (perhaps now that they're done killing off interest in online Scrabble). You would think, at some point, management at Hasbro would recognize that sending their lawyers off on such wild goose chases not only increases the legal bill, but also does tremendous damage to the Hasbro brand.

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Lie Detector Company Threatens Researchers, Draws Much More Attention To Research

from the how-about-a-common-sense-detector dept

Slashdot points us to a story of a lie detector manufacturer, Nemesysco, who apparently was so upset with a report from some Swedish researchers in a technology journal, that they threatened legal action against the journal and the researchers, claiming that they would sue for defamation if the article wasn't taken down. Since the basic point of the journal article was that the lie detecting technology that Nemesysco was betting on simply could not work, you can understand why they might be upset about it. But calling it defamation is highly questionable.

If the information presented in the article was wrong why not just counter it and point out why it's wrong? Threatening defamation lawsuits and trying to shut up the researchers just makes it look like Nemesysco has something to hide. And, indeed, true to the Stresisand Effect, the article reports that the researchers have received a lot more attention for their research since the threats were issued: "It was hardly their intention. But since the article was withdrawn, I have received lots of mail and requests for copies of the article. The article would not have been read to this extent if the company had simply ignored it in silence." Who knows whether or not Nemesysco's lie detector works, but its common sense detector is apparently on the fritz.

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Center for American Progress, Meet the Streisand Effect

from the beware-the-backlash dept

Back in 2005, Mike coined the term "the Streisand Effect" to describe the situation where an attempt to suppress information generates increased publicity for that information. Our latest example comes via my friend Matthew Yglesias, who on Friday had some choice words for a center-left organization called Third Way. Matt blogs on a site run by Center for American Progress (CAP), though with full editorial control over the posts on his particular blog on the site. Despite calling Third Way out, the post got little overall attention on the blog.

On Sunday, however, readers of Matt's blog were treated to this creepy post in which Matt's boss, Jennifer Palmieri, noted that his posts don't reflect the opinions of the Center for American Progress, and then insisted that CAP has "a great deal of respect for [Third Way's] critical thinking and excellent work product." This is a great illustration of the differences between traditional and web-based media. In a traditional paper publication, everything is subject to editorial control, and in all likelihood Matt would have been asked to tone down his criticism of Third Way before his writing hit the presses. But Matt's blog gets posted unfiltered, complete with curse words and spelling errors. The immediacy of Matt's blog is a big part of what keeps readers coming back to the site. And it's also what made Palmieri's post so damaging.

Although Matt's blog is hosted on CAP's site, it's Matt's blog, and readers expect to get Matt's unfiltered opinions. Having Matt's boss hijack his blog in order to publicly reprimand him is really jarring. And then there's the Streisand Effect. Everyone would have forgotten about Matt's original post within a few days had someone at Third Way not called Matt's boss and demanded an apology. Instead, the entire liberal blogosphere is talking about Matt's post... and about Third Way's thin skin. The backlash is going to do far more damage to Third Way's reputation than Matt's original post could have.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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De Beers About To Learn That The Streisand Effect Is Forever

from the let's-explain-how-this-works dept

It would appear that the lawyers at diamond conglomerate De Beers are unaware of the Streisand Effect. As you might have heard, a week after the US Presidential election, some prankster put out a spoofed version of a future New York Times. It got plenty of attention for a few days and then people moved on. Well, apparently not everyone. De Beers is upset that the online version of the spoof contained a fake De Beers ad. Rather than recognize that this was a spoof (ha ha) that everyone had pretty much forgotten about, the company had its lawyers send off a threat letter. However, rather than target the creators of the spoof, or even the hosting firm, De Beers threatened the registrar who handled the domain registration for the site, demanding that it take down the site or face a trademark infringement lawsuit.

Of course, as the EFF notes at the above link, intermediaries (third party service providers) are clearly well protected against liability for the actions of their users in the US. And, of course, there's the whole issue of parodies being protected from infringement suits. However, even more ridiculous is the fact that De Beers is now calling more attention to the ad. The spoof of the entire newspaper did get some attention, but that attention quickly waned, and it's unlikely that too many people paid attention to the spoof banner ad on a spoof website for the NY Times. I hadn't even heard about the ads. Almost all of the attention was on the spoof stories. Yet, now that De Beers is threatening to sue, a lot more folks are going to know about and see the ad. How is that possibly a smart move on the part of De Beers?

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Suing Over Being Called A Douchebag Might Just Get More People To Think You're A Douchebag

from the just-saying... dept

There's a somewhat popular (and quite amusing) blog called Hot Chicks with Douchebags. It is... well, pretty much what you'd expect (and might not be a link you want to click-through while at work) -- a bunch of photos of attractive women in the company of guys who, well, you can figure it out. Anyway, I had no idea that they had come out with a book recently, but apparently some of the folks included in the book are none too happy about it. Three of the alleged "hot chicks" in the book have sued the book's author and publisher, and now one of the alleged "douchebags" has also sued, claiming libel. Of course, once again, it seems like this is the sort of thing where suing only puts a lot more attention on the fact that some folks consider the guy to be a douchebag in the first place. Besides, considering that douchebag, in this context, is pretty clearly a statement of opinion rather than fact (no one actually thinks he's literally a bag for douches), it's difficult to see where the libel is. In fact, I'd say that suing over being included in a book like this seems, well... ah, well, you can figure it out.

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German Politician's Plan To Block Wikipedia Backfires... Badly

from the nice-try,-though dept

How many times will situations like the following happen before people realize how badly trying to suppress information online backfires? Apparently, a German politician who was upset about some things in his Wikipedia profile went to court and got a judge to issue an order to block Wikipedia's German site. Of course, as soon as news of this came to light, the politician backed down and apologized. So, instead of getting the information he wanted suppressed, now that information has been brought to many more peoples' attention, and (of course) the site will remain accessible. Good work.

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Did Amazon Delete Spore Reviews? [Updated]

from the they're-all-gone dept

Want to know how not to respond to criticism? By deleting it. Yet, it appears that's what Amazon has done. Earlier this week we wrote about the controversy of EA's decision to put cumbersome DRM on the highly anticipated video game, Spore. The response was that thousands of people started posting one star reviews of Spore, noting the problems with the DRM. Things then got worse when people realized that EA had misled customers about the fact that they could only have one user account on Spore.

Now, a bunch of people have noticed that Amazon appears to have deleted all of the reviews on the Spore page. This is only going to end badly. When you try to shut down a large group of people who feel wronged, you're not just whacking the bees' nest with a stick, you're setting it on fire with a flame thrower. The folks who were complaining are only going to complain louder, and louder. Remember what happened when Digg tried to takedown the AACS crack? Whoever was responsible for removing the comments -- whether it was Amazon or EA -- they may find that the reaction to trying to shut down the angry mob is only going to make folks that much angrier, and alert that many more people to the problems they have with EA's use of DRM.

Update: It appears that some, or potentially all, of the reviews are now back on the site, and Amazon is claiming that it was a "glitch" that they disappeared. Some people claim that their own reviews are not back yet, though, so the whole situation is a bit fluid. Either way, if it really was a glitch, it was a pretty bad time and place for such a glitch to occur.

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